Summer 2011

The following contributions offer a comprehensive survey of the impeding turns in the scholarly agenda of digital studies. In so doing, they probe the future cultural scenarios looming beyond digital technologies and their related practices, concepts, and perspectives. Such a collective interrogation of our digital future investigates the full spectrum of the humanities. As a result, our notions of subjectivity, identity, consciousness, literacy, text, and medium emerge in these essays as significantly altered by the digital in unusual and unexpected ways. Papers scrutinize a variegated set of relationships between the human neurological network and the networked computer, real and virtual spaces, and subjectivity and procedurality. Scholars in this cluster re-envision such issues in the light of an all-encompassing ontological shift underway as a consequence of the increasingly pervasive presence of the digital in our relations with machines and their processes.

Claims of the supposed disappearance of materiality in digital culture often entail a nostalgic reimagining of the supposedly embodied, personal or creative aspects of earlier writing technologies, including handwriting. Although handwriting was never a fully embodied writing technology, critics of transparent computer graphics often characterize it as such. This revisionist nostalgia for handwriting is evident not only in critical literature but also in contemporary graphical media such as video games. Two recent Nintendo DS games, Scribblenauts (2009) and The World Ends with You (2007), represent two alternative modalities of such nostalgia for handwriting. Scribblenauts claims to fully restore the creative properties of handwriting, but inevitably fails to do so. By contrast, TWEWY claims to offer not handwriting itself but a digital- and DS-specific equivalent. Therefore, it opens up possibilities for critical reflection on the past meaning of handwriting and on the future of the values that handwriting has come to symbolize.

What is the status of digital literature in contemporary culture? Many scholars and practitioners assume that digital literature constitutes a contemporary avant-garde, which does its work of experimentation outside or in opposition to the mainstream. The notion of the avant-garde might seem thoroughly out of date in a consideration of the digital future. Important theorists (e.g. Huyssen, Drucker) have argued that the avant-garde is no longer viable even for traditional media and art practices. On the other hand, the avant-gardes of twentieth-century modernism made claims about the function of art that remain surprisingly influential today – within the art community and within popular culture. As Peter Bürger and others have discussed, an important division grew up in modernism on the question of whether art should strive for formal innovation or for sociopolitical change. Avant-gardes of the twentieth century took up positions along a spectrum from pure formalism (e.g. the Abstract Expressionists) to overt political action (e.g. the Situationists). While the digital literature community is in general committed to formal innovation, some are critical of this commitment, in part on the political grounds that (technological) innovation has become a byword for the digital culture industry. Although the modernist problem is still apparent in some digital art and digital literature today, writers such as Jason Nelson seem to be moving beyond that dialectic.

The original usage of avatar referred to the incarnation or human appearance of a deity, particularly Vishnu, in Hindu mythology. The term was adapted to cyberspace to name one’s online persona. This usage has come to include every aspect of one’s online representation, from the icon on a blog, or an email signature to the figure one plays in Second Life. Avatar, then, is a practical point of entry for theorizing the emergence of the new identity experience of electracy, that is supplementing and displacing selfhood, the identity formation of literacy. Playing one’s avatar is to electracy what writing an essay is to literacy. The point addressed in this essay is that an avatar is not merely the appearance of one’s representation, since through interactivity and even telepresence, I am t/here with my image. What is it to be/have an image? The answer begins with noting the literal meaning of the avatar in Sanskrit: "Descent." Vishnu has descended (taken on embodiment) nine times, to correct a disordered world condition. This essay initiates a review of the cultural archive to see what is known already about our question (representations of "descent"). It is perhaps obvious, considering the prominence of Christianity in our heritage, that the West accumulated a huge amount of information about becoming body. Two examples are referenced in this introductory piece: Krishna and Orpheus.

Poetic writing for programmable and network media seems to have been captivated by the affordances of new media and questions of whether or not and if so, how certain novel, media-constituted properties and methods of literary objects require us to reassess and reconfigure the literary itself. What if we shift our attention decidedly to practices, processes, procedures — towards ways of writing and ways of reading rather than dwelling on either textual artifacts themselves (even time-based literary objects) or the concepts underpinning objects-as-artifact? What else can we do, given that we must now write on, for, and with the net which is itself no object but a seething mass of manifold processes? Part one of the essay presents a brief analysis of recent experiments in "writing to be found" with Google, making some claim that such writing may be exemplary, that its aesthetic and conceptual engagements are distinct, and that there is something at stake here for the literary or rather for certain practices of literary art. After very brief discussion in part two of some broader implications of writing with the Google corpus and its tools, part three addresses more examples of writing to be found, and introduces a collaboration with Daniel Howe, The Readers Project, many processes of which engage with "writing to be found" in Google and making use of its tools.

Locative technologies hold out the promise to transform literary space in all of its dimensions, including its represented spaces, reading interfaces, and the very spaces within which literature is produced and consumed. Yet, despite the growing use of location-based technologies, authors and readers alike have been slow to take to site-specific narrative due to limitations inherent in both the current design of locative media systems and our received notions of what constitutes the narrative experience. This paper argues that new mobile reading platforms in general are altering conceptions of literary space in highly conflicted ways, by radically expanding the sites where narratives can be accessed and experienced even as they reinforce a residual notion of literary reading as a sedentary and decontextualized experience. Locative media likewise hold out the promise of increased mobility and contextual awareness, but confront several cultural and technological factors preventing such an enhanced emplacement of narrative, factors that current performance-oriented approaches cannot fully address. At the level of cognitive engagement, the conditioned expectation of being transported to a remote fictional world interferes with readers' appreciation of the locative narrative's close ties to the real world, as well as the contextual effects it elicits by means of transportation through the actual world. At the technical level, the discontinuous algorithms of place that inform the architecture of most locative media systems hinder the perception of narrative patterning and flow across more extensive spaces. Locative media thus operationalize the spatial tension between conventionally sedentary modes of literary engagement and new modalities of mobility, a tension that is constitutive of our present mediality. The study concludes with a discussion of StoryTrek, a next-generation locative hypernarrative system designed to enable more complex, dynamic and fluid modes of embodied narrative spatiality. By encouraging the user to actively form complex narrative links between real and fictional spaces, StoryTrek enables utopian forms of spatial play that neutralize both the spatial limitations of current locative media design and the sedentary reading practices that continue to structure the experience of digital literature.

This paper focuses on the use of the trope "x is like a node in a network" in works of critical theory, and shows it to be an indicator of a larger discourse, nodalism, that has its origins in 19th century neuroscience and Associationist models of mind. This discourse provides a relationship between structure and function that is used in attempts to model thought in technological devices, as in the work of Vannevar Bush and JCR Licklider. These technological instantiations of nodalism in turn provide the material basis for the expansion of the discourse into other domains, such as politics and economics. The paper concludes by considering the potential positive and negative consequence of nodalism, and the role of the digitial humanities in the reproduction of this discourse.

The research experiment described in this article, Readies Online, started as a database to make accessible a rare manuscript of important modernist poets and writers including Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, F. W. Marinetti, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, Eugene Jolas, and many others. Each of these contributors had sent works prepared for Bob Brown's machine, and he called the prepared texts readies. In the midst of building the collection of texts, the researcher realized that moving the texts through an electronic version of Brown's machine, or through the interface constructed on the website to simulate Brown's machine, changed how one read — even changed the essence of what one read. Speed, pace, direction, and visual cues took on new importance already apparent in reading printed texts, but not stressed. Punctuation now represented an illegible and non-representational, visual cue rather than a direct link to the phono-centric pauses and stops that are more commonly represented by punctuation. The futures of reading, and the use of new devices like e-readers, will have consequences for the definition and practice of what we call reading.