Christian Ulrik Andersen, Malthe Stavning Erslev, Pablo Rodrigo Velasco González & Søren Bro Pold.
The 2021 ELO conference, co-chaired by Aarhus and Bergen universities in May 2021, was planned and executed as a fully virtual event with the general theme Platform (Post?) Pandemic (ELO 2021). The theme led to numerous discussions of the concept of platforms in general and in electronic literature (e-lit). We experienced historical perspectives, discussions of contemporary critical issues with platforms such as criticism with/through art/e-lit, creation of artistic alternatives to major platforms, discussions of how platform culture relates to the pandemic situation and discussions of the definitions and potentials of platforms. Furthermore, the conference itself was held on platforms, thus its critical reflection on platforms relied heavily on the use of commercial platforms.
However, it is difficult to get a concise overview of the 5 conference days’ 62 tracks and our experience is obviously limited. This left us with the questions of whether there is a different way to map this through data analysis, including the sub-question of how the platforms themselves map and frame such a conference, and what could be the platform perspective on this platform critical conference?
We have been experimenting with mapping the conference through data analysis of its recorded and transcribed parts. With the assistance of students (Anne Nielsen, Magnus Wittrup & Jakob Kleofas Adolph) we operated three analytical approaches: human close-reading of data with a focus on the contexts of main keywords (‘platform’, ‘pandemic’, ‘conference’); a Gephi-based (Bastian et al.) network analysis and mapping of co-occurring words; and a mapping of the 1000 most occurring word-pairs done with Python’s Natural Language Toolkit and Pyvis.
Durings this process, we found that our approach was not merely a tool to produce findings; rather, we began viewing the data analysis as itself a form of electronic literature. This e-lit perspective affords a “critical reflection on the role of the digital (…) in humanistic inquiry” (Berner). As such, our efforts exemplify a “co-creation of critical discourse and poiesis” which characterizes the ethos of e-lit in a digital humanities context (Rettberg and Saum-Pascual).
This panel will present our research and discuss what we learned by operating the mentioned methods for observing the data generated by artists and academics in a virtual conference on platforms – and what it means to understand such data as itself a form of e-lit. We will divide the panel into four parts: 1) How does the conference see platforms? 2) How do platforms see the conference? 3) How to "read" or "see" a data-orama? And 4) Platform poems - conference data as electronic literature.
