Linus may be right, but sometimes all the eyeballs look the wrong way. Part of what makes networks so interesting is the ways in which they break, reroute, and disperse information (and not just link and gather it). So much digital literature, and its criticism, addresses the points at which the network breaks: transient texts, unreproducible experiences, and art at the margins. I’m confident your work will revel in these challenges, combating ‘digital Maoism’ and the seductive power of networks that shunt us only to safe, well-traveled places.

This example is particularly striking for its dual subversion: not only is the rogue image burned on top of some unsuspecting tourist’s memory of this sign, but because both images consist of text, this is also a political statement in the linguistic sense (as well as – in this case – a language-driven work of digital art that participates in a nuanced, multivalent act of ‘tagging’).

Lennon’s panoramic review-essay might have been more lucid — despite its obvious commitment to theoretical divagation as right and proper method — so part of the problem here might be less Glass’s casual invocation of Bourdieu (and I’m tired of hearing Bourdieu’s name myself) than (in this case) understandable, if unproductive, misreading (of irony etc). Perhaps, then, a cooler rhetoric would incite more productive polemic? But Lennon’s response to Glass is at any rate unambiguous on most counts. I only wish the discussion would start in what seems to be emerging as the vital precincts of de… continue

I once had a few of my books in Softbook, the first (and now abandoned) e-reader. No reader has yet arrived that has completely satisfied my desire for the book experience. At the same time, as a designer of electronic literature, the ability to link, with sound, color and motion, would be a necessary part of the delivery. The forthcoming Apple iPad might be the platform to do for reading what iTunes did for music (and books on tape, for that matter). If the New York Times can format for it, and all user control (font size, for instance, or orientation), this could be the breakthrough. If not… continue

What would the “general data file” contain? Would it be something like an ASCII file that contains just the words and that can be searched? What about texts with images: would they need two types of data files ? But since images cannot be searched, the image file would not be very useful.