research

The global COVID-19 pandemic has made me further address the value that artistic research has for our mental and psychological health and its significance in community healing. I have, for a while now, used digital technologies to create poetic spaces of shared personal stories interconnecting narratives to bring up issues of power, territory, displacement, historical memory, gender and violence. The need to live, work, socialise at a distance, through digital platforms has highlighted the importance of finding ways to share stories, connect and heal through community creative research practice. How can we engage global communities through electronic literature art practices?

This paper will explore the use of digital methods and tools to conduct and disseminate research in interdisciplinary projects alongside artists and communities and will address the motivations to researching with participants. It will draw from the findings coming up from our workshop in ‘Creative Digital Practices: Community Platform for Healing and Mapping’, (also submitted to the ELO conference).

As co-investigator of the AHRC funded project Memory, Victims, and Representation of the Colombian Conflict my role was leading the creative team working on the artistic research project titled Invisible Voices: Women Victims of the Colombian Conflict and give voice to the women in their participation in the construction of memory. This was an enriching experience where both parties - the academics/artists and the community group – gained knowledge through the physical co-creative workshops with tailored designed research methods for this specific context, and the subsequent digital documentation and archival of the artistic experience. Taking this project and others as core studies, this paper will address questions in connection to community research; the value of creative storytelling and artistic approaches to share personal stories; and discuss pertinent issues in connection to the value, impact and societal change these projects can contribute, not only to the specific group, but to society in general.

Leonardo Flores has identified the latest trend in electronic literature, which he calls its ‘third generation’, as one that happens on social media, using and/or abusing, hijacking the affordances of popular platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and so on. Much has been written about various aspects and genres of twitterature; I have myself presented ‘video writing’ on YouTube at the 2017 ELO, and examined digital authors’ attitudes towards Facebook as a space for communication elsewhere. I now propose to look at a different use of Facebook as a literary space in which creative writing practices emerge that would not exist without this platform. Focusing again on French and Francophone authors, often (yet) unpublished in print, this paper will explore a range of modes of, and approaches to, writing on the Facebook wall, including the form, poetics, rhythms of publication, and motivations, both by individual authors and in the case of a collective project, drawing on the work of a handful of authors. Milène Tournier and Nathanaëlle Quoirez propose original poetic texts as status updates with great frequency, pieces of fiction or poetry that vary in length and that are not meant for later publication elsewhere but which the authors consider to be an important aspect of their literary practice. Marc Jahjah publishes poems often accompanied by a photo, also returning to perfection the texts after their first publication, countering the logic of the ephemeral. Gracia Bejjani also publishes photos that are not always new at the time of publication, accompanied by just a few words or lines, often including a (rhetorical) question, usually with some metaphorical and poetic link between text and image. She also practices video writing with Facebook as first mode of publication. In a very different style, Bruno Lalonde proposes often philosophical reflections on life and literature, sometimes in an aphoristic style, sometimes longer, as we could read in a writer’s notebook or diary. In a similar spirit, translator André Markowicz writes entire mini-essays on, as well as draft translations of, the (Russian) texts he is translating and beyond. Last but not least, Nouvelles de la Colonie is a collective project run by a group of avatar-characters who have created a fictional world called The Colony, an allegory, among others, of the social media world where everyone has a well-defined role and is closely watched. Members of the Colony publish entire short stories on the Page that constitute a feuilleton, while also constructing a visual image using motifs of totalitarian systems. While these texts do not constitute ‘electronic literature’ in the sense of the authors intervening on the code level, they appropriate a digital space that was not primarily meant for literature in order to practice modes of writing, often intertwined with other media, that is native to this space and uses the affordances of this specific environment. The main objective of this talk and the research that underlies it is to explore what this digital space and its affordances might do to literary writing, and vice versa, how and to what extent writing of a literary quality might transform this space.

The research community of electronic literature is exercising more and more influence in the field of digital culture and there is a growing body of research on the literary, computational, and cultural aspects of born-digital writing, but research into the specific impact of platforms on the production of digital writing has been very limited and often relegated to a peripheric rank. However, platforms play an essential role in shaping the genres and practices of electronic literature that needs to be investigated more deeply to develop better understanding of how our tools and machines shape digital culture. My talk has the objective to reflect the importance of the interface in literary production. At the border of technology and literature, where format and content matter, what is the status of the tool in the creation of works of electronic literature? I will recall the principle that electronic literature is subordinate to the tools it uses and will demonstrate how coding participates in the recognition in the field of digital humanities. I will take the example of the project DHonsite2019, that takes place in Cotonou, Benin, in May 2019 to show how the interface participates in the construction of digital works, no longer remaining on the periphery of literary production. The DHonSite project aims to collaboratively forge a new vision of creative and critical practices of digital forms across cultural differences. Putting in perspective its neutrality and attributing to it the ambition to constitute a space for dialogue and interpretation around texts, the interface thus becomes an element of culture that allows a rebalancing of forces in the field of digital humanities.

This research shows a diagnosis of teaching methods of poetry writing used by teachers at some high schools in Mexico City. At the initial stage of this research, teachers of three different types of high schools were given a questionnaire using Google Forms. This included general questions regarding the teachers´ working conditions, their literary preferences, the sections in their Study Programs containing the subject matter of study, and the activities and methods used for the writing of poetry. The results were analyzed with the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). It was found that within the Study Programs of three different types of high schools, poetry is approached studying its essential characteristics: the fundamental interaction of form and content, its rhetorical figures, its contrast with others genres, appreciation, analysis and criticism of texts, but a specific systematic method for the teaching of writing of this genre is missing. Only two study programs included a small section for poetic writing but was not systematic and it did not had specific activities. Therefore, didactic sequences of poetic writing are proposed progressively so that students develop the ability to write poems practically and consecutively. Teachers can create variations of them either in terms of structure or in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Each one of the sequences is based on a poetic resource such as alliteration, epithet, metaphor, comparison, among others with the purpose that students can create their own texts and at the same time consciously be aware of some of the resources that are used when writing poetry . It is proposed that the writing exercises be done first and later on the teacher explain the concept of the poetic resource that were used to compare it with the finished product. What is intended is that the student does not learn the concept of the resources used in isolation and without meaning, but with the modeling in practice they can better understand and assimilate each concept. The sequences are based on the use of videos, audios, programs or specific applications that young people use in their daily lives.

During the last ten years the digital publishing industry has gone through an important development in terms of the creation and adoption of new software. E-books that are widely known and used in PDF format can now be entirely designed with new software and enriched with multimedia and multimodal features, which can also embed Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies.

Since the design of the layout and the software of enhanced e-books are both created with the same technology used in the web, these enhanced e-books can be analyzed and described with theories and concepts used in the field of web technology. The innovative features that these e-books present include practices termed as Multimedia Literacy, i.e. multilinearity, multimedia, multimodality. For these reasons the analysis of the works of fiction and poetry published in this format can be carried out through these theories and research methods, already elaborated in the field of electronic literature.

The method of media-specific analysis conceived by Katherine N. Hayles, as well as her comparative study on the relationship between print books and works of electronic literature, the studies on software and new media aesthetics by Lev Manovich, and Johanna Drucker’s work that encompasses print books, artists’ books and digital aesthetics are among the most important resources.

Despite the popularity of e-books, the practice of multimedia literacy and the increasing interest in AR and VR technology in various industrial sectors as well as in the arts, the market growth and development of the technology for both the creation and the preservation of digital books has been remarkably low. Enriched e-books, defined by editors and experts as “enhanced e-books”, or referred to with the acronyms EPUB (electronic publishing) and DPUB (digital publishing), may also fail in popularity because of similar terminology used in online and web- based publishing.

In my presentation I will summarize a survey made in 2018 among six digital publishers from Italy, all founders of publishing companies or projects in digital publishing. The survey covers a time span from 1971, the year Project Gutenberg was founded to 2017 when the IDPF was combined with the World Wide Web Consortium.

In my interviews I asked questions concerning the creation, distribution and preservation of these types of books. Moreover, the interviewees gave their personal views on the acceptance and awareness of this technology among their customers in their respective fields. The topics addressed range from works of literature, art and school education.

This 20-minute presentation highlights research conducted as a Fellow in the MIT Open Documentary Lab developing a methodology and software for parsing linguistic and semantic information from vast quantities of audio and video files for playback and synchronization across networked computers. The presentation will focus on the expressive potential of this methodology to create new forms of multi-modal digital poems. The goal of this research is to extend recent advances in computational text analysis of written materials to the realm of audio and video media for use in a variety of different language centered media production contexts. This methodology and software provides the ability to parse vast quantities of audio and video files for topics, parts of speech, phonetic content, sentiment, passive/active voice and language patterns and then playback the video or audio content of the search for consideration in an aesthetic context. Queries that are intriguing can be saved and sequenced for playback as a poetic remix of linguistic patterns on one or multiple monitors. For instance, an e-lit poet can create a database of hundreds of audio recordings of poems from the Poetry Foundation and parse the recordings for moments of alliteration; the search can then be played back as a generative remix of alliterations across decades of poems and poets. This new composition could then be sequenced across multiple computers in a gallery setting and spatialized with speakers playing in different locations in a room; imagine the alliteration example above but coming from a dozen locations in a gallery, sometimes the samples playing in a sequence around the room, sometimes all at once with the same phrase other times with pairs of speakers triggering simultaneously. The poetic possibilities that can be explored between the choice of material for the database, the choice of linguistic and semantic parsing and choice of spatial configurations (how many playback devices, where are they located) can foster intriguing new forms of e-literature. To make the concepts concrete I will illustrate the research with video documentation from a recent digital poem I created with the work that uses Youtube typography tutorials as its source material for a sixteen-computer composition. This humorous work demonstrates the multimodal aspect of the research. For example, when parsing for parts of speech like a superlative adjective in the Youtube tutorial database, the visual content of the word the author is constructing in their Adobe Illustrator interface is visually displayed; creating an aural and visual combination that has both sonic and graphic impact. The presentation will provide an overview of the process for making this form of digital poem as well as demonstrate creative applications of the research.