The article "Electronic
Literature: What is it?" by Katherine Hayles covers just about everything you
need to know about electronic literature. Hayles does a beautiful job splitting
up her article into four, all encompassing parts. Part 1 provides context to
help conceptualize e-lit, part 2 uncovers all the past and current genres of
e-lit, while part 3 and 4 illuminate the differences between print and e-lit
and how they are preserved, respectively. I found part 2 the most interesting
as I liked learning about all the different types of e-lit, especially the
early stuff like the clunky hypertexts, but part 3 I consider the most useful
to understanding e-lit. I liked her point about how links are exclusive to
e-lit but are pretty much just footnotes in digital medium. That point rings
especially true in the article because her “notes” are all hyperlinks right to
the bottom of the page, literally digital footnotes! (except these footnotes
have direct links to the references, where print forces the reader to find
another piece of physical print) What I found to be the biggest difference
between the two is the interactive elements. The animations, reward systems and
nonlinear elements are what make e-lit unique. As Nick Monfort suggests, e-lit
readers can be seen more as interactors than simply readers.
Hayles provides the link to the
ELO website and I couldn’t help but click. She references this in the fourth
part of the essay regarding preservation of e-lit. in my head I supposed that
an e-lit library would physically be in the space of massive servers, like the
servers that host all our cloud backed data. But what those servers would hold
is where I got lost. The ELO website is I guess what an e-lit library looks
like. It’s pretty awesome. It has a bunch of really cool works that show you
exactly what e-lit can be. (because it literally is) I visited the oldest
collection from 2006 because I wanted to know what it was like early on. Its
pretty funny I ended up downloading a bunch of really small 2 second clips on
my computer and I have no idea when they are supposed to play in the actual
work they are from. Nonetheless it is an awesome virtual library and it’s cool
to see how much these works have changed. Here’s the site: http://collection.eliterature.org
Trevor
Because this was the first collection, there is a lot of older work on here. This is also the collection I studied and wrote about the most, so I'm pretty fond of it. For comparison, here is the third collection, which most of the options for your analysis writing will come from: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/
ReplyDeleteThere are more embodied works here, even some VR, and, of course, less Flash pieces (back to the preservation comment and Jillian's post), which really shows how the form is changing.
I too thought it was useful and interesting that Hayles incorporated interactive digital footnotes into her article. That is one of the many advantages of e-lit over printed text. I like how you pointed out that readers of electronic literature are not just readers, but interactors. That idea of engaging with a work is appealing to people who may learn better through action. I also like how you called hyperlinks "reward systems." There is so much more accessibility when it comes to navigating e-lit and the access to knowledge is rewarding!
ReplyDeleteLily
Another thing that I thought about when I was reading your point on digital notes was that I noticed them and used them but I didn't even realize them as such an advantage for electronic literature. I think those who grow up with digital literature understand a lot about it without noticing how much they actually understand. At least for me, I found your insight a good point that was so obvious but I missed it when I was looking at the article.
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