Bouchardon and Petit defend the concept of digital writing and the teaching thereof. We can accept that digital writing exists, with its specific properties and tensions, but can it be taught? Specifically, the pedagogical dimension of what is known as "digital" writing, the authors argue, would do well to follow a study on the relationship between writing and computer science that was sponsored by the Picardy region : PRECIP, PRatiques d'ÉCriture Interactive en Picardie (interactive writing practices in Picardy).

Exploring the interaction of poetics and language with the discourse of the Anthropocene (through etymologies of various ecological ages, or notions of the “survival of the fittest” and embodiment), Retallack combines poetry and prose to occasionally suspend the essay genre into a reflective and creative endeavour, attempting to encompass the larger cultural efforts of “poets, scientists, philosophers, visual and performance artists, composers of every kind [who are] working on an interconnected project” of ecopoetics.

This reprinted essay, first published in Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne's edited collection Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (Iowa UP, 2018), addresses the major themes of – and suggests the possibility of a vital conversation between – two forthcoming ebr gatherings: 'Essayism', edited by Jason Childs and Joseph Tabbi, and 'Natural Media', edited by Lisa Swanstrom and Eric Dean Rasmussen. Image: Ship of Fools in Flames, c. 1450; possibly Jheronimus Bosch.

Clarke opens with a biographical account of his own early encounters with the Gaia concept - and a skepticism he shared with the evolutionary thinker Lynn Margulis, Gaia's second author after the British scientist James Lovelock. Neither an organism nor a single cell, and not really an organic or vitalistic entity, Gaia is better understood, according to Margulis, as "an emergent property of interaction among organisms, the spherical planet on which they reside, and an energy source, the sun." The move away from metaphors and New Age vitalisms tethers Gaia theory more tightly to the sciences. Margulis’s work brings Gaia in line with the autopoietic systems theory of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela introduced in the 1970s.

This essay is drawn from a preliminary version of several sections from Clarke’s forthcoming book presently entitled Partial Earth: Lynn Margulis, Systems Theory, and the Evolution of Gaia (Fall 2020) and appears here by permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

A book-review meditation-musing by David (Jhave) Johnston on a multimodal science fiction by Johanna Drucker. The story is told from the point of view of a distributed organism, Archaea that was discovered in the 1970s. "Structurally similar to bacteria but chemically-distinct," this entity suggests what a born-digital literature for the posthuman era might look like: "an epoch when human-level consciousness drifts down into animals, insects, fish" and many other others.

This is an informal essay, not a paper. There are simply too many questions and few answers. The text was assembled from notes from my keynote conference at ELO 2018 in Montreal ("Mind the Gap!"), where I have experimented with a tentative form of performing theory, possibly pushing the limits of Walter Benjamin's desire to write a book made of quotations only. Also, as with all things, this is an incomplete account of the use of humor and constraint in electronic literature. Many examples just simply could not be included here, and it is not my intention to perform close-readings of any of these works either. My goal is simply to create a narrative that signals how humor is related to constraint in art and technology. Perhaps we can prepare an Anthology of Humorous Electronic Literature together? Also, some disambiguation is in order: this is not about computational humor, or the use of computers in humor research, or about jokes concerning computers. And this is also not about OuLiPo or other literary works specifically written under constraint.[footnote]For a discussion about these type of works, read ebr's thread "Writing Under Constraint," edited by Joseph Tabbi at the turn of the millennium. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/writing-under-constraint/[/footnote]

Are digital practices ever going to transform what it means to create, circulate, read and preserve literary works? Bouchardon sets out ten ways that might happen.

What is the role of hand-crafted literary interfaces in a world of memes and bots? Kathi Inman Berens examines five recent books that address literary interfaces and applies pressure to the definition of "third generation electronic literature," exploring the role of code and intention in e-lit authorship.

Like e-books and so much else in digital commerce, the poetry printed out by Instagram give us back the book - stripping away the social features such as reader comments, nested conversations and responses that make a work "viral," or "spreadable." The content of Instagram poetry, to nobody's surprise, is almost always simplistic, inspirational, and emotional. What it spreads. like any other social media, is indistinguishable from from the surveillance infrastructure of digital metadata that allows algorithms to "read" the reader (who is left in the dark). Kathi Inman Berens in this essay puts forward some ways to change that.

A roundtable discussion hosted by Karl Knausgaard's Alma Mater in Bergen, Norway.

For Martin Eve, Anthony Uhlmann appears to be writing for a very small audience: "those who are interested in contemporary mutations in metafiction, autofiction, and post-postmodern sensibilities."

Does literature have a place in a world of ubiquitous computing, massive user bases, and even larger audiences? It might, Flores suggests, but first we must redefine (and differently historicize) literary arts in ways that are not constricted by the print paradigm.

Here we transcribe an extended conversation between hypertext author Bill Bly and Ph.D. candidate Brian Davis that began in January 2018 at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), home to The Bill Bly Collection of Electronic Literature. They discuss Bly's long-term electronic hypertext project, We Descend, Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor (1997-present), as well as the history of electronic hypertext and hypertext theory, the technological challenges of born digital writing and archiving, book-archives and archival poetics, and the value of innovative writing and deep reading amidst the current century's "hodgepodge," "higgledy-piggledy" social media.

Through performances and readings configured across multiple screens, Phillippe Bootz conveys practices of constrained writing (and interrupted reading) into multiply mediated poetic dimensions.

A consideration of Monstrous Weather, a recent netprov (or networked improvisation) and the ways that collaborative storytelling encourages the rereading, retelling, rewriting, and adaptation of stories that begin as performances, and then turn into a form of archiving through still further rereading, rewriting and retelling. Author Alex Mitchell begins by depicting how, during the original performance of Monstrous Weather, there was a constant reworking, remixing and retelling of texts, both literally and through references and embellishments. This process gradually coalesced the loose collection of story fragments into something that had a kind of coherence, if not as a story, then at least as a storyworld. Mitchell discuss two particular performances/remixes: a live reading of excerpts from the netprov performed at the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Conference 2017 almost exactly 1 year after the initial performance, and a subsequent hypertext remix/archive.

Rettberg's and Jackson's interview, and their creative work's direct engagement with environments anticipate the themes in a forthcoming ebr gathering by Eric Rasmussen and Lisa Swanstrom, titled Natural Media. More than just an articulation of environmental 'issues,' the creative work of Jackson and Rettberg actively integrates snowfall in Brooklyn, tattooed skin on bodies, pollutants in Jersey City and New Orleans (post-2012), and other particles and particulars that are touched by natural and medial ecologies.

This conversation is published as the fourth in a series of texts centered around the publication of The Metainterface by Søren Pold and Christian Ulrik Andersen. Other essays in the series include: The Metainterface of the Clouds, Always Inside, Always Enfolded into The Metainterface: A Roundtable Discussion. and  Voices from Troubled Shores: Toxi•City: a Climate Change Narrative.

Babak Elahi shows how electronic literature in its public display, its interactivity, and its paradoxical combination of ephemerality and permanence brings us closer to the ancients than to the moderns - and closer still to the collective ritual experiences that Arabic and Muslim literature always valued over Western individualism. Further still, the emergence of Arabic e-lit does not just mean inclusions of still more cultural or ethnic identities. The politics of identity is yet another Western concern that an online Arabic poetics is happy to leave behind.

At the moment when post-fictional fictions, essayistic fictions, and design fictions emerge as a cultural dominant, Rettberg, Swanstrom, Nesheim, Anderson and Pold discuss an emerging "aesthetics of infrastructure." Quietly condoned, mostly unnoticed installations of "Camouflaged Cell Concealment Sites" are now being visited by artists such as Betty Beaumont and Trevor Paglen. When our cloudy digital industries are so busily constructing cell phone towers that look like pine trees or Saguaro cactuses (sort of), the role of literary and visual artists may be simply to document these found fictions - for as long as they don't get arrested.

This conversation is published as the second in a series of texts centered around the publication of The Metainterface by Søren Pold and Christian Ulrik Andersen. Other essays in the series include: The Metainterface of the Clouds,  Voices from Troubled Shores: Toxi•City: a Climate Change Narrative and Room for So Much World: A Conversation with Shelley Jackson.

In this essay, Doris Hambuch uses the image-based work of Arabic cartoonist Khaled Al Jabri to address concerns of technological dependence to reconsider our use of screens. Rather than simply reprimanding readers about the potentially negative dependence of our contemporary society on technology and its screens, Hambuch instead proposes that we look to Al Jabri's work as a way of reconsidering the role of the screen in visual poetics and graphic literature.

In her essay, Egyptian elit scholar Reham Hosny observes and quantifies the ways that Arabic electronic literature has been historically underrepresented in the predominant critical venues like the ELO's Electronic Literature Collections and other central repositories for the dissemination and study of e-lit. Rather than simply observing this vacancy, however, Hosny proposes real, practical methods for addressing and bridging this discrepancy, bringing new works to light and encouraging translation, open access, and consideration of the language-based and nationalist biases in the scholarship surrounding elit.

In this essay, John Barber argues that sound suggests a new and valuable way of approaching and considering Arabic electronic literature. Based on the oral histories of Arab cultures, the use of sound in Arabic electronic literature provides a way of knowing and being in a literary world, real or imagined. Sound makes readers re-think their relational experiences with others, with themselves, and the spaces and places they inhabit. These shifting relationships promote interesting opportunities for Arabic electronic literature.