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  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. Diffractive Reading in the Reading Club

    Annie Abrahams discusses, referring to Karen Barad, Donna Haraway
    and Iris van der Tuin among others, how the Reading Club can be considered an example of a diffractive reading and writing practice.

    Annie Abrahams - 15.09.2019 - 16:35

  8. #PEAE (Participatif Ethology in Artificial Environments)

    Originally I proposed a 20 min long performance called ThinkTalk with Rob Wittig – In it, we wanted to mix objects, voices and text live (using webcams) to compose something like a text opera with solos, dialogs, a choir and organic chaos. It should have been a meandering text collage with coincidences and contingency leading to unintentional meaning. - if you have an opportunity to invite us?
    Instead I will tell you about my relation to electronic literature and my struggles defining my artworks.

    Annie Abrahams - 15.09.2019 - 16:55

  9. Peripheries2: Czech and Slovak digital literature on the edge of domestic and foreign interest

    Czechoslovak literature always kept up with literary trends, which were trying to combine texts and possibilities of new medias. Whether we speak about a period of literary avant-garde, or about a period of experimental poetry of 1960s, works of Czechoslovak authors were always at the forefront of domestic literary-theoretical and literary-historical reflection and had strong (in case of 1960s even initiative) cultural impact abroad. However, after the rise of digital literature the situation and position of Czechoslovak (and Czech and Slovak) literary production have changed. Domestic theory and praxis in digital literature have become marginal issue. Even if there has emerged a piece of work with potential to interest international readers and theorists, it has never crossed borders of former Iron Curtain in nearly 100% cases. Czech and Slovak digital literature has found itself at dual perihpery at the same time – domestic (internal) and foreign (external).

    Tomas Franta - 10.10.2019 - 17:57

  10. Electronic Literature in the Anthropocene

    Contemporary environmental traumas are placing formidable demands on the creative arts when it comes to interrogating their kaleidoscopic complexities and implications. Electronic literature that engages topics of climate, infrastructure, and nonhuman agency is in a promising position here, due to its recasting of extent literary and poetic traditions using the architectures of contemporary digital computing and communications infrastructure. These technologies are involved not just in measuring and mapping a rapidly degrading environment, but their developmental histories and continued functioning are implicated in both embedding and perpetuating the very effects being detected.

    Richard Carter - 31.10.2019 - 18:00

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