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1. The Ends of Publishing

   If the media was the message for McLuhan in the 1960s, then audio-visual publishing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo have become a message today. In his 1998 article entitled “Database as Symbolic Form,” Lev Manovich fails to foresee the socially hypermediated turn of the new century when he argues that “database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world” (p. 7). From a purely mathematical, logical viewpoint, they do at first seem at odds, since the database is the superstructure and the narrative media files are the objects oriented within. For example, a database might house narrative-less stock photos or sound effects as easily as it does an audio-visual story. The (early) media database seems indifferent to its contents and does not seem to be able to tell a story. Likewise, the narrative within a digital movie file is indifferent to its matrix-host, because the “story” operates regardless of whether you play the film on a DVD player, digital projector, or a YouTube download.

   Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 13:51

2. Genre-bending on an Academic Platform: Three Creative Works on Scalar

   This paper investigates genre and media specificity of electronic literature created in Scalar. Scalar is a platform and authoring tool created specifically for humanities scholars to enable multimodal and multilinear publications. Besides scholarly work, Robert Budac's The Scalar Conspiracy [4], Steven Wingate's daddylabyrinth: a digital lyric memoir [12] and micha cárdenas' Redshift & Portalmetal [5] are all works of electronic literature created in Scalar. I demonstrate that all three of these works use Scalar to create genre-bending texts that build on and subvert the technological affordances as well as the contextual connotations that Scalar provides. The Scalar Conspiracy parodies the counter-intuitive user interface elements by making the reader investigate the text's different hidden messages. daddylabyrinth: a digital lyric memoir destabilizes the genre of the (auto)biography by promoting documentation and research while continuously showing how these processes fall short during the writing and reading process. Redshift & Portalmetal favors experience over documentation to create a work that is both immersive and theory-building.

   Hannah Ackermans - 18.10.2021 - 16:10

3. Follow the Pathfinders: a Case Study Approach to Production, Use, and Readership on Scalar

   This born-digital article examines the multimodal academic publication Pathfinders (Moulthrop and Grigar). Through a combination of interviews with readers and the author, textual analysis of the book, and literature review of Scalar, I trace the affordances of the platform, appropriation by scholars, the media text, and readership of Pathfinders. I distill themes that are key in the multimodality of the book, including platform adoption, institutional embedding, technological context and research values. Throughout the article, which is also written on Scalar, I reflect on my own use of Scalar and the various considerations that come with it in terms of software sustainability, accessibility, and transparency of research context. I conclude with a reflection on the media specificity of Scalar as an academic platform.

   (source: Hyperrhiz abstract)

   Hannah Ackermans - 16.05.2022 - 11:20