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Teaching Digital Literature: Didactic and Institutional Aspects
Digital media is increasingly finding its way into the discussions of the humanities classroom. But while we have a number of grand theoretical texts about digital literature we as yet have little in the way of resources for discussing the down-to-earth practices of research, teaching, and curriculum necessary for this work to mature. The book Reading Moving Letters, edited by Roberto Simanowski, Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla, addresses this need and provides examinations by nine scholars and teachers from different national academic backgrounds. While the first section of the book provides definitions of digital literature as a discipline of scholarly treatment in the humanities, the second section asks how and why we should teach digital literature and conduct close readings in academia and discusses institutional considerations necessary to take into account when implementing digital literature into curricula. The following text is the introduction to section two.
Patricia Tomaszek - 14.09.2010 - 12:33
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A Four-Sided Model for Reading Hypertext Fiction
I will not pursue the issue of a hypertextual competence (or a multimodal hypertextual competence) here. Rather I would like to take a closer look at literary hypertext and electronic literature itself, and the fact that electronic literature, just like print literature, prefigures different modes of reading. I will insist on the necessity of examining what mode of reading and what kind of responses are prefigured in hypertexts when we make conclusions about hypertext reading. I want to approach the topic by putting weight on how Megan Heyward’s Of day, of night (2002) prefigures the reader's response. The aim of this article is to explore some of the preconditions for reading Of day, of night, and to identify three modes of reading in this hypertext fiction. In addition to these three modes I will argue for a fourth mode of reading hypertext fiction. This mode can be identified in several literary hypertexts, but is less relevant for describing the preconditions for reading Heyward's text. Consequently I will make use of other work to exemplify this mode. Four modes of reading are identified and described. These are semantization, exploration, self-reflection and absorption.
Patricia Tomaszek - 17.09.2010 - 11:09
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Figures in the Interface: Comparative Methods in the Study of Digital Literature
This paper, which is part of the collection of essays Reading Moving Letters (see introduction) reflects on what the emerging field of digital literature studies and the more established (but continually evolving) discipline of comparative literature might contribute to one another in terms of defining concepts and methods of literary analysis. My discussion is guided by the tentative proposition that the vexed status of the "national language" for comparative literature can be seen as analogous to the status of the "digital" for scholars undertaking research on computer-based literary texts. Aiming to overcome the ideological strictures of nationalism, many present-day comparatists are returning to the old question "what is literature?" and are placing renewed emphasis on the role of figurative language as a defining feature of literary texts and, consequently, as the appropriate focus of comparative textual analysis.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.03.2011 - 15:17
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Aesthetics of Surface, Ephemeral and Re-Enchantment in Digital Literature: How Authors and Readers Deal with the Lability of the Electronic Device
Whenever the program of a work, created by an artist, is run by a computer, the digital device necessarily plays a role in its updating process: because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, the digital device may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project, or even make it unreadable on screen. Thus, readers do not know what they should consider as part of the artist’s intentionality, and what they should ascribe to the unexpected changes made by the reading device of their personal computer. Critics who are in keeping with a hermeneutic approach may ascribe certain processes, actually caused by the machine, to the artist’s creativity. What is more, authors lose control over the evolution of their work and the many updates it undergoes. Thus, the “digital” artist is given four options when dealing with the lability of the electronic device, which will be described in this article by close readings of The Dreamlife of letters by Brian Kim Stefans, Revenances by Gregory Chatonsky and La Série des U by Philippe Bootz.
Alexandra Saemmer - 03.07.2011 - 16:03
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Visionary Landscapes: Literature on the Edge of Time and Space
Introduction to a special issue of Hyperrhiz presenting a collection of essays, artist papers, reviews, and literary works from the Electronic Literature Organization's (ELO) 2008 conference held at Washington State University Vancouver, in Vancouver, Washington [livinginswwashington.net], from May 29 to June 2, which was hosted by Dene Grigar and John Barber.
Dene Grigar - 06.10.2011 - 06:55
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Generative Visual Renku: Poetic Multimedia Semantics with the GRIOT System
A polymorphic poem (polypoem) is a generative digital artwork that is constructed differently upon each instantiation, but can be meaningfully constrained according to aspects such as theme, metaphor, affect, and discourse structure. The Generative Visual Renku project presents a new form of concrete polymorphic poetry inspired by Japanese renku poetry, iconicity of Chinese character forms, and generative models from contemporary art. Calligraphic iconic illustrations are conjoined by the GRIOT system into a fanciful topography articulating the nuanced interplay between organic (natural or hand-created) and modular (mass-produced or consumerist) artifacts that saturate our lives. GRIOT, which is a system for composing generative and interactive narrative and poetic works, is used to semantically constrain generated output both visually and conceptually. On the one hand, this project extends the GRIOT architecture's support for composing graphics and has resulted in new theory to provide cognitive and semiotic groundings for the extension.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.10.2012 - 21:20
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The Aesthetics of Generative Literature: Lessons from a Digital Writing Workshop
This paper explores a range of issues related to the pedagogy and practice of generative writing in programmable media. We begin with a brief description of the RiTa toolkit – a set of computational tools designed to facilitate the practice of generative writing. We then describe our experiences using these tools in a series of digital writing workshops at Brown University in 2007-2008. We discuss and theoretically examine a set of core issues raised by workshop participants — distributed authorship, the aesthetics of surprise, materiality, push-back, layering, and others — and attempt to situate them within the larger discourse of generative art and writing practice.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.10.2012 - 21:23
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Electronic Literature as an Information System
Electronic literature is a term that encompasses artistic texts produced for printed media which are consumed in electronic format, as well as text produced for electronic media that could not be printed without losing essential qualities. Some have argued that the essence of electronic literature is the use of multimedia, fragmentation, and/or non-linearity. Others focus on the role of computation and complex processing. "Cybertext" does not sufficiently describe these systems. In this paper we propose that works of electronic literature, understood as text (with possible inclusion of multimedia elements) designed to be consumed in bi- or multi-directional electronic media, are best understood as 3-tier (or n-tier) information systems. These tiers include data (the textual content), process (computational interactions) and presentation (on-screen rendering of the narrative). The interaction between these layers produces what is known as the work of electronic literature.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.10.2012 - 21:30
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Creative Nonfiction in Electronic Media: New Wine in New Bottles
Moving text into e-space has thus far taken as many steps backward as it has forward, largely because the paradigm of the printed book has served as a blinder that keeps us from seeing possible new ways of writing—something nowhere more obvious than in nonfiction. After looking at a few examples of such failures of imagination, including an internet-only scholarly publication that fails to take advantage of virtual textuality, this essay first notes some nonfictional genres and modes after which it looks the relations between fiction and nonfiction as literary forms. Next, it suggests new methods of argumentation made possible by computer-based textuality. The largest part of this essay then explores three new forms: the blog as the electronic translation of the journal, the hypertext essay, and the Ulmerian mystory.
Source: Author's Abstract
Patricia Tomaszek - 10.10.2013 - 15:21
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Entity/Identity: A Tool Designed to Index Documents about Digital Poetry
Entity/Identity: A Tool Designed to Index Documents about Digital Poetry
Patricia Tomaszek - 10.10.2013 - 21:48
