Summer eReading: La valeur heuristique de la littérature numérique

New Scholarly text by Serge BouchardonEven as some of us return to our studies, our Summer eReading continues with this French work of scholarship by Serge Bouchardon: La valeur heuristique de la littérature numérique.

Based in Paris, Bouchardon has been a long time friend of ELO. In addition to his critical work, his creative works have been celebrated at a variety of ELO events including the recent New Media Gallery in Milwaukee.

Presentation

Literary writing with and for the computer has been around for over half a century. This literature is part of well-known genealogical lines: combinatorial writing and writing with constraints, fragmentary writing, audio and visual writing. Whether it is in the form of hyperfictions, animated poems, generative or collaborative works, digital literary creation is now flourishing, especially online.

Because it is at the intersection of literary, communication, epistemological and pedagogical issues, digital literature is a particularly fruitful object.  The heuristic value of digital literature is what allows you to question and reevaluate certain notions (author, text, narrative, materiality, figure, memory…), but  it is also what opens up avenues for the field of digital writing.

Biography

Serge Bouchardon graduated in literature from the Sorbonne University (France).  After working as a project manager in the educational software industry, he wrote his dissertation on interactive literary narrative and is currently Professor in Communication Sciences at the University of Technology of Compiegne (France). His research focuses on digital creation, in particular digital literature.

As an author, he is interested in the unveiling of interactivity. The creation Loss of Grasp (http://lossofgrasp.com/) won the New Media Writing Prize 2011.

Research: http://www.utc.fr/~bouchard/
Creation: http://www.sergebouchardon.com/

 

 

Summer eReading: Analyzing Digital Fiction

Analyzing Digital FictionOur Summer eReading series resumes with a scholalry work that examines many of forms of electronic literature. Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge 2014), edited by Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, and Hans Rustad, features readings from an international group of scholars on an equally international collection of works.

Collected authors, in addition to the editors, include: Serge Bouchardon, David Ciccoricco, Isabell Klaiber, Alexandra Saemmer, Roberto Simanowski, Bronwen Thomas, and Susana Tosca.   Finnish scholar Raine Koskimaa says, “This book provides the reader with powerful tools to analyze and understand the emerging fictions of digital culture.” It will make a good companion to the diverse works of electronic narrative that will also be featured in our summer eReading!

From the Publisher:

Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. It offers analyses of digital works that have so far received little or no analytical attention and profiles replicable methodologies which can be used in the analyses of other digital fictions. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

Summer eReading: This Is

Link to the "This is"Our Summer eReading series continues with a creative work, this time by e-lit author Alan Bigelow, whose works can be found at webyarns.  Bigelow’s piece “This is” includes one of the many divergent adaptations of Jeremy Hight’s ‘missing’ short story “Ethan has nowhere to go.” You can read more about that project in Potomac Review and see more permutations in Unlikely Stories, which includes versions by  Aaron Avila, Scott Davis, Keith Higginbotham, Alexandra Naughton, Jason Nelson, Vera Lucia Pinto, Johansen Quijano, Anastasia Salter, Matthew Sherling, and Brian Vann.
The transformation of Hight’s work from one artist to the next in the electronic literature community demonstrates the collaborative interplay of artists as they re-imagine each other’s works and draw inspiration from each other’s innovations.  Meanwhile, Bigelow says he’s developing another webyarn for later this summer (called “Life of Fly”), which, fortunately for us, means even more Summer eReading!
Medium: Internet-based HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript work for laptop, desktop, or portable devices.

Project Description: Read more Summer eReading: This Is

Summer eReading: Digital Modernism

A continuation of our weekly Summer eReading series, highlighting new works of e-lit and scholarship.

Digital Modernism coverA certain self-referentiality and playful experimentation in works of electronic literature has won it the affection of those with an appetite for the Post-Modern.  But in Jessica Pressman‘s new book, she situates these literary works in a category she calls “Digital Modernism.”  Throughout the monograph, Pressman performs detailed interpretations of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Dakota and William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, and other works of digital literature in the context of print-based, canonical Modernist texts such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos.  In what Rita Raley calls “wonderfully elegant close readings,” Pressman demonstrates how critical reading practices evolve with developments in technologies.

In the midst of these close readings,  Pressman presents her exploration of the media archaeology of older forms of “new media,” epitomized by her analysis of Bob Brown’s Readies, in which she sees anticipation of the fast-flashing words that flicker through so much electronic literature.

Jessica Pressman is currently serving on the Board of Directors of ELO, but has a much longer history of service with the organization, beginning with its time at UCLA.  She will be presenting her recent research at the upcoming ELO 2014 conference in Milwaukee.

Read more Summer eReading: Digital Modernism

Summer eReading: Writing Under

Our Summer eReading series continues with a selection from Alan Sondheim’s collected works “The Internet Text” published by West Virginia University under the title Writing Under. Chris Funkhouser says of the collection: “Writing Under offers up generous statements of process, from a self- and other- aware master who is codework’s godcyborg, a limner of psychedelic landscapes in Second Life, and an inveterate graphophile. This volume radiates foresight, stabilizing, if only for a moment, the fragility of ‘tenuously tethered bits and bytes’ that exist in a vast field.” While Sondheim’s total work of over 25,000 pages of writing would take a lifetime to peruse, this collection offers a summer-sized sampling. The volume was published in the Computing Literature series, edited by ELO Vice President Sandy Baldwin and Board Member Philippe Bootz.

From the publisher:

Writing Under Book CoverAlan Sondheim’s Writing Under explores and examines what happens to writing as it takes place on and through the networked computer. Sondheim began experimenting with artistic and philosophical writing using computers in the early 1970s. Since 1994, he has explored the possibilities of writing on the Internet, whether using blogs, web pages, e–mails, virtual worlds, or other tools. The sum total of Sondheim’s writing online is entitled “The Internet Text.” Writing Under selects from this work to provide insight into how writing takes place today and into the unique practices of a writer. The selections range from philosophical musings, to technical explorations of writing practice, to poetic meditations on the writer online. This work expands our understanding of writing today and charts a path for writing’s future.

The Summer eReading series will continue each week delivering creative and critical texts of and on electronic literature created by ELO members.

Summer eReading: Phantasmal Media

As the semesters wrap up and the summer months begin in the Northern Hemisphere, you might find yourself with a little more time to catch up on your digital lit reading. Today we begin a weekly reading series featuring recent critical and creative works in electronic literature by ELO members.

Phantasmal Media cover
Phantasmal Media by D. Fox Harrell

The first scholarly book is Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression by D. Fox Harrell.  Published in 2013, Harrell’s conceit of the phantasm offers him a framework for exploring the unseen figures (of speech, self, and thought) moving within within computational media.  Among the many featured texts in the book, Fox presents two of his works Living Liberia Fabric and The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs, as he discusses aspects of GRIOT, his narrative generation system.

In addition to serving on ELO’s Board of Directors (currently on temporary leave), Harrell is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT where he directs the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory.

From the publisher: Read more Summer eReading: Phantasmal Media