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Immersion, Digital Fiction and the Switchboard Metaphor
This paper re-evaluates existing theories of immersion and related concepts in the medium-specific context of digital-born fiction. In the context of our AHRC-funded ‘Reading Digital Fiction’ project (2014-17) (Ref: AH/K004174/1), we carried out an empirical reader response study of One to One Development Trust’s immersive three-dimensional (3D) digital fiction installation, WALLPAPER (2015). Working with reading groups in the Sheffield area (UK), we used methods of discourse analysis to examine readers’ verbal responses to experiencing the installation, paying particular attention to how participants described experiences pertaining to different types of immersion explicitly and implicitly. We explain our findings by proposing the idea of a switchboard metaphor for immersive experiences, comprising layers and dynamic elements of convergence and divergence. Resulting from our analysis, we describe immersion as a complex, hybrid, and dynamic phenomenon.
Astrid Ensslin - 12.06.2019 - 22:45
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Nodes Without Edges: Peripheries of the Database
This paper takes a digital hermeneutic approach (Van Nuenen and Van de Ven) to database research in the field of electronic literature. I analyze the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (KB), a publicly available cross-referenced database of electronic literature that allows contributors to enter and edit information. I consider the peripheries of the database from the perspective of the development, population, and research use of information in the KB.
As developers, we consider it essential to have fields for information that will document e-lit practices and their authors that are as accurate as possible without adding superfluous or problematic information or making the records too complicated to fill out. This can lead to sensitive issues: I recount a current discussion of the use of the gender field in the author records of the KB, combining the community discussion in the ELMCIP/ELO Facebook groups with sources from library science and radical cataloging (i.e. Drabinkski 2014).
Hannah Ackermans - 06.08.2019 - 10:48
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Visible and Invisible Archives: The Database Aesthetics of The Atlas Group Archive and haikU
Although many works of electronic literature use databases in some form, “not all new media objects are explicitly databases” (Manovich 41, my emphasis). I analyze two works of electronic literature, The Atlas Group Archive (Raad) and haikU (Wylde), as examples of different material and conceptual databases. I approach and compare the works within the framework of Digital Hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole.
Walid Raad's 1989-2004 The Atlas Group Archive (AGA) is a multimedial, fictional 'archive' which encompasses supposedly donated testimonies on the war in Lebanon (1974-1991), including diary logs, photographs with notes, and videos. The narrative is structured as a database, in which the layering of content in individual texts and images as well as in the database as a whole becomes the key feature.
Hannah Ackermans - 06.08.2019 - 10:53
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From Twitterbots to VR: 10 of the best examples of digital literature
From Twitterbots to VR: 10 of the best examples of digital literature
David Wright - 27.08.2019 - 14:06
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Sound, Fury, and Consistency: Writing Recombinant Fiction
Sound, Fury, and Consistency: Writing Recombinant Fiction
David Wright - 28.08.2019 - 02:58
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Italo Calvino’s Six Memos as ethical imperative in J.R. Carpenter’s The Gathering Cloud
In 1985, Italo Calvino wrote a series of lectures (later published as ‘memos’) in which he proposed six values he deemed crucial to literature as it moved into the next millennium: lightness, quickness, ‘crystal’ exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. Though never a writer of electronic literature, Calvino has frequently been associated or referenced in relation to digital works. J.R. Carpenter’s web-based work The Gathering Cloud (2016) (hereafter TGC) exhibits Calvino’s values. TGC is informed by Howard’s 1803 Essay on the Modifications of Clouds. Howard’s ‘frontispiece’ and five ‘plates’ are used in Carpenter’s web-based work. Poetry is then superimposed on these repurposed illustrations. Situated ‘within’ the poetry, animated gif collages play.
David Wright - 04.09.2019 - 02:28
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Infinite Verse
Infinite literature is abundant, often conceptually simple, and often formally easy to understand. For critics and poets to explore infinite forms of literature further, it is important to clarify their essentials. In this discussion I will describe properties of infinite (or, to phrase it differently, “boundless”) poetry. I specifically consider verse — poetry which, when composed, is “turned” into lines in some typical or unconventional way. These verse works, or segmented verbal works, need not be digital: There are many infinite artworks that are not based on digital computation or even what people would usually describe as “technology,” while there are many finite (bounded) artworks that are computational. Some of the works I will cover are thought of as prose fictions, but I will demonstrate that to attain boundlessness they need at least one turn of the sort that is characteristic of verse.
Nick Montfort - 06.09.2019 - 22:48
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A Little Transmediation Can Be a Dangerous Thing, or What Happened When I Made a Multimedia Poem from an Artist’s Book
A Little Transmediation Can Be a Dangerous Thing, or What Happened When I Made a Multimedia Poem from an Artist’s Book
Richard Holeton - 07.09.2019 - 04:58
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Beyond the Periphery of Modernist Prose: Digital Faulknerian Stream-of-Consciousness
The first two chapters of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (hereafter SF) (1929) use stream-of-consciousness prose to represent the perspectives of the intellectually-disabled Benjy and suicidal Quentin, respectively. The text moves freely between time periods, using italics to indicate shifts, establishing what Faulkner calls ‘unbroken-surfaced confusion’. As a result, the novel depicts the novel’s titular ‘Sound and Fury’.
To this day, SF poses editorial dilemmas. Polk (1985, XIV) lists four difficulties: (i) none of the extant documents fully preserve Faulkner’s ‘final intentions’; (ii) the documents preserve inconclusive and contradictory testimony; (iii) it is impossible to determine who caused variations between the book and carbon typescript; and (iv) given the nature of the text, it is difficult to determine which variations are corrected ‘errors’ and which are not. Faulkner’s correspondence with his literary agent also reveals his desire to use colourised text, which has led to the development of colour editions: the 2012 Folio Society edition and the 2003 hypertext edition.
David Wright - 07.09.2019 - 12:55
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The Birth of the Algorithmic Author: NLG Systems as Tools and Agents
Natural language generation (NLG) – when computers produce text-based output in readable human languages – is becoming increasingly prevalent in our modern digital age. This paper will review the ways in which an NLG system may be framed in popular and scholarly discourse: namely, as a tool or as an agent. It will consider the implications of such perspectives for general perceptions of NLG systems and computer-generated texts. Negotiating claims made by system developers and the opinions of ordinary readers amassed through empirical studies conducted for this research, this paper delves into a theoretical and philosophical exploration of questions of authorial agency related to computer-generated texts, and by considering whether NLG systems constitute tools for manifesting human intention or agents in themselves.
leahhenrickson - 12.09.2019 - 15:02
