INF533 Assessment 1: Reflections

The concept of Digital Literature is still not satisfying defined to me and perhaps will never be due to the exponential iteration of content creation from across the world. But perhaps by looking at certain qualities seen in the medium we can gain an idea of what distinguishes it from what came before. At the fundamental level digital consists of digits, of 1’s and 0’s, that encode information. This practice allows for easy transmission, printing, and manipulation via computer. This contrasts to the pre-computer past where literature was either manually copied with a stylus or more recently with the assistance of a machine such as moveable type or a typewriter. The increased speed of reproduction and transmission changes the nature of the medium into one where we can modify, reimagine, and remix works back into the cultural milieu that in the past may have seemed inviolable sacrosanct works.
Marx argued that the means of reproduction determined the nature of society but never foresaw a book being reproduced with cntrl +A, cntrl +C, cntrl +V.

To look at it on a less theoretical and a more practical level. Digital Literature is what takes advantage of our technology hardware and infrastructure. Devices such as smartphones, laptops, or dedicated e-readers combined with trusted suppliers of electricity and internet. Additional content becomes accessible across different works through hyperlinks between texts and the reader’s experience can wander from one author’s work to another according to their whimsy. Reading styles have changed due to this functionality of the medium; from reading whole works, in one to a few sittings, to taking numerous bites of many.

In the museum sector we are seeing numerous new ways of storytelling and the delivery of experiences to our visitors. Apps can work if they have a focused function tied to their design. A good example is MONA’s O which is designed to replace didactic panels on walls and allows the visitor to choose the flavor they receive information in as well as being able to review their visit in the order of their experience and thus relive it. There are many apps that try to do everything for everyone and end up doing nothing for all due to bloatware interfaces.

Is a website automatically Digital Literature? Is an app? What I like to think about is the boundaries of systems where they break down so where is the boundary of Digital Literature? are there print books today that have never been emailed to the publisher? are there book printers who receive works in a non-digital way? just because it looks like a book and smells like a book doesn’t mean it hasn’t been assisted by a digital pathway during its genesis. The limits imposed on a work are the choice of the author, their intentions, their selections of technology. A print book containing a QR code is linked to the digital web and any image that is not individually hand drawn was printed from a file. We are trying to put in boxes a phenomenon of infinite graduation and we are better off engaging with literature just as we have before to understand it through experience rather than taxonomy.