Search results for "node/Swigart"

Introduction In digital humanities work, we bring humanities insights and methods to bear on digital projects. Those projects are often themselves what we might call “humanities products.” That is to say, these projects operate within humanities domains: analyzing data from humanities disciplines for humanities publications, making humanities arguments in new media forms, opening access to humanities collections, or presenting humanities knowledge to the general public. But these are not the only types of digital projects that can benefit from a humanities approach. This article presents a strand of work we have been doing in developing new electronic literature projects at […]

Opening: The logic of white supremacy is parasitical: snaking its way through existing infrastructure, siphoning power, reconstituting structures, and circulating resources to produce hierarchies that elevate white experience. Recent efforts in electronic literature, however, have called this legacy of structural racism into question. The forthcoming (and fourth!) collection of e-lit from the Electronic Literature Organization, ELO’s amended fellowship program, and discussions about decolonizing e-lit featured at electronic book review are a few endeavors that question the role race, racialization, and racism occupy in the field of electronic literature. And yet, as noble as these efforts are, white supremacy has endured […]

The ELMCIP project (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice: Developing a Network-Based Creativity Community), which ran from 2010-2013, was one of the most ambitious joint research projects to date in the field of electronic literature (e-lit). The seven-partner, six-nation project resulted in conferences in six countries, a major exhibition, three books, a film, the first digital anthology of European electronic literature, and the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, a large-scale, open-access research database. This essay will present this multifaceted project within a Creative DH framework. After first presenting the work of the original three-year collaborative […]

The focus of this essay will be Darren Wershler’s NICHOLODEON: a book of lowerglyphs and its living, digital manifestation as a ganglion of texts and links in its online version, NICHOLODEONLINE. Wershler creates a textual homage to the influential Canadian avant-garde poet, bpNichol, in NICHOLODEON, which is a “book” initially published as a print version in 1997 and then later in an online iteration as NICHOLODEONLINE in 1998. The materiality of each iteration differs drastically from the traditional appearance and presentation of its book version to its online manifestation. NICHOLODEONLINE is a moving and dynamic aggregate of pathways—it is a […]

I direct an Immersive Storytelling Lab, and for most of my career have been deeply involved in electronic literatures and disciplinary boundary-crossing, making small worlds: haunted cabinets, first-personal confessionals, treasure boxes, book objects and large-scale cinematic palimpsests. It’s an honour to have the opportunity to think about the trajectory of my work in relation to (un)continuity – to sit with the recurring themes and tools and inspiration that is foundational to my practice – and while I leave all sorts of easter eggs in my work for careful readers – a repetition of character names, reuse of the same 3d […]

Care and Carelessness As the writer types furiously, attempting to meet a deadline, the little red squiggle appears. The writer’s eyes dart to the left. The word is “aquire,” but Microsoft Word suggests it should be “acquire.” The writer accepts this change and moves on. A few sentences later, another red line appears. When the writer hovers their cursor above the words marked by this line – “It goes without saying” – a popup message warns that this way of starting a sentence suggests a lack of confidence. This message comes from Grammarly, an algorithmic writing assistant. These days, algorithms […]

This paper follows the threads of speculative interfaces through electronic literature and the digital humanities, arguing not only that the speculative interface is a key attribute of electronic literature, but also that speculative interfaces are an important methodology in the digital humanities. I will discuss the interfaces of three works of electronic literature, each written decades apart: Christopher Strachey’s M.U.C. Love Letter Generator (1952), Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story (1990) and Kate Pullinger’s Breathe (2018). Each of these creates a new, speculative interface: Strachey programmed a mainframe computer to generate love letters, Joyce pioneered hypertext fiction, and Pullinger created a […]

Victory Garden 2022, one of the latest web reconstructions of e-literary classics made by the Electronic Literature Lab, delivers a promise of yet another 20 years of exploration of this vast hypertext. Created in Storyspace and originally published in 1993 by Eastgate Systems, Stuart Moulthrop’s hypertext fiction achieved a status of a unique, literary evergreen, a wide ranging digital ouvre. The dense network of interconnected text spaces (993 lexias and over 2800 links) delivered an abundance of divergent stories that run in parallel or, sometimes, in contradiction to each other. Add to this some blind alleys and “secret” spaces, and […]