Literary Computation: The Role of Computers in the Construction of Literary Artifacts

Over the last decades, the progressive adoption of information systems (IS) by artistic fields deemed to be the exclusive domain of creative humans provides some insights as to what the future may hold. The question addressed in this paper is: has literature missed out in this race to explore new horizons with the aid of the new technologies? In an attempt to answer it, we will start by studying how the adoption of IS came about in some of these fields, and we will try to postulate which particular ingredients may have played significant roles in turning little steps of modernization into revolutionary steps for the field. Then we will address the issue of which current advances in IS may be waiting to revolutionise literature, and what are the conditions that must be fulfilled for this revolution to come about.

(Source: ELO 2008 site)