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
Reading ELIZA: Critical Code Studies in Action
Marino and Berry discuss their engagement in weekly conversations about the nature of "code, of ELIZA, its descendants" and how each of these programs have circulated within our critical code culture, along with other "contemporary conversation agents like Siri and ALEXA and, of course, ChatGPT."
Who Sees with Machines? A Review of Jill Walker Rettberg’s (Perhaps Not So) Posthuman Book on Machine Vision
Lea Laura N. Michelsen reviews Machine Vision: How Algorithms are Changing the Way We See the World by Jill Walker Rettberg. Machine vision is all around us, for good and bad, but who has the power to influence how we use it?
Robert Coover
John Cayley commemorates Robert Coover, a prolific writer and one of the first supporters of digital writing and writing with computation who in the 1990s began teaching courses in hypermedia (with George Landow) at Brown University. This obituary was originally composed for communities associated with Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, within which Coover lived and worked for almost a half century, and where John Cayley is Professor of Literary Arts.
ebr: meeting point for conversations
Managing Editor Anna Nacher recollects the past — and sketches out the future of ebr.
Experiments in Generating Cut-up texts with Commercial AI
Can ChatGPT or other Chatbot interfaces really write anything better than a feeble imitation of postmodern cut-up techniques? Polina and James Mackay think so, and they offer some reasons for holding onto a human, guiding intelligence in the writing process.
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
Off Center Episode 12: Existential Transformative Game Design with Doris Rusch
In Off Center Episode 12, Scott Rettberg talks to game designer, academic, and author Doris Rusch about making games with meaning, existentialist psychotherapy, the resurgence of text-based games online, and embodiment: "Let’s talk about Zombie Yoga."
Remembering Robert Coover
Scott Rettberg and Robert Arellano's collection of interviews "with critics, creative writers, students, and friends of Coover" to commemorate the passing of one of the pioneers in electronic literature.
Off Center Episode 25: AI Cinema with Will Luers
Off center, wayward, slightly off path.... Rettberg and Luers discuss their longrunning encounters with writers, artists, computational film makers and other multidisciplinary "people who come to the electronic literature community, and it’s not only writers, but also artists, visual artists, and you find everyone has a similar kind of wayward path."
Off Center Episode 11: Filmmaking and Combinatory Cinema with Roderick Coover
In conversation, Scott Rettberg engages with Roderick Coover and his multiplicitous career that started off as a forest ranger, a cinema projectionist, "a ski bum" and (further along) a winemaker in Burgundy, a couple of years of participant observation in Africa, the first all-electronic dissertation at the University of Chicago, works of combinatory cinema and other "differing narratives" that emerged in a still (inter)active literary and multi-medial career.