ontologies

This is a two-part meditation on where electronic literature came from, some of the places it’s been, and how (and why) it might possibly go on.

Espen Aarseth will look at the roots of electronic literature in the period before 1997, discussing the origins of digital writing in terms of contemporary art and theory. Particular attention will be given to interactive fiction and what happened to it.

Stuart Moulthrop skips over the really important bits (1997-2010) and concentrates on the state of electronic literature in the current decade, especially the intersection of various text-generation schemes with latter-day conceptualism and “the new illegibility.”

Both keynote speakers will offer critical prospects on the very idea of electronic literature, the meaning of the name, and various present and future ontologies for our discourse.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

ELO 2013 brought out the question of how the theoretical discussions about specific works can be extended in space and time beyond teams. A few months before, different teams began a project of the labex Arts-H2H focusing on the design of “Cross-reading”, a tool to make a pooling of theoretical perspectives used in different parts of the world to treat works of Electronic Literature. This experience, the first large-scale in this area, has as its primary mission to cross different methodologies (or points of view) on the same object to produce a high value-added analysis, which is not only a juxtaposition of disparate contributions but a construction reflecting teamwork.The still ongoing implementation implied first the design of an ontology to harmonize the different analyses produced autonomously by each team. Analyses come from diverse backgrounds such as literature, semiotics, media and cultural studies, ergonomic experimentation and aesthetics. The ontology considers the work as a Spinozist individual in the context of the procedural model of Ph. Bootz, allowing the contemplation of both the visible "surface" and the computer program of the work. Based on this ontology, we indexed all contributions. Then, “Cross-reading” presents a visualization to show relationships, similarities and differences between the analyses. Relations between synonyms and homonyms concepts are those that allow the construction of a combined theoretical approach. A prototype is available at http://ineslaitano.com.ar/crossreading/