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Literature and Computation presents some of the most relevantly innovative recent approaches to literary practice, theory, and criticism as driven by computation and situated in digital environments. These approaches rely on automated analyses, but use them creatively, engage in text modeling but inform it with qualitative[-interpretive] critical possibilities, and contribute to present-day platform culture in revolutionizing intermedial ways. While such new directions involve more and more sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence, they also mark a spectacular return of the (trans)human(istic) and of traditional-modern literary or urgent political, gender, and minority-related concerns and modes now addressed in ever subtler and more nuanced ways within human-computer interaction frameworks. Expanding the boundaries of literary and data studies, digital humanities, and electronic literature, the featured contributions unveil an emerging landscape of trailblazing practice and theoretical crossovers ready and able to spawn and/or chart the witness literature of our age and cultures.Introduction and Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Global Perspectives on Digital Literature: A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century explores how digital literary forms shape and are shaped by aesthetic and political exchanges happening across languages and nations. The book understands'global'as a mode of comparative thinking and argues for considering various forms of digital literature—the popular, the avant-garde, and the participatory—as realizing and producing global thought in the twenty-first century. Attending to issues of both political and aesthetic representation, the book includes a diverse group of contributors and a wide-ranging corpus of texts, composed in a variety of languages and regions, including East and South Asia, parts of Europe, Latin America, North America, Australia, and Western Africa. The book's contributors adopt an array of interpretive approaches to make visible new connections and possibilities engendered by cross-cultural encounters. Among other topics, they reflect on the shifting conditions for production and distribution of literature, participatory cultures and technological affordances of Web 2.0, the ever-changing dynamics of global and local forces, and fundamental questions, such as,'What do we mean when we talk about literature today?'and'What is the future of literature?'

Digitale Medien verändern, wie literarische Texte geschrieben werden und wie erzählt wird. Zugleich verändern sie die Auffassung von Gegenwart. Vor diesem Hintergrund fragt der Band nach dem Status von Gegenwartsliteratur nach der Digitalisierung: Welche Rolle spielen neue Zeitkonzepte für das Schreiben? Welche Formen der Zeitreflexion prägen Romane der letzten 15 Jahre? Welche neuen Schreibweisen werden in digitalen Medien entwickelt?

This book will be of interest to all those who have engaged with hypertext either as creators or as users. They will discover that screen writing has a history going back to a number of avant-garde practices which already incorporated a screen imaginary into the creative work. Readers of this volume will be offered a privileged insight into a debate between detractors and advocates of the new modes of writing and reading and the new means of cultural transmission (CD-ROM, the Internet, digitisation); they will thus be able to weigh up for themselves the assets and illusions, the heuristic merits and politico-commercial issues at stake. May these reflections convert the globe-trotters of hyperspace into knowledgeable navigators!Cet ouvrage intéressera quiconque est confronté à l'hypertexte, que ce soit en tant que concepteur ou en tant qu'usager. Il découvrira ici que l'écrit d'écran a une histoire qui remonte à certaines pratiques avant-gardistes qui avaient déjà intégré un imaginaire de l'écran dans leurs créations. Il entrera de plain-pied dans un débat entre détracteurs et partisans des nouvelles modalités d'écriture/lecture et des nouveaux supports de transmission culturelle (cd-rom, Internet, digitalisation), afin qu'il puisse lui-même faire la part entre les atouts et les leurres, entre les mérites heuristiques et les enjeux politico-mercantiles. Que ces réflexions puissent convertir les globe-trotters de l'hypersphère en navigateurs avertis!

This volume reflects on the complexity of relations between traditional and new media. Articles collected here focus on the increasing dynamism and fluidity of dependencies between literature, visual arts, digital media, or internet artistic projects. They analyse the abrupt evolutions of the media through which art is made available to the public, as well as describe the changing status of audiences and viewers within the new communicative paradigms. Verging on the non-human, computer-generated, or virtual reality, texts and projects analysed here provide case studies for a better understanding of the contemporary cultural reality whose most significant feature is the fact that it is an inherent part of our everyday experience.

From Instapoetry to BookTube, contemporary literary cultures and practices are increasingly intertwined with social media. In this lively and wide-ranging study, Bronwen Thomas explores how social media provides new ways of connecting with and rediscovering established literary works and authors while also facilitating the emergence of unique and distinctive forms of creative expression. The book takes a 360˚ approach to the subject, combining analysis of current forms and practices with an examination of how social media fosters ongoing collaborative discourse amongst both informal and formal literary networks, and demonstrating how the participatory practices of social media have the potential to radically transform how literature is produced, shared and circulated. The first study of its kind to focus specifically on social media, Literature and Social Media provides a timely and engaging account of the state of the art, while interrogating the rhetoric that so often accompanies discussion of the ‘new'in this context.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.Over the past half century, computing has profoundly altered the ways stories are imagined and told. Immersive, narrative, and database technologies transform creative practices and hybrid spaces revealing and concealing the most fundamental acts of human invention: making stories.The Digital Imaginary illuminates these changes by bringing leading North American and European writers, artists and scholars, like Sharon Daniel, Stuart Moulthrop, Nick Montfort, Kate Pullinger and Geof Bowker, to engage in discussion about how new forms and structures change the creative process. Through interviews, commentaries and meta-commentaries, this book brings fresh insight into the creative process from differing, disciplinary perspectives, provoking questions for makers and readers about meaning, interpretation and utterance. The Digital Imaginary will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including storymakers, educators, curators, critics, readers and artists, alike.

A motto guiding Gregory L. Ulmer's career is from the poet Basho: not to follow in the footsteps of the masters, but to seek what they sought. The responsibility of humanities disciplines today is to do for the digital apparatus (social machine) what the classical Greeks did for alphabetic writing. Ulmer frames online learning as a mode of invention (heuretics), beginning with the invention of konsult itself. Konsult: Theopraxesis describes the invention of a genre of learning that is to digital media what Plato's dialogue was to alphabetic writing. The Greeks invented the practices of writing (rhetoric and logic) native to the new institution of school (the Academy), fostering a new behavior of selfhood (Socrates). Ulmer adopts this historical precedent as a relay, an inventory for what must be invented again today: a genre of learning, an educational institution, identity behavior. The insight of electracy is that each apparatus augments and institutionalizes one of the primary faculties of human intelligence: theoria in literacy; praxis in orality; poiesis in electracy. Needed today are not practices of writing, but'theopraxesis'of media. The analytical information economy of literacy required separation and isolation (siloing) of institutionalized intelligence. The multimodality of electracy enables syncretism of faculties into holistic performance: thinking-doing-making; knowledge-purpose-affect. The interface metaphor of Plato's dialogue was an oral conversation during which the illiterate interlocutor is introduced to dialectical reason as Idea. The interface metaphor of konsult is scientific consulting during which anelectrate students encounter plasmatic desire as simulacrum. This new learning is organized around an updating of Justice native to electracy.

We live in an age where language and screens continue to collide for creative purposes, giving rise to new forms of digital literatures and literary video games. Towards a Digital Poetics explores this relationship between word and computer, querying what it is that makes contemporary fictions like Dear Esther and All the Delicate Duplicates—both ludic and literary—different from their print-based predecessors.

Electronic Literature considers new forms and genres of writing that exploit the capabilities of computers and networks – literature that would not be possible without the contemporary digital context. In this book, Rettberg places the most significant genres of electronic literature in historical, technological, and cultural contexts. These include combinatory poetics, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction (and other game-based digital literary work), kinetic and interactive poetry, and networked writing based on our collective experience of the Internet. He argues that electronic literature demands to be read both through the lens of experimental literary practices dating back to the early twentieth century and through the specificities of the technology and software used to produce the work. Considering electronic literature as a subject in totality, this book provides a vital introduction to a dynamic field that both reacts to avant-garde literary and art traditions and generates new forms of narrative and poetic work particular to the twenty-first century. It is essential reading for students and researchers in disciplines including literary studies, media and communications, art, and creative writing.

Digital Milton is the first volume to investigate John Milton in terms of our digital present. It explores the digital environments Milton now inhabits as well as the diverse digital methods that inform how we read, teach, edit, and analyze his works. Some chapters use innovative techniques, such as processing metadata from vast archives of early modern prose, coding Milton's geographical references on maps, and visualizing debt networks from literature and from life. Other chapters discuss the technologies and platforms shaping how literature reaches us today, from audiobooks to eReaders, from the OED Online to Wikipedia, and from Twitter to YouTube. Digital Milton is the first say on a topic that will become ever more important to scholars, students, and teachers of early modern literature in the years to come.

Briefe waren in der Zeit vor der Erfindung des Telefons zentral für die Kommunikation und sind bis heute eine faszinierende Quelle für die Forschung. Im Jahr 1870 wurden 334 Millionen Briefe in Deutschland versendet, 1895 waren es bereits über zwei Milliarden, also gut eine halbe Million pro Tag – und anders als heute, wo die meisten Briefe Werbung enthalten oder von Behörden kommen, war der Anteil der Privatbriefe sehr hoch. Bei denjenigen, die regelmäßig Briefe schrieben, waren fünf bis zehn pro Tag keine Seltenheit. Viele schrieben deutlich mehr – etwa so wie wir heute E-Mails. Nur ein Bruchteil dieser Briefe ist überliefert; die meisten gingen verloren oder wurden von den Empfängern oder deren Nachkommen bewusst vernichtet. Das Buch behandelt Spezifika und Rahmenbedingungen der Briefkommunikation seit der Aufklärung, greift Impulse aus der Historischen Netzwerkforschung auf und reflektiert die Bedeutung von Briefen für die Erforschung des 19. Jahrhunderts.

Ante la pregunta de si escribir libros se ha convertido en un anacronismo en la era de la comunicación digital y la cibercultura, la respuesta es, ciertamente, un no; sin embargo, aunque por una parte pueda observarse que el libro como objeto y concepto se mantiene vivo en la era digital, por otra, debe analizarse y estudiarse lo que esta presencia implica en términos de los nuevos modelos de escritura, lectura y pensamiento. Para Roger Chartier, la revolución del texto electrónico no ha relegado al libro de modo que pueda ser catalogado como una antigüedad; por el contrario, ha sido una excelente manera de reinventar el análisis de la cultura impresa haciendo énfasis en las diferentes herramientas con que cuenta la industria editorial. En el ámbito literario, el uso de estas tecnologías ha permitido el surgimiento de formas híbridas de creación, que permiten la integración de elementos extra-textuales y proponen un soporte diferente a la cultura escrita, así como un soporte nuevo para el libro: es a causa de una conjunción de este tipo que surge la llamada literatura electrónica, aquella que es creada en un entorno digital y sólo puede ser consumida en un soporte electrónico. En esta investigación se analizan aspectos relacionados con los cambios que padece el producto literario así como el repertorio del mismo, la figura del lector (o consumidor) y el concepto del productor (o autor).

Electronic literature is a rapidly growing area of creative production and scholarly interest. It is inherently multimedial and multimodal, and thus demands multiple critical methods of interpretation. Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} is a collaboration between three scholars combining different interpretive methods of digital literature and poetics in order to think through how critical reading is changing—and, indeed, must change—to keep up with the emergence of digital poetics and practices. It weaves together radically different methodological approaches—close reading of onscreen textual and visual aesthetics, Critical Code Studies, and cultural analytics (big data)—into a collaborative interpretation of a single work of digital literature. Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} is a work of electronic literature that presents a high-speed, one-word-at-a-time animation synchronized to visual and aural effects. It tells the tale of a mysterious pit and its impact on the surrounding community. Programmed in Flash and published online, its fast-flashing aesthetic of information overload bombards the reader with images, text, and sound in ways that challenge the ability to read carefully, closely, and analytically in traditional ways. The work's multiple layers of poetics and programming can be most effectively read and analyzed through collaborative efforts at computational criticism such as is modeled in this book. The result is a unique and trailblazing book that presents the authors'collaborative efforts and interpretations as a case study for performing digital humanities literary criticism of born-digital poetics.

Nicht alles, was vermessbar ist, ist auch real. Bereits Galilei demonstrierte mit einer Vermessung der Hölle Dantes, dass man selbst literarische Räume kartieren kann. Diesem Vorbild folgen auch die Laienkartographen des 21. Jahrhunderts. Ihre »Map Mashups« führen eine Tradition fort, die seit der Antike Spuren in Literatur, Kartographie und wissenschaftlichen Diskursen hinterlassen hat. Mit diesen digitalen »Remediationen« sind literaturgeographische Fragen in der Internetforschung angekommen. Annika Richterichs Studie untersucht daher aus medien- und literaturwissenschaftlicher Sicht, wie (software-)technischer Fortschritt und habitualisierte Mediennutzung im Forschungsfeld der geomedialen Fiktionen zusammenspielen.

Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today's multitouch devices to yesterday's desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson's self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries.Reading the means of production as well as the creative works they produce, Emerson demonstrates that technologies are more than mere tools and that the interface is not a neutral border between writer and machine but is in fact a collaborative creative space. Reading Writing Interfaces begins with digital literature's defiance of the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early twenty-first century and then looks back at the ideology of the user-friendly graphical user interface that emerged along with the Apple Macintosh computer of the 1980s. She considers poetic experiments with and against the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s and takes a fresh look at Emily Dickinson's self-printing projects as a challenge to the coherence of the book.Through archival research, Emerson offers examples of how literary engagements with screen-based and print-based technologies have transformed reading and writing. She reveals the ways in which writers—from Emily Dickinson to Jason Nelson and Judd Morrissey—work with and against media interfaces to undermine the assumed transparency of conventional literary practice.

Der Band versammelt Beiträge einer wissenschaftlichen Tagung zur Brief-Edition im digitalen Zeitalter, die im Oktober 2011 in Weimar stattgefunden hat. Im Mittelpunkt stehen allgemeinere editionswissenschaftliche Fragen, z. B. wie wandeln sich editionswissenschaftliche Standards, etwa die Textkonstitution oder die Darbietung der Brieftexte sowie der Briefmanuskripte durch die elektronischen Medien? Welche Chancen, aber auch Probleme ergeben sich dabei für die Briefeditionen? Wo liegen die Vorteile, wo die Grenzen der Verwendung der neuen Medien für Recherche und Kommentierung der Briefe? In den hier versammelten Aufsätzen werden zudem verschiedene wissenschaftliche Brief-Editionsprojekte vorgestellt, die sich mit editorischen Fragestellungen gerade im Hinblick auf die veränderte Medienlandschaft beschäftigen. Sie spiegeln nicht nur den aktuellen Forschungsstand und neue Tendenzen der Brief-Edition wider, sondern machen auch deutlich, wo es durch den Medienwandel bedingten Gesprächsbedarf zwischen Editoren, Verlegern, Archiven und Nutzern gibt und zeigen Desiderate und Lösungsansätze im Bereich der gegenwärtig noch fehlenden Infrastrukturen für die Zusammenarbeit zwischen den beteiligten Disziplinen und Institutionen.

Can a case be made for reading literature in the digital age? Does literature still matter in this era of instant information? Is it even possible to advocate for serious, sustained reading with all manner of social media distracting us, fragmenting our concentration, and demanding short, rapid communication? In The Edge of the Precipice, Paul Socken brings together a thoughtful group of writers, editors, philosophers, librarians, archivists, and literary critics from Canada, the US, France, England, South Africa, and Australia to contemplate the state of literature in the twenty-first century. Including essays by outstanding contributors such as Alberto Manguel, Mark Kingwell, Lori Saint-Martin, Sven Birkerts, Katia Grubisic, Drew Nelles, and J. Hillis Miller, this collection presents a range of perspectives about the importance of reading literature today. The Edge of the Precipice is a passionate, articulate, and entertaining collection that reflects on the role of literature in our society and asks if it is now under siege. Contributors include Michael Austin (Newman University), Sven Birkerts (author), Stephen Brockmann (Carnegie-Mellon University), Vincent Giroud (University of Franche-Comté), Katia Grubisic (poet), Mark Kingwell (University of Toronto), Alberto Manguel (author), J. Hillis Miller (University of California, Irvine), Drew Nelles (editor-in-chief, Maisonneuve), Keith Oatley (University of Toronto), Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia (British Library), Leonard Rosmarin (Brock University), Lori Saint-Martin (translator, Université du Québec à Montréal), Paul Socken (University of Waterloo), and Gerhard van der Linde (University of South Africa).

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

What happens to literature in an age of digital technology? Regards Croisés: Perspectives on Digital Literature provides an answer, with a collection of cutting-edge critical essays on literature gone digital. Regards Croisés is an important addition to existing research on digital literature, and will appeal to scholars of electronic writing, digital art,humanities computing, media and communication, and others interested in the field. It offers a significant advance in the field through its wide-angle perspective that globalizes digital literature and diversifies the current critical paradigms. Regards Croisés shows how digital literature connects with traditions and future directions of reading and writing communities all over the world. With contributions by authors from eight countries and three continents, the collection presents points of view on a transcontinental practice of digital literature. Regards Croisés also opens dialogues with expanded critical paradigms of digital literature, beyond earlier critical concern with the aesthetics of the screen as a space of hypertext links. Many of the essays recognize a rich history and ongoing literary practice engaged with the basic fact of the computer as a programmable device. Other essays explore the latest developments in social media and Web 2.0 as venues for digital literature. Regards Croisés shows the vibrant engagement of writers and readers with literary practice in a digital world.