- What makes a good digital text, what counts as one, and what purpose do digital texts serve?
The purpose that digital texts serve is for our storytelling to take advantage of the capabilities of our technology. The risk for the author is for technological spectacle to take over from message and for the audience to feel distanced from the connection that drives the relationship between artist and viewer as Sadokierski (2013) states “electronic books can do certain things that print books cannot, and therein lies their value. Enhanced electronic books are changing our definition and expectations of books” but the work of most value is the one that drives an audience to read it, return to it, and explore their internal emotional landscape in ways they had not imagined previously. Not just to give novel interactive experiences but experiences that explore the human condition in novel ways.
What counts as a digital text is still being defined as permutations and iterations of technology continue to allow for storytelling to develop in fascinating ways. I have recognised certain key attributes that help define the genre. It involves hardware with electronic components and software that translates the work held in ones and zeros from a digital file into the familiar letters and pages we are used to whether this is in an app, eReader, or personal computer. What is more interesting and useful than constructing a watertight definition of digital literature is exploring the affordances of purpose that the medium allows for the audience and author. As the technology of the printing press increased the dissemination of previously hand copied works so the internet has, by several orders of magnitude, increased the ability to disseminate works of digital literature. This has created entire new genres defined not by literary style but “the ways in which works were disseminated, documented and preserved” (Rettberg, 2012). Audiences are getting used to works being manifested across genres with increasing freedom; including Harry Potter starting as a series of novels then transitioned to being movies, computer games, and online interactive website exploring the phase space of the work.
Compare your experience of reading digital texts with reading print.
For me a key component of being driven to read is seeing the physical item in front of me. For a work on my computer I have to navigate to it. It simply does not have a presence in space. I read the eReader work i reviewed in one evening and, without the impetus of an assignment, it would have been easy to read a number of pages and never return to it or be distracted to read a different work. I love going to the library and carrying a pile of an entire series out with me, seeing the piles of unread and read books shift to different sides of the mantlepiece, and I understand I could download numerous series into the eReader application freda that I downloaded but they lack the weight that pulls at my consciousness. I would like to buy a dedicated reader device to experience the benefits of weightless tomes. One that is submersion proof that I can enjoy in the bath would fit my needs well but from my experience of moving from a physical collection of music to digital storage which no longer exists. I am wary as we now live in a world where we have more data available that we can transmit at greater speeds and never before has its existence been so fragile.
- Choose the digital text you most enjoyed and discuss how you might incorporate it into a program at your institution.
The execution and capabilities of The O from The Museum of Old and New Art are inspirational and the capability to remove text and its gravitational effect on the attention of visitors in cultural institutions is transformative for object based learning. For my workplace at The National Sports Museum I have already been part of a program of app development and learned much from the failure of that process. To succeed it would need to be optional for interpretation, work on a variety of devices going back several generations, connect intimately to the collection, connect to the tone of our institution, and given that we are sports focused have at least an element of available competition. I would like to try again to make a work that would add to people’s meaning making and social interaction and with the experiences of the past and the learnings from INF533 Literature in the Digital Environment I believe I could make a better go of it.
Reference List
Sadokierski, Z. (2013, November 12). What is a book in the digital age? [Web log post]. Retrived from http://theconversation.com/what-is-a-book-in-the-digital-age-19071
Rettberg, J.W. (2012). Electronic literature seen from a distance: the beginnings of a field. Retrieved from http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2012/41/walker-rettberg.htm