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From the Digital to the Bookbound
Dear Reader: How are you reading these words? On which device? Through which interface? Can you read the source code of this web ‘page’? Can you re-write it? Why does it matter? We have machines for that, we have apps! In Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound Lori Emerson sets out to demystify the wondrous devices of our digital age by interrogating both the limits and the creative possibilities of a wide range of reading and writing interfaces. For Emerson, interface is an open-ended term – a threshold, a point of interaction between human and hardware, between hardware and software, between reader and writer, and between human-authored writing and the vast corpus of machine-based text relentlessly reading and writing itself behind the surface of the screen.
J. R. Carpenter - 09.08.2014 - 16:06
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A Topographical Approach to Re-Reading Print Books About Islands in Digital Literary Spaces
This paper interrogates the ‘topic’ of islands displaced from print books into digital literary spaces through a discussion of a web-based work of digital literature ...and by islands I mean paragraphs (Carpenter 2013) http://luckysoap.com/andbyislands/ In this work a reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space veined blue by a background image of graph paper. Whereas horizontally lined loose leaf or foolscap offers a guide for linear hand writing, horizontally and vertically lined graph paper offers a guide for locating positions, or intersections, along orthogonal axes such as latitude and longitude, and time and distance. In this graphic space the horizon extends far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating this space (with track pad, touch screen, mouse, or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands… and by islands I mean computer-generated paragraphs.
J. R. Carpenter - 22.11.2014 - 10:54
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A Topographical Approach to Re-Reading Books about Islands in Digital Literary Spaces
This paper takes a topographical approach to re-reading print books in digital literary spaces through a discussion of a web-based work of digital literature “…and by islands I mean paragraphs” (Carpenter 2013). In this work, a reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space extending far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. This sea is dotted with computer-generated paragraphs. These fluid texts call upon variable strings containing words and phrases collected from a vast literary corpus of books about islands. Individually, each of these textual islands represents a topic – from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing on the topic of islands. This paper will argue that, called as statement-events into digital processes, fragments of print texts are reconstituted as events occurring in a digital present which is also a break from the present. A new regime of signification emerges, in which authorship is distributed and text is ‘eventilized’ (Hayles).
Alvaro Seica - 15.05.2015 - 13:59
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Once Upon a Tide: An Introductory Essay
Not quite a short story, not quite a stage play, ‘Once upon a Tide’ is just one of those moments in literature when time … stands … still. When plot advances by simply refusing to budge. One of those waiting times, slack tides, great hollows within which heat intensifies, cold deepens, night thickens, fevers rage, or the sun continues its relentless blaze. Tension builds, and still nothing happens; neither the sight of a sail on the horizon nor the slightest breath of wind. It is within these long stillnesses that sailors’ yarns unravel. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the entirety of Marlow’s tale is recounted in one evening whilst sitting utterly still on the deck of a ship moored on the Thames. In the pitch dark and the heavy night air of the river, the narrator strains to discern meaning: ‘I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips…’.
J. R. Carpenter - 24.06.2015 - 11:36
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"'Till Algebra is Easier —': Elements of Computation in the Poems of Emily Dickinson
In this paper, I present close readings of a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems that I propose might be best explained through an understanding of her awareness of the current scientific topics of the time. These include, for example, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Faraday’s and Maxwell’s numerous investigations into electromagnetism in the early to mid 1800s, and the production of Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1847. Specifically, in regards to Babbage’s computing machine, I demonstrate a connection between some of the innovations first formulated by the mathematician and proto-programmer Ada Lovelace in 1842 and 1843, including concepts of looping, modeling, and isomorphism, and Dickinson’s poems, written more than one decade later, which include references to cycles, recursion, and branching. Additionally, I show that there are clear stylistic similarities between Lovelace’s philosophical inquiries into the nascent discipline of computation and some of Dickinson’s poems that might be said to contain algorithmic structures or images.
Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 16:02
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Narrative Affect in William Gillespie's Keyhole Factory and Morpheus: Biblionaut, or, Post-Digital Fiction for the Programming Era
Programmable computation is radically transforming the contemporary media ecology. What is literature's future in this emergent Programming Era? What happens to reading when the affective, performative power of executable code begins to provide the predominant model for creative language use? Critics have raised concerns about models of affective communication and the challenges a-semantic affects present to interpretive practices. In response, this essay explores links between electronic literature, affect theory, and materialist aesthetics in two works by experimental writer and publisher William Gillespie.
Focusing on the post-digital novel Keyhole Factory and the electronic speculative fiction Morpheus: Bilblionaut, it proposes that: first, tracing tropes of code as affective transmissions allows for more robust readings of technomodernist texts and, second, examining non-linguistic affect and its articulation within constraint-based narrative forms suggests possibilities for developing an affective hermeneutics.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 02.06.2016 - 11:15
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Literatura electrónica en español / Electronic Literature in Spanish
Alex Saum-Pascual presents and contextualizes contemporary Spanish-language electronic literature and reads from her digital poetry.
Scott Rettberg - 03.05.2018 - 10:00
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I Hold It Toward You: A Show of Hands
"What is a book?" This is the question the text starts of with and the question the text circles around, exploring the material basis of reading and writing. Parallel to the theoretical examination and anecdotal reference to the history of the written word, the author positions a post-apocalyptic fiction about the last reader.
Hannah Ackermans - 18.09.2018 - 14:42
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Electronic Literature as an approaching tool to emerging ways of reading
What is reading? As a transitive verb, and in the strict action, it is to pass the view by the signs that we recognize from our mother tongue, written in a text to understand them and turn them into sounds. The act of reading goes beyond the interpretation of an inherited code. Reading is a cognitive visual/motor activity and meaningful of reality.
When we read a text, our thinking manages a bunch of received information that little by little it is organizing according to its maturity, experience, cognitive processes, intuition and conceptualization. The order in which it happens does not matter. What is important is the fact that when it is read, the construction and appropriation of both historical and a-historical concepts is happening. But, what happens when we read Electronic Literature?
Technology, following the proposal of Marshall McLujan, is an extension of our own body. For that matter, clothing is an extension of our skin. The shoes are an extension of our feet.
June Hovdenakk - 03.10.2018 - 15:21
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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
