C A R O L I N E || M C C R A W
M.A., Digital Humanities
Friday, Oct. 18, 2019
Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities – Loyola University Chicago
➕ Lecture
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Spend the remainder of the workshop using the following tools & considerations to generate some kind of digital text work— it can be silly, use found language, be an extension of something else, be collaborative— just spend some time playing with the affordances of a screen and what they might mean for a digital text.
T O O L S :
- Code Templates
- Voyant Textual Analysis (create a word cloud, poem from text mining results, etc.)
- Twitter (see Resources for examples)
- Physical form to be digitized (scanning, photographing)
- Screenshots
- Creative citations
- Hyperlinks
- Tumblr
- Code grab (view the source code of any page; steal the code, and play with it in a text editor!)
- Anything on your phone
C O N S I D E R A T I O N S :
A digital text is:
POROUS
FLUID
PULSING (alive?)
MALLEABLE
COLLABORATIVE
BOUNDLESS, yet bounded
RECURSIVE
FRAGMENTARY
UNSTABLE
GENERATIVE
EPHEMERAL
CUMULATIVE
SIMULTANEOUS
NONBINARY
NONHUMAN
HUMAN
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→ What intimacies can the digital provide?
→ How would this be different in a book form?
→ What is the lifespan of what you are creating? How will it die? How does this inform its creation?
→ How do you engage with text in digital spaces in your daily life?
→ What is a digital reader/user’s physical relationship to their text? To your text?
→ What boundaries are you working within? Rejecting?
→ Which digital practices— literary, and non— is this work informed by? Responding to?
//
“I had a couple of different laptops… and one of them had a slider bar. I could slide the screen brightness down to almost nothing, so I was sitting in complete darkness. The screen would have just the tiniest hint of phosphorescence and a faint crackle of static electricity. I thought, This is an option Dickens did not have.” - Nicholson Baker
“The surface of writing is and always has been complex. It is a liminal symbolically interpenetrated membrane, a fractal coast-- or borderline, a chaotic and complex structure with depth and history.” - John Cayley
“So what is beyond the book is still the book.” - Edmond Jabès