taxonomy

In their article "A Survey of Electronic Literature Collections" Luis Pablo and Maria Goicoechea describe characteristics and functions of collections of electronic literature and analyze descriptors used and the way information can be accessed. Based on their observations, Pablo and Goicoechea advocate a database structure which is flexible and can produce a dynamic archiving model as texts are registered and collected so that tags form a close set for the texts in the collection and this set can expand as new texts make new tags necessary. Further, the organization of tags into ever more complex taxonomies seems inevitable, since this provides an accurate description of knowledge accumulation with respect to the field's richness. They postulate that the study of tagging practices applied to digital works provides us with guidelines not only to describe texts of electronic literature, but also to demonstrate the wide variety of forms which a literary text can embody.

(Abstract article)

For the ELO 2015 conference, we propose a roundtable discussion about the CELL Project. The Consortium for Electronic Literature (CELL) is a partnership founded by the Electronic Literature Organization that joins together nine research centers worldwide, all developing online database projects devoted to research in electronic literature (e-lit). The project is currently funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, enabling development of an online index, search engine, and other tools for researching bibliographical and critical material on e-lit. (source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Computer source code is written in a par ticular language, which consists of syntax and semantics. A language’s level is defined fi by how closely tied it is to the computer’s architecture and operation. Some are compiled, others interpreted, and not all languages are lists of instructions or imperatives, for example, functional languages such as Scheme. The “lowest” level languages offer ff the least abstraction from the machine processes, which typically indicates fewer conceptual groupings of processes. In machine languages, for example, instructions go directly to the microprocessor. A highlevel language, such as Java, needs to be compiled, or translated into processor instructions. High-level languages are marked by greater levels of abstraction, and a subset, including BASIC, COBOL , and even SQL , aspire to greater legibility to human readers. Some of the high-level languages, such as Inform 7, which is used to write interactive fiction, a genre of interactive narrative, can accept statements that read like natural language, such as, “The huge green fierce snake is an animal in Mt King” (Crowther and Conley 2011) (see inter active narr ative).

The ontological status of code has been the subject of much debate, particularly whether code can be described in Austinian terms as a performative system, as language that makes things happen. For example, N. Katherine Hayles has argued that “code has become . . . as important as natural language because it causes things to happen, which requires that it be executed as command the machine can run” (2005, 49). However, Wendy Hui Kyon Chun (2008) has warned critics not to confuse source code with executed code and not to treat the code as if it is the hidden essence within the object. Meanwhile, Alexander Galloway stresses the importance of “protocols” over code, arguing that “code only ‘matters’ when it is understood as being the substance of a network” (2006, 57). Such a point complements Friedrich Kittler’s (1995) pronouncement that “there is no software,” but instead a set of electrical signals coursing through the hardware. In that sense, there is also no code. Nonetheless, though code may not be able to claim the concrete physical status of hardware, code studies has developed around the material trace, the par ticular instantiation of an algorithm that is code (see algorithm).

( Johns Hopkins University Press)

Pedro Barbosa recalls in this interview his memories of the first studies and works of electronic literature back in the 1970s when he was a student at the University of Porto. Starting from considerations about his collaborative works he makes a comparison between printed literature tradition and the age of new media focusing on the paradigmatic change of this very transitional period with live in and the differences of the creative work. Furthermore he makes an interesting statement on regard of the aesthetics of new media by comparing works of electronic literature with the oral tradition. In the end he mentions some of the milestones of electronic literature that he considers important.

There is no understanding of electronic literature. No theory exists to analyze literary texts and signs on the computer and the network. How does the digital inscription become literary? Don’t get me wrong: there are admirable descriptive formalisms and historical genealogies of electronic literature. All these function as criticism should, but offer nothing of electronic literature as such. Existing criticism begins from the presumption that “there is” electronic literature and proceeds to describe the various works in existence (for example, in Electronic Literature Hayles explicitly refuses to theorize the subject of her book). The results are productive for maintaining the existing distribution of texts and readings in a field of literary and non-literary texts. My paper is part of a project refusing the given-ness of these forms and histories. The theory of “electronic literature” is a failure, and I insist on the achievement of this failure. The larger project is a technical and philosophical argument for the absence and potential of electronic literature. For purposes of this paper, I draw my examples from the ELC Volume 2. I will ask the question “why is there electronic literature at all?” in terms of the conditions of existence for texts at the interface of the computer, the network, and the human subject. The stakes are high. The absence of a theory and the negation involved opens a field of potentialities. 1) Absence of the work. The internal tagging of electronic literature in remediated terms - such as poem or fiction, but also much more broadly as video or games, etc. - situates the general category of “the literary” in an undetermined open field of digital production. In turn, this openness allows electronic literature to problematize its differential relation to other forms of work (e.g. artifacts such as computer programs or academic scholarship) with resulting institutional effects. 2) Absence of community. There are coherent communities of scholars and creators of interactive fiction, computer games, and so on. Such groups originate in a logical relation to practices and fields of production. The ELO defines its community in vaguer terms. In fact, the ELO as community is a metonymic displacement of the community of electronic literature; which is to say that the participants at this conference are exactly this community. We share relations to electronic literature as an absence or openness of definition. The community does not share anything; it is nothing but this contingent grouping. Such contingency is powerful as a means of advocacy and affiliation. As shown by projects such as CELL or by the sheer diversity of the organization’s membership, the ELO community is potentially affiliated with all that is produced in digital media. Finally, 3) absence of the subject. The philosophical condition for the work of digital writing is a topology of absence: interruption and entropic expenditure of the subject at the gap or dispersion that is the digital text, leaving nothing but characters codes, file formats, and other forms of inscriptions. At stake in electronic literature is the impossible survival of the subject across this topology, whether legally in the name of the author or archivally in data storage files. “The literary” is a fiction or turn beyond the absence of the subject; it is a “becoming” of/in the digital text. This potential of electronic literature is the highest of stakes: the end (culmination/goal) of digital writing.

(Source: ELO 2013 Author's abstract: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/absence-and-potentia…)

In this presentation I propose a close/distant reading of some Argentinean e-poetry works –Migraciones and Outsource me! by Leonardo Solaas and TextField, Eliotians and some of the works of The Disasters by Iván Marino– in order to pose a debate concerning the development of e-poetry in audiovisual electronic environments, particularly e-poetry created by artists/programmers who hardly would defined themselves as poets or writers.To what extent one should still speak about literature concerning this kind of works? Is it possible to find a literary impulse in contexts where literature has lost its privileges and migrates “out of bounds”? If the artists mentioned above lean themselves into literary traditions, why are their works more frequently regarded by visual art critics rather than literary critics? I argue that the works analyzed enable us to resituate literature in inter/trans media contexts, which nevertheless are readable in terms of literary effects. It is not that we should read this works only as literature, but it happens that nowadays critics who were educated in literary traditions can probably read in these works something that visual arts’ critics are not reading. I will not say that this situation provides necessarily better readings, only different. And after centuries of delimitations between artistic languages, even if 20th century avant-gardes opened the path to the dissolution of those boundaries, we still lack an educational system which could deal with the merging of languages. Meanwhile, I would consider how literary critics could collaborate in order to show how literary impulses could still be readable, and not invisibilized, when visual artists and programmers tangle languages and openly lean themselves into literary traditions to which they are more or less “outsiders”. In addition, I will propose a political reading of this “out of bounds” movement. In a world where migration is part of globalized capitalism, migration of languages, for instance merging languages, could be easily seen as going with the flow. But maybe we can reverse the argument: some works within contemporary electronic arts engage themselves with a “translanguage” politics which comments, reflects on and even deviate globalized flows in order to expose the false ecumenism of the globalized era.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/out-bounds-searching… )

The line between electronic literature and digital games has started to blur more than ever. For example, Christine Love’s 2012 Analogue: A Hate Story can be read as a literary “story” that builds on the visual novel form. However, critic Leif Johnson (of IGN) reviewed Analogue as a “game-like experience” and even a “game” that “neatly sidesteps the label of mere ‘interactive fiction’ like Love’s other games thanks to some smart design choices.” Phill Cameron (of Eurogamer) describes Analogue repeatedly as a “game” and also reflects on its deviation from the “interactive fiction” category. The slippage between the language of fiction and games, in such mainstream reviews, reveals a fascinating taxonomic undecidability. Though Analogue’s “textual” focus makes it a natural boundary object between electronic literature and digital games, this tension extends to games that incorporate minimal text or even no text at all. In this presentation, I focus on Thatgamecompany’s third and most critically-acclaimed game, Journey, which was also released in 2012. In Journey, the player guides a mysterious robed avatar through a desert and up a mountain. At different moments, the player can discover other players but cannot communicate with them via either speech or text. The journey on which the player embarks is suggestive of many things but ultimately unsolvable at either a ludic or narrative level. As Ian Bogost observes, “It could be a coming of age, or a metaphor for life, or an allegory of love or friendship or work or overcoming sickness or sloughing off madness. It could mean anything at all.” Rather than determining the “literariness” of Journey, I explore how it uses the affordances of both electronic literature and digital games to produce complex narrative networks. As such, my analysis focuses both on the shared gameplay experience of Journey itself and on the fan-created “Journey Stories” Tumblr space that collects emergent narratives of interactive play. This experience, I contend, helps us think through and across the boundary between electronic literature and videogames, and their once-discrete cultural orientations.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013 site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/digital-games-and-el… )