Digital Literature as a Social Hermeneutic Dispositif: The case of the GeoNeoLogical Novel

This paper argues that digital literature can be understood as a social hermeneutic dispositif. To demonstrate this thesis, an experimental book is presented. It is written/read using a geo-tagging software, that restitutes, to the reader acting as a co-author in a Web 2.0/3.0 context, the combination of significant (semantic) keywords (or tags) with a given city place and with a certain social temporality. The novel’s title is based in the philosophical idea of deixis, i.e., the articulation of space (geo), time (neo) and logos (discourse, reason). In the interface, the fictional text presents, at each scene, 3 writing/reading itineraries, each one using a specific literary medium/language, referring, in a greater or lesser extent, to dimensions ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘logos’. A first text has linguistic nature and was deconstructed into several sub-texts types: narrative (mention of major events), dialogic (characters dialogues) and meta-informative (keywords, tags). A second ‘text’ uses visual language inherent to characters and scenery photos (space or synchronic level) subjacent to the novel’s scenes (time or diachronic level). A 3rd ‘text’ refers to the language of maps, which represent the course (time) of the paths (space) used by novel’s characters in their daily lives both in the real and fictional world. The first (seminal) author associated photos both to the moment they were taken and to the urban space where these photos were captured or to a point in cyberspace.

(Source: ELD 2015)