In the introduction to their roundtable on building and speculating on objects in digital space, Alyssa A. and Caleigh explain that their projects “intersect where [they] use conventional humanistic inquiry to observe new media.” Relying on a critical framework informed by the work of Roland Barthes and Katherine Hayles, Alyssa A. analyzes the implications Bret Easton Ellis’s Twitter account bears on reader-author relations in online space. Working with Voyant, an online text analysis tool, Caleigh explores versioning and literary influence in a series of literary “remixes” of Emily Maguire's “Cherished,” a short story published through the Australian project Remix My Lit. My multimodal essay on narrative time and space in the fourteenth-century alliterative poem the Siege of Jerusalem takes the opposite approach, using new media, including digital mapping tools and text encoding, to critique conventional graphical display.

In the following pages, I respond to Alyssa A. and Caleigh’s three questions about the work of Johanna Drucker, Stephen Ramsay, and Nicolas Bourriaud in relation to my own attempts to render medieval narrative time and space in a digital environment, a process that calls attention to the difficulty of displaying objects that are not “born-digital” in an online space.

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Author: Alyssa McLeod
Word Count: 197

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