Digital humanities and digital literary studies face much the same challenges as contemporary media art: what will become of them once their media are no longer “new”, and the limitations of processing art as data have become more clearly and widely understood? This paper revisits information aesthetics and computer poetics from the 1960s and 1970s, casting them as precursors of today’s digital humanities, with many of the same issues, achievements and failures, and with their own hype cycles of boom and bust. Conversely, “post-digital” and “Post-Internet” trends in music, graphic design and visual arts may anticipate possible futures of digital humanities and literary studies after the hype has passed.
Florian Cramer is an applied research professor and director of Creating 010, the research center affiliated to Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. He also works for WORM, a Rotterdam-based venue for DIY avant-garde culture.
With its algorithmic text processing and complex relations between code and text, the computer in many ways seemed to offer new perspectives on for instance textuality, and it also instigated new forms of text, such as electronic literature and computer games with epic narrative elements. However, neither electronic literature nor computer games compare to printed books, and conventional literary textual analysis does not apply easily. Since the arrival of the computer and a new materiality of the textual there has been a need for new theoretical understandings of text. This discrepancy between textual organisation and its analytical apparatus was also coined by Espen Aarseth in his ground-breaking work Cybertext – perspectives on ergodic literature from 1997. The term ‘cyber’ (originating in the Greek Kybernetes, ‘steersman’) indicates that navigation is crucial. Both electronic literature and computer games were in other words not just new media for narratives, but presented a type of text that was characterised by a schism between doing and reading, or instrument and media.
This paper will propose the use of ‘interface’ as a way to comprehend the textual instrument-media apparatus and its grammar. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”, as well as selected artworks, it will argue that the purpose of the literary is to address this ‘operationality’ of the interface as a ‘tendency’ within the artwork. Finally, it will suggest certain contemporary changes in the interface that calls for a new literary critique (interface criticism). The interface is changing from being relatively contained in software and hardware, to being mobile, limitless and almost reckless and dissolute in the ways it incorporates a constant flow of data from other interfaces. This change fundamentally presents a new mode of production that is setting a new stage for literary interface criticism.
Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Pold are Associate Professors at Information Science, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark.
The title of the conference – Literature between Paper and Pixels – evokes associations of change and a move from paper to pixels. And while this might very well be the case it is also clear that most literature today is either paper or pixel first. There is however an often repeated notion that the whole system for literature is being disrupted and in this paper I want to discuss the research and public discussion on the digital shift in the literary world. Using a meta-perspective on “the between”, suggested in the conference title as the place where literature is negotiated and transformed, the intention is to shed light on how the digital shift is discussed both in academia and in public contexts. The “between”, though hardly a term but simply drawn from the conference title, is what I define as the area of negotiation of the changes in literary culture, reading habits, book market and the creation and distribution of literature in the present. In this space ideology, practical realities, agents, powers and beliefs are jumbled and juxtaposed. Many “truths” are expressed by a variety of agents such as publishers, authors, bookseller, critics, politicians, academics that are often contradictory and the paper is an attempt to address the meaning and nature of different claims.
The paper draws many of its specific examples from a newly published book on the Swedish literary field where we, a group of six researchers, investigated how literature is negotiated and valued in present-day book and media market. The intention is however also to examine the academic context where literature in print and digital is discussed at moment. Previously studies on the book market has been done mainly by academics in publishing and literary studies, but the digital changes has drawn research from particularly media studies and library and information studies.
Ann Steiner, Associate Professor in Publishing studies and Literary Studies, Lund University. Steiner has published extensively on the book market and reading and recent publications include the co-written Höstens böcker. Litterära värdeförhandlingar 2013 (2015), the co-edited Hype. Bestsellers and Literary Culture (2014) and Litteraturen i mediesamhället (3rd ed. 2015).
From the point of view of the reader, the process of digitalization has not only transformed the book reading experience through introduction of the e-book, but also opened up new channels and venues to acquire information about books and to seek inspiration for reading. On the internet readers may find information through a variety of public and commercial resources (e.g. websites and databases of libraries, booksellers and book subscription services) and discuss literature with other readers in online forums like book reading clubs, fansites, and social network media. Furthermore, the role of traditional literary intermediaries and popularity indexes (e.g. book reviewers, bestseller lists, etc.) to inform readers’ choices has changed, because the online world allows for additional forms of intermediaries and popularity rankings (layman reviews, automated recommendations, ‘likes’, etc.).
In this paper I will analyze the ways in which readers’ literary taste in terms of genre preferences and reading gratifications are associated with various forms of online and offline behavior (including reading of paper and e-books, purchase of paper and e-books, and engagement in discussion of literature). The analysis is based on a representative survey (N = 1.535) in 2015 by TNS Gallup of Danish book readers’ online and offline preferences and behavior. Combining literary taste indicators with social demographic and general lifestyle measures the analysis can paint a nuanced picture of the ways in which socially stratified literary tastes are informing – and informed by – various forms of information and inspiration seeking behavior in the online and offline world. Theoretically the paper is informed by the sociology of taste (Pierre Bourdieu) and media theory concerning mediatization (Hjarvard) and connectivity (José van Dijck).
Stig Hjarvard, Ph.D., is professor at Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at University of Copenhagen. He is chief editor of the journals Northern Lights (Intellect Press) and Journal of Media, Cognition and Communication (Royal Danish Library). He is chair of the ECREA Section on Mediatization and chair of the Danish Ministry of Culture’s Panel on Books and Literature. He is co-editor and contributor (with Rasmus Helles) to Northern Lights’ issue on Books and Publishing in a Digital Age (vol. 13. no. 1, 2015).
This paper studies the complex dynamics of a digital reading culture. Through an empirical study of readers’ reactions to Amazon’s acquisition in 2013 of Goodreads, a popular social network site for readers, the paper seeks to analyze and discuss how readers negotiate and manage the problems and possibilities of a data-driven reading culture. Goodreads is primarily used as a way to create a personal, tagged archive of books for both recollection and sharing purposes, and this can be seen as a strategy of claiming ownership of books regardless of the reader’s mode of access. Amazon serves as both manufacturer and seller of the Kindle, content provider, and publishing house, and as such, provides a closed media ecosystem where devices and content are bound together, and the consumer is similarly bound to their engagement with Amazon. This has been described as an instance of “controlled consumption” (Striphas, 2011) preventing the consumer from using the product freely (Pold and Andersen, 2012).
The Amazon acquisition threatens users’ feelings of control over their archive. In other words, readers are involved in a struggle to defend their ownership over books, as Amazon seems to be laying claim to the social life of book reading. At the same time, the possibilities of social media such as Goodreads for public discussion and self-presentation can be seen as a way for readers to compensate for the loss of the physical collection and the tangible products of culture. The paper will argue that digitization of reading culture still has the potential to instigate a new kind of reading publics, where audiences claim ownership over cultural products in different ways than before, developing communicative tactics to circumvent and reinterpret the strategies of the powerful (cf. de Certeau, 1984).
Anne-Mette Albrechtslund, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark.
Audiobooks are rapidly gaining popularity with widely accessible digital downloading and streaming services. The paper is framing how the digital audiobook expands and changes the target groups for book publications and how it as an everyday activity is creating new reading experiences, places and situations for reading.
Birgitte Stougaard, Associate Professor, Aesthetics and Culture, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Iben Have, Associate Professor, Media Studies, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark.
In Production. The Shanghai 1927 Project combines several formats to establish a powerful experience in which you can keep diving in further. It's unforgettable entertainment developed at the best of our abilities. It gives you the fictitious story of 16 year old Lu Ping who lives in the roaring Shanghai of 1927. Among ruthless gangsters, super rich imperialists, poor prostitutes, world wide adventurers, nationalists soldiers, aspiring communists and so much more, she discovers herself and her city, while experiencing one of the defining periods in the birth of modern day China.
Other than being a classic entertainment product with a deep historical and rich foundation The Shanghai 1927 Project is also curated for learning in a tie-in website for teachers.
There is three overarching elements in The Shanghai 1927 Project.
The Girl From Shanghai. A digital comic book
Shanghai Modern. a fictive historical online magazine
Shanghai Learning. A Danish website learning material companion.
Kong Orange, Esben Kjær Ravn. The world needs digital quality time. It is actual joy, that your mind feasts on, while your heart is beating. That’s what we develop at Kong Orange in the forms of puzzle games, mopeds, digital comic books, music, dance or interactive biographies. Kong Orange is a business and production umbrella, that keeps a vigorous body moving ecstatically in a meaningful direction. The body is formed by a colorful collective of friends, partners and colleagues. Esben Kjær Ravn is the sole proprietor of Kong Orange, but all the different production teams are made up from tailored patchworks of freelancers and co-contracters.
Merete Pryds Helle is a Danish author. She has among many other things written the first text message and iPad novel in Denmark, and has become a pioneer in the development of digital literature.
The magic edition of this classic Hans Christian Andersen tale combines traditional physical books with a digital app to deliver an experience your kids will love. Instead of planting them in front of a TV or video give them the magic edition – and activate your children’s imagination.
Books & Magic (Mark Folkenberg) deliver quality reading experiences that inspire children to read. Our professionals include some of the most experienced 3D artists, architects, developers, UX specialists and 3D artists in the business. In the past, they’ve brought their unique skills to brands like LEGO and IO Interactive’s Hitman 47 series. Now they bring their passion – plus a combined 40+ years of game and app development experience – to the world of children’s literature.
