Hannah Ackermans introduces The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative via a discussion of digital communities and unintentional acts of exclusion, highlighting the importance of a shared vocabulary for accessibility in scholarship.
This article is a lightly edited version of my keynote address at the Born Digital event on 5 February 2024, which kicked off a collaboration between Stuttgart University (Germany) and the University of Bergen (Norway). The collaboration includes an exchange program for MA students and the production of The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative, which launched in March 2025. All hyperlinked terms lead to their corresponding glossary entry.
Vignette 1
Three decades ago, on 15 January 1994, the Freenet initiative De Digitale Stad (DDS) was launched in the Netherlands. This “Digital City” provided citizens of Amsterdam with a free Internet-connection, but more importantly, with an online community. The project was a collaboration by the city’s cultural center De Balie and hackers collective Hack-tic. The enthusiastic and idealistic bunch tried to get more people to participate online, as Web 1.0 was gently starting to develop characteristics we would later classify as Web 2.0. The initial 10-week experiment was a success; DDS became so popular that modems were sold out in Amsterdam mere days after the project was launched. The technological motivation tells only a partial story; De Balie and Hack-tic also aimed to stimulate political discussion, an urgent issue considering the low voter turnout of recent local elections (Rommes et al 188). A separation between our physical and digital lives, then, is an oversimplification, even in the early days of the Web.
The city was maintained by the community and based on public values. 10 weeks turned into 7 years, and although De Digitale Stad eventually was taken offline in 2001, it sparked a host of similar initiatives across Europe and Northern America. It was also reconstructed later by the workers at Amsterdam Museum, de Waag, and the Universiteit van Amsterdam, who considered its preservation a crucial part of Internet history that we should not lose to the modern Internet.
Vignette 2
Naturally, communities on the Internet still exist. I am a part of some. Until last year, one of them was primarily hosted in a Facebook group. We shared stories, asked questions, or collectively discussed conundrums, from hyper-specific book recommendations to our worries about the climate crisis. Facebook seemed like the natural place to do this as many members of the community had an account and the post-with-replies structure worked well for the breadth of topics discussed. Although we had fiery discussions, I’d always experienced the group as supportive and inclusive. It came as a surprise, then, when someone posted an accusation that our group was white supremacist. She had seen us discuss Russia’s attack on Ukraine with emotion and support for Ukranians, whereas the more recent posts about Israel’s attack on Palestine received hardly any comments. The screenshots of posts she found using the search function of the Facebook group were all new to me, I had not seen the posts in support of Palestine in the feed. Neither had other members. Even the moderators were hardly shown these posts. Although articles had appeared before about Meta’s suppression of posts referencing Palestine (i.e. Isaac n.p., Brown and Younes n.p.), it was still an alarming realization how much this algorithmic suppression had impacted the conversations we were having in our group. It was not the first objection we had had to using Facebook as our platform, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Our moderators opened a Discord server to provide a non-Meta third place for our community. I signed up for Discord and deactivated my Facebook account.
The Internet today is marked by platformization, run by the small group of big tech companies, as UNESCO mentions. The expanse of platforms governing the social Internet seemingly makes it easier to participate online as one can easily create an account and follow the limited set of actions set by the platform. But it also complicates things. Jose van Dijck explains: “In recent years, tech companies have turned products into data services where customers pay mostly with their personal information and attention [, which] has upended the once popular ideal of a universal and neutral Internet that connects the world” (2802). Platforms are designed and governed to maximize the time spent there by users due to the monetary value of personal information. Raquel Recuero, for example, sees the structure of platforms, driven by their economic logic as the fundamental context in which polarization and toxicity emerge as it “allows discursive violence to be quickly spread and legitimated” (3). Behnke identifies structural hostility as another seeming inevitability in her video, “that there’s always going to be hate and harassment on these platforms”. Recuero argues that the context-collapse of content within the ways that platforms are organized, signifies “the absence of clear boundaries between various interaction contexts, making it challenging for people to interpret and understand them” (4). It is no surprise, then, that our main course of action in the face of post suppression was to move to another platform.
These big forces—‘inevitabilities’?—in our digital society complicate how to deal with the plethora of global challenges we are facing today. We are seeing more and more people sounding the alarm about our inability to deal with social justice and climate justice in a platformized world that fragments our attention and functions by the virtue of context-collapse. The way we experience these challenges emotionally is filtered through the algorithmically determined media consumption which favors polarization and doomscrolling for ‘engagement’. Our digital world, which resembles a corporate producer-consumer relationship more than collectivity within cities, are implicated in these challenges themselves rather than an (ineffective) tool to address them. This corporate worlding simply feels like too much to take on. So for our third vignette, let’s turn to a tiny section of digital culture instead: electronic literature.
Vignette 3
Newcomers to electronic literature might expect a clear definition of the artform. This is not as simple as they might expect. The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) used to define electronic literature on their website as “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer” (n.p.). Remarkably, the ELO has removed even this broad definition from their website as it was considered too limiting. Fortunately, there are others available. Scott Rettberg proposes a definition in his book Electronic Literature. As creative work, he defines it as “new forms and genres of writing that explore the specific capabilities of the computer and network – literature that would not be possible without the contemporary digital context” (PAGE). Rettberg includes in his electronic literature definition, genres such as codework, email narratives, and Twitterature. This definition is more focused on the self-reflexivity of electronic literature, suggesting an avantgarde perspective. The second half also suggests that you have to ask yourself how much it matters in which form you read the narrative.
Much like the modernist and postmodern literature that preceded it, electronic literature has been characterized by creative experimentation and the subversive use of media. Electronic literature’s multimodality interrogates the medial experience in digital culture through critical play. Although there are a variety of approaches to electronic literature, there is a continued argument against platformization, a position perhaps most explicitly held by Eugenio Tisselli and Rui Torres in their essay “In Defense of the Difficult”. They ask if “the ways in which we engage with literature are doomed to become progressively detached and inconsequential, always in search of the quick ‘like,’ incapable of critique below the shiny, polished, touch-sensitive surface of things?” (n.p.). So the poetics of complexity present in many works of electronic literature functions as a critique of our everyday interactions with digital media, making electronic literature a metonymy of larger digital culture.
As a tradition of practice, electronic literature relies on community. It was built through various collaborations and institutions and grants to enable creativity, preservation and scholarship. The prominent position of born-digital creation and distribution of the works tends to position electronic literature outside traditional publishing structures. Its institutionalization, then, has largely come from people inside the creative field itself, a considerable number of whom are also scholars. Electronic literature, of course, does not exist in a vacuum. It also needs to find ways to deal with challenges inside and outside the field itself.
Digital Narrative
So how do we move between early Internet experiments to the vastness of the digital world to the niche of electronic literature? Digital Narrative! In the project description, The Center for Digital Narrative in Bergen (Norway) describes digital narratives as: “new forms of storytelling driven by computation. Contemporary life is increasingly driven by digital narratives–whether anti-vax conspiracy theories proliferating on Facebook, storyworlds emerging from a computer game industry that now dwarfs other sectors of the entertainment industry, or machine learning systems that generate fiction.” Digital Narrative encapsulates a host of different medial modes, such as electronic literature, computer games, computational narrative systems, and social media and network narratives. It provides a necessary lens to use distinct knowledges from different areas to understand our current and future digital world. From the very first born-digital works to the content created by digital natives today, digital narrative contributes to an understanding of digital culture not as a monolith but in complex human interaction and expression of digital narrative that diverge greatly in content and form, as do the tools and theories with which to understand digital narrative. This pursuit of knowledge is not trivial. We need to understand digital narrative in its different forms to understand our reality.
The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative
This brings me to the introduction of The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative. The glossary is a collection of terminological explanations in relation to digital narrative. And rather than a book written by a person or small team, the glossary is an online resource with entries from many authors residing in various institutions. As a living document, it will develop over time and with contributions from many different people, including you. In its basic form, a glossary entry will entail a short definition, a longer explication of 300-750 words, some notable examples, cross-references to other glossary entries and, of course, a bibliography.
I would like to look at the value of building a glossary and map the four values we want to build into it. Because the glossary project is essential work—both the act of creating and the resulting product build towards a better digital culture.
1. Sharing is Caring
At the risk of stating the obvious: the glossary builds a shared vocabulary across people from different backgrounds and disciplines of digital narrative. The assertion to use a certain vocabulary can have far-reaching impact. Electronic literature is a prime example. Lori Emerson, for example, wrote in 2011: “what did not exist until the founding of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999 (thanks to Scott Rettberg, Robert Coover, and Jeff Ballowe) is a name, a concept, even a brand with which a remarkably diverse range of digital writing practices could identify: electronic literature” (n.p.). Adding the term to our shared vocabulary had a social function: “Moreover, it’s not simply that writers had something by which to bind them together and identify with but it’s also that increasingly e-literature became known as something of a coherent field with a wide, yet still bounded spectrum of means by which critics, teachers, students, scholars could talk about their work” (n.p.). It is however, Emerson’s casual conclusion that I find most interesting: “In other words, e-literature became something much more than just hypertext, as valuable as that particular mode of writing may be” (n.p.). The term electronic literature is not meant to even out differences between different terms, hypertext in this case is still a salient part of our terminology, and we need to have a variety of terms to be specific about our subjects. Having a shared but extensive vocabulary then, can contribute to a shared conceptual framework. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting we need to simply see things the same way. A shared conceptual framework is necessary, precisely so that we can disagree productively rather than speak past each other in vital conversations about the present and future of the Internet—and by Internet, I mean our world. The glossary has a role that simply googling cannot, or can no longer, fulfill. We can fight the fragmentation and isolation that are results of platformization and polarization by bringing in various perspectives without creating a singular normative narrative.
Bringing coherence into our diverging online spaces has been an issue for years. Safiya Noble has researched the harmful effects of algorithmic collections such as Google results for years. In an interview, she said: “I think young people are increasingly asking search engines complex questions that might be better suited or pointed toward, say, a reference librarian or a trusted, learned adult who might know, or maybe organizations that have been working in an area for a long time who have bodies of evidence and research that could help inform a point of view” (n.p.). A reference librarian or trusted, learned adult can indeed provide information in context in a way that Google may not. In addition to receiving knowledge in context, it is also necessary to learn how to contextualize information, by becoming part of the knowledge-building process.
2. Negotiations in Knowledge-Building
So creating a shared framework is not to say that we cannot embrace difference and specificity. In fact, we need to take into account not just technical but also social and discursive differences between terms. Again, we can draw from the history of electronic literature: fanfiction expert Flourish Klink said at ELO 2015 that ELO was broad enough to include all sorts of digital genres, “but to do this is to ignore the differences in the communities that supported these texts’ creation. Similarly, it is tempting to declare the ‘end of e-lit,’ since so much e-lit can also be framed as fan fiction, video art, games, etc. but to do this is to ignore the impact of the e-lit community and its structure”. Building a Living Glossary of Digital Narrative, which encompasses a lot of digital genres, gives us the opportunity and obligation to talk to each other about different specificities of use, beyond just a single definition. While the short definition gives an entry point, the longer explication of the entry presents diverging and conflicting uses of a term. The process of writing these entries is just as important as the resulting project. When you write a glossary entry, you will gain a deep knowledge of the term that is beyond what you’ve previously learned about or how you would use it in an individual article.
Embracing these negotiations instead of authority in a thoughtful way is an ongoing process and not without its pitfalls. Coming back to De Digitale Stad, for example, the city was meant to have a diversity of voices but ended up being more exclusory than the builders intended, perhaps the clearest evidence of which is that only 9 percent of netizens were female (Rommes et al 183). It was later argued that not enough attention was given to what users actually wanted and what their background was. Despite its goal to bring the digital world to everyone, it became so complex that an unintended selection was made based on people’s previous experience with computers: “Natuurlijk is er een belangrijk verschil tussen het opzetten van DDS voor ‘iedereen’ en alleen voor ‘iedereen die eerder met een computer heeft gewerkt’.” [Of course there is an important difference between setting up DDS for ‘everyone’ and just for ‘everyone who has worked with a computer before’.”] (Rommes et al 198). A high bar to set in 1994. The people for whom The Digital City was meant were not part of the network of organizations that built it. For the glossary, this is partly taken into account by its contributory nature, because we want to make sure people from different levels of education, including students or people in industry, can contribute and be guided on how to write glossary entries on terminology they work with. But of course we hope that the readership of the glossary exceeds its authorship, which requires us to value accessibility.
3. Access for All
I usually refer to accessibility from a disability-inclusive standpoint as this is my field of study within electronic literature. And, of course, the Glossary website needs to be accessible and include best practices. Just as cities need ramps, tactile pavements, and auditory cues, our digital world needs accessibility features to be accessed by people across (dis)abilities. This includes textual alternatives to visual and auditory content as well as a clear interface and infrastructure that can be navigated through a variety of assistive technologies. Accessibility also enables its own instances of digital narrative, such as creative captioning and poetic alt text. Creating access for all,1Using the phrase ‘access for all’ is a nod to the creators of DDS, as an offshoot of Hack-Tic also developed by the Internet provider XS4ALL (pronounced ‘access for all’). however, goes beyond meeting web accessibility requirements.
Let’s start with the open access aspect. The glossary will be freely available to everyone with a device and an Internet connection. And although FAIR principles are usually reserved to talk about big data, it is necessary to include findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability into the website in the future. This could bring, for example, an API for other websites to use the glossary entries to make their own websites more accessible through explanations of terminology.
This brings me to the second interpretation of access as approachability, which involves thinking of the glossary as scholarly communication, not just communication with those already in the know. This is an increasingly common critique of the humanities. Katina Rogers notes that “it is perhaps a failure of the imagination that renders the overwhelming majority of humanities research in formats that the public will never see” (59). Media specificity, then, has far-reaching consequences on the role of research output in society. In her discussion of creative work as academic publications and born-digital formats, Rogers argues that “rigorous, deeply creative work of this nature makes research and scholarship more accessible to broader audiences than ever before—a fact that often brings great joy to the scholar as well” (65). Independent research needs to be encouraged within a democracy, but we also have a responsibility to do useful research and, critically, reach people with it.
How we create publications such as the glossary affects how the audience will approach the work. I’m sure we all have the reading experience of deciphering lingo in scholarly texts that only send a very clear message that we are not meant to be there. Although specialized language may be necessary to discuss certain things, we all live in this city and we deserve to understand it. Explaining the diversity of a term’s use in an understandable manner—rather than dispersed in a variety of jargon-filled articles and books that plenty of people will not have access to— is a way to include people who are new to our respective and intersecting fields. In this sense we can see the glossary project as a combination of containment and openness. Containment because we will set a rigorous standard for quality and structure. And openness because of the welcoming nature of the project as well as its living aspect, continuously adding new entries by new voices. This is not a one-time publication, but an ongoing process of adding terms, to be used separately or in relation to others. Both of these acknowledge reality, a key part of scholarly practice. We need to acknowledge complexity, but also the necessity for structure and entry points. To come back to the city metaphor: the glossary is the overall view of the ever-expanding city, but living inside the city will give you a necessarily partial view of aspects that are relevant to your own life and work.
4. Crafting the Future
And this brings me to the final value of craft and creativity. I am preaching to the choir when I say that writing genres and technologies are not neutral containers, there is even a whole creative practice of writing under constraint that presumes that putting formal constraints on your writing will manifest more creativity. This is no different for scholarly practice, in which styles and platforms have a shaping effect in the research process. Kumiyo Nakakoji et al, for example, assert: “since scholarly work is one of the most cognitively intensive intellectual tasks, tools for scholarly work need to be very carefully designed; a scholar concomitantly needs to be very careful in choosing which tool to use for their scholarly work” (64, original emphasis). So knowledge production like the glossary needs to be centered in craftmanship that draws attention to the types of work involved in creating and using it. The concepts we explicate are grounded in the structure of the glossary’s website and workflow, and this structure influences how we consider the concepts.
Beyond individual entries, we can think of the totality of the project as speculative interface as Jill Walker Rettberg calls it. She argues for speculation as an essential element of both fiction and humanities research and that experience with electronic literature can light the way for how we approach digital humanities practices. She explains this dichotomy by saying: “speculative interfaces do not only interpret the worlds and the data and the ideas and stories they shape; they are also a form of world-building, whether those worlds are fictional, as in electronic literature, or document aspects of our shared reality, as in the digital humanities” (n.p.). In addition, I propose that speculation is not only what a creator can do with an interface, but world-building in the sense that the interface includes the intended readers and authors of the project as well as our scope and subject. As such the speculative interface is a manifestation of how different readers are implied by the interface and content. The interface inscribes which readers or users exist according to the work. Together we can ask what our shared foundation is across fields that encompass “digital narrative” and just as importantly: what do we want to build on this foundation. Understanding our interconnectedness will be key and I cannot wait to work with you in the future.
Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, the glossary is essential work, both as a noun and a verb.
As a noun, ‘work’ is a product, a collection of texts and interface— an essential entry point to various elements of understanding digital narrative. And entering a field is something you can do at any level of education. You can be new to a term as a student or someone outside academia, but also as a full professor who is expanding their scope or realizing that the term they used one way actually has a diversity of interpretations. We are all continuously learning new things.
And then there is the verb—work as labor, practice, the act of writing. Here, the glossary is a structure, like a tool or method, that trains you to consider coherence within diversity in terminology through writing entries. Doing the work, we develop the skills of writing as well as understanding context and complexity, a skill we can apply far beyond the specific terms we have explicated. Without this skillful practice, we cannot build our city, whether digital or physical.
Together, these interpretations of ‘work’ embody values of a developing shared conceptual framework, being an active participant in negotiating our knowledge-building, welcoming access, and improving our craft. The glossary shapes these often-nebulous values into digital material. Taylor Behnke concludes that: “the way we get under or around inevitability, that’s civic imagination. It’s a skill, it takes practice, it takes asking the question, over and over: What would it take to make the future desirable?” We can ask this one entry at a time. The Internet is a place we live, that we can understand and shape together.
References
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