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1. Appealing to Your Better Judgement: A Call for Database Criticism

   Engagement with public databases has become a leading way for scholars, artists, and readers alike to encounter works of electronic literature as well as get an overview of the field. Although acknowledged as an important and difficult process, database construction is, in practice, too often underestimated as merely a preparatory task in Digital Humanities. Through the conception of database criticism, I provide a critical apparatus to approach databases in terms of qualitative and aesthetic characteristics.

   Considering public databases as media texts, I take a digital hermeneutic approach to the reading strategies involved in engaging with databases. What follows is the presence of databases as cultural artifacts that are themselves studied in humanities and social science frameworks. It is in the interest of both the quality and esteem of the databases to develop ways to study and evaluate them parallel to academic reviews of monographs and edited collections.

   Hannah Ackermans - 07.09.2020 - 14:22

2. Something there badly not wrong: the life and death of literary form in databases

   Returning to his 2010 essay, “Electronic Literature as World Literature,” Tabbi extends those arguments in light of community built scholarly databases that have since emerged and in contrast to an uncritical tracking of “views, citations, downloads and occasional shared themes” (not to mention an increased precarity of authorship, where one’s scholarly work is basically given away).

   For digital practices to be literary, Tabbi argues, our selections need to circulate within various institutional, academic, curatorial, and cultural structures – each of which is devising its own set of relations to the digital. This essay aims to initiate those ongoing conversations and evaluations in the field of born digital, electronic literature. In so doing, Tabbi suggests how acts of close reading can bring scholars into closer contact with one another and also activate the databases where e-lit archives are presently stored, read, curated, and mined for verbal and perspectival patterns. (Which have been described, in broad outline as a kind of distant reading.)

    

   Hannah Ackermans - 07.09.2020 - 15:54