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“A Literary History of Word Processing”
Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is finally released! Along with it, it is published its first review written by Dylan Hicks for “Los Angeles Review of Books”. “[book] is especially concerned with how word processing has changed the embodied labor of writing — its actual tasks, tools, and physical demands — and with how literary writers have embraced, resisted, and interpreted that transformation”. Track Changes is a fundamental reading in the field of digital humanities, comparative textual media, and electronic literature.
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From Dada to Java
How should we read and interpret Taroko Gorge by Nick Montfort? What does it mean ‘bot’? Is Twitterbot a new literary form? “From Dada to Java: conversations about generative poetry & Twitter bots” is a film devoted to the explanation of these new types of writing and reading that is generative poetry. Sophie Skach, Betul Aksu, Victor Loux, and Zhou Tang invite artists and theorists of electronic literature to elucidate a complicated nature of generative works. Among them are Montfort and Sandy Baldwin, both are writers of digital literature and members of Electronic Literature Organization. To explain the meaning of generative poetry, it seems necessary to situate it in the cultural context. It turns out that the generative poetry is the continuation of avant-garde literary practices, such as Dada and Oulipo. One of the goals of generative work is to produce a text that is a new literary experiment ‘written’ by a computer, not a human. Because of this, artists seek to generate work that is not an imitation of human’s work. Therefore, generative literature means to delve into an ‘inner layer’ of computer to disclose its creativity and features that are other than human. Eventually, we receive a text that does not reflect ‘human’ literary work, rather ‘non-human’ automated work produced by the cooperation between artist/programmer and computer.
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40 years of Apple
40 years of Apple in pictures! Apple’s a rich history covers the following technological breakthroughs, such as the first Apple computer in 1976, the Apple Lisa computer in 1983, the Macintosh computer in 1984, the iMac in 1998, iPhone in 2007, the MacBook Air laptop in 2008, iPad in 2010, and the Apple Watch in 2015, and much more…
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Abra: A Living Text for iOS
Abra: A Living Text is a free iOs app and a limited-edition artist’s book printed with heat-sensitive ink and other features that animate the page. It is created by Amy Rabas at the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago with a collaboration between Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, Ian Hatcher. Abra invites a reader to play with touchscreen interfaces whereby you can shift words under your fingers, mutate the text, and write your own words. However, the iOs app does not make this book a special text; the biggest challenge is to move these effects to the printed page. Therefore, the artist’s book printed is a great experience of reading the page as an interface. Thanks to thermochromic ink that disappears with the heat of your hands or breath, and laser-cut openings, the book becomes a real interface.
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eLit for Kids
One of the areas of electronic literature is digital works for children. As Leonardo Flores said, children’s e-literature help to develop digital literacy, related to reading digital text, coding, designing, and navigation in digital environment, to name just a few. The examples of kid’s electronic literature are kinetic text Anipoemas by Ana María Uribe, playable works Enigma n by Jim Andrews, and language-art work Unicode Infinite by Jörg Piringer. Electronic literature for children was the part of conference “The End(s) of Electronic Literature”, organized by Electronic Literature Organization at the University of Bergen last year. Kid E-Lit exhibition was presented at Bergen Public Library in August and September 2015.
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