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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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Revisting Califia: “Here the Path triverages”
This paper is not a reappraisal of Califia, as it needs no reappraisal in terms of its value to electronic literature, but a re-reading of what could be termed its hidden critical apparatus. While not wrongly referred to as “hypertext narrative,” this general category obscures a number of crucial structural and theoretical distinctions that suggest Califia rests on, and can offer, a different and powerful critical idiom of its own that has only recently found more theoretical expression as technology has advanced. Roughly contemporary (Luesebrink began Califia in 1995, when Patchwork Girl was published, and published it in 2000) and both on Eastgate, Califia remains in a relatively peripheral position in comparison, and not because Patchwork Girl appeared first. As many articles written about Patchwork will attest, PWG is and was more immediately accessible to the academic community via its attachment to several theoretical narratives around intertextuality, strategies of resistance, and a straightforward use of hypertext as structure and theme (“patching” and linking, e.g.
Vian Rasheed - 14.11.2019 - 01:21
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CELL Roundtable on Naming Authority and Interoperability
At meetings in Siegen (2009), Sydney (2010), Provincetown ( 2010), Bleckinge (2010), Bergen (2011), and Morgantown (2011), the editors of the Electronic Literature Directory have established and developed a Consortium on Electronic Literature (CELL). The related database projects originating in each of these locations, is committed to the development of bibliographic standards, interoperability, and data-sharing to ensure the broad reach and wide range of literature and criticism that new media literary scholars are obligated to document and cultivate. In Paris this year, present members will meet to discuss the achievement of interoperability across our various platforms. First on our agenda, will be a report on progress toward the establishment of a "naming authority" for authors and works in the field of electronic literature, and we will continue towards our goal of institutionalizing basic bibliographic practices consistent with the emerging norms of the field.
Ole Samdal - 25.11.2019 - 14:47
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Narrating the Sociality of the Database: A Digital Hermeneutic Reading of The Atlas Group Archive and haikU (presentation)
I investigate the database characteristics of electronic literature that makes them into social forms. Database structures are both fragmented and relational, displaying hypertext characteristics. I approach The Atlas Group Archive and haikU, two works of electronic literature, as examples of material and conceptual databases in order to explore the database function so saturated in our daily life. Both works highlight a database aesthetics, although the ways they do so are polar opposites. I analyze the works within the framework of digital hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole. I demonstrate how AGA is an explicit database, supposedly showing a 'complete' archive, whereas haikU is an implicit database that hides the corpus of sentences. I show the sociality of the databases, thematizing both the human process behind database formation as a whole, as well as how the individual elements influence the perception of the overall database.
Hannah Ackermans - 03.12.2019 - 10:25
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Narrating the Sociality of the Database: A Digital Hermeneutic Reading of The Atlas Group Archive and haikU (paper)
In this paper, I investigate the database characteristics of electronic literature that makes them into social forms. Database structures are both fragmented and relational, displaying hypertext characteristics. I approach The Atlas Group Archive and haikU, two works of electronic literature, as examples of material and conceptual databases in order to explore the database function so saturated in our daily life. Both works highlight a database aesthetics, although the ways they do so are polar opposites. I analyze the works within the framework of digital hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole. I demonstrate how AGA is an explicit database, supposedly showing a 'complete' archive, whereas haikU is an implicit database that hides the corpus of sentences. I show the sociality of the databases, thematizing both the human process behind database formation as a whole, as well as how the individual elements influence the perception of the overall database.
Hannah Ackermans - 03.12.2019 - 10:37
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How to Review a Database
In this 5-minute lightning talk, I introduced my work-in-progress chapter on database criticism. A video of the presentation is available on YouTube, see below.
Hannah Ackermans - 03.12.2019 - 12:53
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The Digital Imaginary: Literature and Cinema of the Database
Over the past half century, computing has profoundly altered the ways stories are imagined and told. Immersive, narrative, and database technologies transform creative practices and hybrid spaces revealing and concealing the most fundamental acts of human invention: making stories.
The Digital Imaginary illuminates these changes by bringing leading North American and European writers, artists and scholars, like Sharon Daniel, Stuart Moulthrop, Nick Montfort, Kate Pullinger and Geof Bowker, to engage in discussion about how new forms and structures change the creative process. Through interviews, commentaries and meta-commentaries, this book brings fresh insight into the creative process form differing, disciplinary perspectives, provoking questions for makers and readers about meaning, interpretation and utterance. The Digital Imaginary will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including storymakers, educators, curators, critics, readers and artists, alike.
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Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Digital ImaginaryScott Rettberg - 29.01.2020 - 13:58
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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
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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
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Exposed
The criminal punishment system in the United States confines over two million people in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside these prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. Quotes, audio clips, and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma that prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. On July 8th alone, there are over 100 statements included in the interface — statements made by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and severe hardship. Unfortunately, their words are all we have.
Scott Rettberg - 08.12.2020 - 13:48
