The Digital Imaginary: Literature and Cinema of the Database

Over the past half century, computing has profoundly altered the ways stories are imagined and told. Immersive, narrative, and database technologies transform creative practices and hybrid spaces revealing and concealing the most fundamental acts of human invention: making stories.

The Digital Imaginary illuminates these changes by bringing leading North American and European writers, artists and scholars, like Sharon Daniel, Stuart Moulthrop, Nick Montfort, Kate Pullinger and Geof Bowker, to engage in discussion about how new forms and structures change the creative process. Through interviews, commentaries and meta-commentaries, this book brings fresh insight into the creative process form differing, disciplinary perspectives, provoking questions for makers and readers about meaning, interpretation and utterance. The Digital Imaginary will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including storymakers, educators, curators, critics, readers and artists, alike.

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Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction
The Digital Imaginary

Part One: Database
Interviews
Connections And Coincidences In The End: Death In Seven Colors: A Conversation With David Clark
Emotional Proximity Through Inside The Distance: A Conversation With Sharon Daniel

Commentaries
Stuart Moulthrop: Now What: Sharon Daniel And David Clark On The Digital Imaginary. 
Judith Aston: The Readerly And The Cinematic: Hybrid Reconfigurations Through
Digital Media Practice. 

Part Two: Archive
Interviews
Pry As A Cinematic Novel: A Conversation With Samantha Gorman
The Generative Archive Of Encyclopedia: A Conversation With Håkan Jonson And Johannes Heldén.

Commentaries
Lisa Swanstrom: The Taxonomy Is Imprecise.
Geoffrey C. Bowker: Reading The Endless Archive

Part Three: Multimodality
Interviews
Authorship In Inanimate Alice and Letter To An Unknown Soldier: A Conversation With Kate Pullinger
The Metamorphoses Of Front As A Narrative Told Through Social Media Interface: A Conversation With Donna Leishman.

Commentaries
Anastasia Salter: Collaborative Voices: Kate Pullinger's Digital Authorial Voice. 
Mark C. Marino: What Holds Electronic Literature Together? 

Metacommentaries
Illya Szilak: Do Cyborgs Dream Of Iphone Apps? The Body And Storytelling In The Digital Imaginary. 
Nick Montfort: Computational Literary Practices And Processes And Imagination.

Afterword
Steve Tomasula: Haunting The Digital Imaginary. 

Bibliography
Index

(Source: Publisher's catalog copy)