CultureNet: A Collection of Digital Curiosities: Electronic Literature Conference

Electronic Literature Conference

Andrew Klobucar and I have just come back from the Electronic Literature Organization
conference in Vancouver WA this past weekend where 120 artists and
scholars met to present and talk about electronic literature. Hosted by

Do new modes of literary and cultural production require new methods of analysis and assessment? With this question in mind, the following monthly column aims to present and discuss important changes in the practice of literary criticism and research derived from developments in digital technology in the Humanities. The practices and theories examined will be assessed in the interest of designing new research paradigms for literary studies that are:

• more information-centred, as they work at a higher level of abstraction
• interactive with the scholar, using proactive software with respect to the literary work
• multifunctional and integrated

To read an object digitally or in an information-centred manner means more than recognising its format as binary encrypted pixels. The digital text demonstrates an entirely transformed relationship between texts. Where traditional print archives present networked information as a more or less centralised system composed of independent sources of content, the digital text suggests a more dynamic, inconsistent arrangement, where the meaning of any single “node” of content literally depends upon the connections informing it. Hence, interpreting a text digitally becomes at a fundamental level an exercise in data placement or mapping, where various formatted components of information within texts can be configured and reconfigured according to pre-determined frameworks of meaning – for example, cultural, semantic, grammatical, etc.