Call for Papers: Dichtung Digital

The online journal on digital art and technologies Dichtung Digital invites submissions to a special issue on communities in electronic literature guest-edited by Scott Rettberg and Patricia Tomaszek (University of Bergen, Norway).

Submissions will be accepted by email at publications@elmcip.net on the following schedule:

Abstracts (500 words) due: April 1, 2011
Full papers due: June 1, 2011
Date of release: Fall 2011

Electronic Literature has always been a participatory activity for authors and readers. In their interdisciplinary nature, creating works that employ diverse media and programming techniques, communities in electronic literature engage in various kinds of collaborative practice. Collaboration in networked computer environments involves working with people with different skills and collaborative acts with systems.

The collaborative research project ELMCIP (Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice) investigates the formations and interactions of communities of practice and scholarship in the field of electronic literature. Its aim is to develop a framework for understanding how e-lit communities have evolved in recent decades and how that development process can more generally give insight into the formulation of contemporary networked mediated communities.

With this call for papers, contributors are invited to submit papers that engage the broad theme of community-research in digital artistic practices, with a special focus on electronic literature.

Proposals might include:

- National and language-group histories of electronic literature communities

- Studies of communities that form around a particular theme, genre or authoring software (e.g. Storyspace; Interactive Fiction; Flash; Processing; RiTa)

- Insights into the collaborative dynamics of creating a work with practitioners coming from various disciplines and different geographical places

- Histories of, or comparisons between, emergent communities and planned or institutional communities

- Histories of communities of academic practice in electronic literature

- Perspectives on the role and history of the artist in a community.

- The values of community forms and aesthetics

- Explorations of the history and methodologies of collaborative narrative projects