traditional literature

To date, all formal, technical, and typological analyses of electronic literature (and poetry) that I am aware of have approached the domain from both obvious angles: theory-led and from-the-text. The former has yielded traditional literary analyses such as (Aarseth 1997) and (Hayles 2007) while the latter more recently has yielded analyses such as (Di Rosario 2011) and (O’Sullivan 2016). Taking our cue from informatics we could if we so wished analyse works of electronic literature using the theoretical foundation of computer science: finite automata. What is being suggested here is not the theoretical analysis of the electronic arts through the lens of Turing Machines or alternately the lambda calculus/type theory. Rather, what is being suggested is replacing the symbol with the lexeme thus alighting on the idea of lexical automata. Semiotically speaking, finite automata operate on sets of unrestricted symbols whereas surely it must be agreed that literary works are lexically constrained therefore electronic literary works must be in the final analysis characterised by lexical automata. This work is an attempt to show how the analysis of electronic literary works so understood and explored yields fruitful results. What is meant by hybrid writing forms? Precisely this; the blending of unstructured and structured data. A word of caution: unstructured here does not mean devoid of all structure, it means yet-to-structured – this may appear to be a pedantic stipulation but it is one that will serve us well. Natural language here is taken to be unstructured. This is in contrast to the linked records and fields of structured data – what we know to be true, digitally represented. Not all literary works are works of fiction, thus at some level we will need to understand what it means to blend unstructured and structured data. Surprisingly little work has been carried out in this regard, notwithstanding the exemplar studies of (Eriksson 2007) and (Nešić 2010). The core idea here is to somehow combine Semantic Web technologies with the text. Each of these studies (and others) examines a variant of that. Building atop the base layer of Peircean semiotics is the most natural way for carrying out this task I propose. The resultant mixture is called semetext, it can be viewed if one wants as an extension of hypertext; indeed, explicit in the wider literature, though not acted upon, is the recommendation that if we replace the hyperlink with something that carries typed information something like what is being suggested here would emerge. Aarseth, Espen J. 1997.

Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Di Rosario, Giovanna. 2011. Electronic Poetry: Understanding Poetry in the Digital Environment. University of Jyväskylä. Eriksson, Henrik. 2007. “The Semantic-Document Approach to Combining Documents and Ontologies.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Knowledge representation with ontologies: Present challenges - Future possibilities, 65 (7): 624–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.03.008. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2007. “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” January 2, 2007. http://eliterature.org/pad/elp.html. Nešić, Saša. 2010. “Semantic Document Architecture for Desktop Data Integration and Management.” Università della Svizzera italiana. http://doc.rero.ch/record/21797?ln=en. O’Sullivan, James. 2016. “Towards a Digital Poetics.” https://cora.ucc.ie/handle/10468/3257.

Alan Bigelow tells in this interview how he started publishing online works of digital poetry around the year 1999 and where his inspirations for his work come from. Furthermore he explains why he chose to change from working with Flash to working with HTML5 and in which way this decision subsequently changed his way of writing. Then he considers the transition from printed books to digital literature from the point of view of the reader also in regards of the aesthetics of digital born literature. In the end he gives his opinion about the status of electronic literature in the academic field.

Fabrizio Venerandi is author of two novels published in form of hypertextual ebooks and also co-founder of the publishing house Quintadicopertina. In this interview he talks about the book series Polistorie (Polystories) and about the basic ideas that inspired this project. Recalling the experience he made with the groundbreaking work on the first MUD in Italy in 1990, Venerandi describes the relations between literature and video games. Starting from a comparison between print literature tradition and new media, at last, he faces the problems of creation and preservation of digital works.

Aux amateurs de littérature numérique, le Web offre en deux clics l’œuvre et son envers, son mystère et une partie de ses clés, le spectacle et sa machinerie intellectuelle ou technique. Qu’on l’appelle «cyberlittérature» ou «littérature numérique», cette littérature n’aurait pas de réalité sans le support numérique et le dispositif informatique grâce auxquels l’œuvre est produite, lue et souvent agie. L’ambition de cet ouvrage est de faire entrer le lecteur dans l’univers des œuvres numériques, en interrogeant au passage le modèle classique de l’édition. Les auteurs ont choisi d’observer deux dispositifs collectifs : autrement dit, deux lieux sur le Web où deux communautés d’acteurs livrent simultanément quelques-unes des clés essentielles de leur raison sociale dans le domaine littéraire en ligne. Du territoire occupé sur le réseau au geste d’une écriture qui revendique son originalité, en passant par la possible émergence d’un modèle inédit d’édition, il ne s’agit pas moins que de se demander si, finalement, ce que l’on désigne par «littérature numérique» n’est pas l’expression d’un nouveau paradigme pour la littérature.

Source: https://books.openedition.org/bibpompidou/214?lang=en