The Digital Review is an annual online journal of digital writing with a focus on the born-digital essay. Each theme-based issue will offer a curated combination of commissioned work, submitted work, restored past work and re-designed public domain work.
For more information and how to submit, please visit the Call for Submissions
Let’s Build a City: Introducing the Living Glossary of Digital Narrative
Hannah Ackermans introduces The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative via a discussion of digital communities and unintentional acts of exclusion, highlighting the importance of a shared vocabulary for accessibility in scholarship.
A Review of Interpreting Meat
Gabriela Jarzębowska reviews Interpreting Meat by Teddy Duncan Jr. By unmasking the hidden libidinal and discursive investments in meat, Duncan urges us to imagine a different kind of relationship with animals—one grounded not in domination or guilt, but in awareness, responsibility, and a reshaping of desire itself.
A Review of Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900 by Jeffrey West Kirkwood
Will Luers contributes to current debates on AI by engaging with Jeffrey West Kirkwood's Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotics. Luers examines the parallels between AI and cinema technology as "thinking machines," both structured around intervals that produce perceptual and conceptual unities. What we have, in cinema and AI no less than human cognition, "is a reevaluation of the unity of consciousness."
Call for contributions for special issue “Celebrating Joseph Tabbi and 30 Years of electronic book review”
A special call for papers celebrating the work of Joe Tabbi—electronic book review's founder and long-term editor-in-chief—which will be published in a special issue of electronic book review during the journal's 30th anniversary year.
Lost in The Backrooms [or How I Learned to Love the Liminal]
Experimental storyteller and digital artist Mez Breeze explores the liminal spaces of The Backrooms, a found footage web series which is based on a popular creepypasta of the same name. In doing so, Breeze confronts the feelings of alienation and predation inherent to late-stage capitalist society.
Advertising with AI – On the presentation of authorship of ChatGPT-generated books
Tuuli Hongisto explores the problems of cyborg authorship through the presentation of ChatGPT as a co-author of literary works on Amazon. Rather than shying away from admitting that an AI took part in the writing process, these authors position ChatGPT and other LLM's as authors with their own rights, rather than tools.
William Gaddis at his Centenary
December 2022 was William Gaddis’s centenary year, marked that October by an archival exhibition and academic conference at Washington University St Louis, whose Olin Library special collections hold his archive. December 2023 then marked 25 years since Gaddis’s death. Over the past decade, he has been published, reprinted, translated, namechecked, served by globally public discussion forums, at a greater rate than ever during his lifetime. This special issue of electronic book review brings together work on Gaddis at this distinctive time in his reception. This gathering focuses particularly… continue
Talan Memmott Netprov Interview
Rob Wittig and Talan Memmott reminisce about their favorite Netprovs, discuss the ways improvisation on the Web can be tackled, and theorize the future possibilities of the Netprov form after a step back from the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Off Center Episode 17: Transgressive Games and Understanding Male Gamers with Kristine Jørgensen
This time around on the Off Center podcast, Scott Rettberg is joined by Kristine Jørgensen, professor of media studies and PI at the Center for Digital Narrative. They discuss male gaming culture and transgressive games, her involvement in the Games and Transgressive Aesthetics project, and as her ongoing project Understanding Male Gamers.
María Mencía’s e-Poetry: A Conversation Exploring Her Work
In this conversation with Yolanda De Gregorio Robledo, e-poet María Mencía discusses her journey as an artist and scholar. In doing so, María reveals her artistic interests, the influences the electronic literature community has had on her work, and the importance of highlighting women's contributions to the field of electronic literature as a whole.