The Digital Review is a new bi-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
Why Twining?
This except from Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives explores the popular and open-source digital storytelling platform Twine. Authors Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop discuss the history of Twine as well as existing works and possible projects.
Digital Orihon (デジタル折り本): The (un)continuous shape of the novel.
Wright explores the digital manifestation of an orihon manuscript style for how it can expand how we think of the novel's form. He considers how digital versions of J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year and his own print novella make use of the concept of the fold as identified in the orihon style.
COVID E-LIT: Digital Art from the Pandemic curatorial statement
Nacher, Rettberg, and Pold offer a curatorial statement about the COVID E-Lit Exhibition--one of the many exhibitions held at the ELO 2021 conference. This Exhibition in particular, they explain, focused on reactionary, reflexive, and recovery-based art in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pivot! Thoughts on Virtual Conferencing and ELOrlando 2020
Stanfill and Salter reflect on conferencing amidst their organization of the 2020 ELO Conference in Orlando, Florida that had to change to due a global pandemic. Sharing their experiences and wisdom, they discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various virtual platforms for conferencing, coupled with the contexts of concurrent politics, co-location, and lessons for the future.
Decoding Canadian Digital Poetics Gathering
The title of this special gathering describes a digital poetics of the nation state that is currently known as Canada; however, the Editors and authors of this issue wish to acknowledge that this land is made up of over 630 First Nation communities, representing more than 50 nations and 50 Indigenous languages. This special gathering’s description of a “Canadian digital poetics” is for the purpose of consistency and not the homogeneity of these diverse communities, nations, and languages, which we do not take for granted. The Editors, Dani Spinosa and Lai-Tze Fan, additionally acknowledge that… continue
Gardening E-literature (or, how to effectively plant the seeds for future investigations on electronic literature)
In the course of her wide ranging review of Scott Rettberg's Electronic Literature, Anna Nacher offers a glimpse into "semi-peripheral avant-gardes" that are more open than other fields of digital culture to decolonization and not restricted to the Anglophone world.
Creating New Constraints: Toward a Theory of Writing as Digital Translation
In response to Mencia, Pold, and Portela, Belgian poet and scholar Jan Baetans suggests that we might view the field of trans-medial literature as an offshoot of translation studies (and not the reverse). In any case, whether we approach e-lit from a medial or linguistic standpoint, scholars do well to observe a "merger of translation and adaptation studies."
Of Myth and Madness: A Postmodern Fable
Ralph Clare reviews After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography by Chris Kraus.
Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry’s Ontological Implications
A review of Aesthetic Animism, so vulnerably personal, and at the same time so pragmatically organized, that it might just suggest a possible future for scholarly and creative scholarship: a digital practice that (in Jhave's words) "distends selves towards collectivities that remind it of oblivion." For the moment, that inevitability is avoided by the book's receipt of the 2017 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature.