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
Total Eclipse: A Rearview Review of Rhythms
A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon slides between the sun and the Earth, aligned precisely so that the lunar body appears to block the solar surface entirely from view. In this autobiographical essay, Steve Tomasula, an Illinois-based writer known for collaborative image-text assemblages, from TOC to Ascension, that convey how and why humans’ existential sense of reality can vary so radically across time and space, recalls an April 2017 Midwestern road-trip pursuing the path of the total eclipse. In Tomasula’s account of the totality, the multiple meditations surrounding this predictable celestial event only intensify the sublimity of the shared experience and its disruptive systemic effects.
Ecocritique between Landscape and Data: The Environmental Audiotour
This article discusses the Environmental Audiotour—a work by Parikka, Patelli, and Wong through which art and technology intersect with environmental issues at the Helsinki Biennial 2023. The artist-researchers explore topics like rising sea levels affecting islands, how humans impact the environment, and ways to visualize environmental data. Overall, the authors use creative methods to understand and address environmental problems in today's digital world.
Thank you to the ELO 2023 conference, especially to its organizers, Daniela Maduro, Manuel Portela, Rui Torres, and Alex Saum-Pascual, who first hosted Professor Jussi Parikka as a keynote speaker at their conference in Coimbra, Portugal. This resulting publication is a collaboration with ELO 2023 and will also appear in their forthcoming conference publications.
Episode 8: Fanfiction as a Form of Digital Narrativity with Flourish Klink
Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), interviews Flourish Klink, podcaster and fandom expert, about their rich history with fandom and fan culture.
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