Our presentation concerns the implications of building and speculating on objects in digital spaces. In our final projects, Caleigh examines how versions work in a series of 24 literary “re-mixes” of text on a blog produced by the Australian "Remix My Lit." Alyssa focuses on the relation between an author on Twitter (Bret Easton Ellis), the text he produces, and his followers/readers, and how these relations complicate Barthes’s claims in “The Death of the Author.”

However, we examine this theme on a broader level, too. Our projects intersect where we use conventional humanistic inquiry to observe new media. We are both interested in how text in digital spaces alter digital spaces, and how the digital spaces alter text and the creation of text. As well, we both deal with issues of online authorship. For the purpose of this presentation, we are framing our inquiry by looking at online texts as spaces of social experience and encounter. We integrate Nicolas Bourriaud, Johanna Drucker and Stephen Ramsay into this conversation. Bourriaud comments on the role of participants and objects in social spaces of inter-subjectivity and interaction: “Art is a state of encounter.”  Drucker questions the representation of information in DH scholarship. She states that “The challenge is to design graphical expressions suited to the display of interpreted phenomena: information about subjective user-dependent metrics, subjective displays of information, and subjective methods of graphical expression.” Stephen Ramsay also comes up in our presentation with his work on how algorithmic criticism plays in the humanistic interpretations of text, and his focus on building and making; as he writes, “if text analysis is to participate in literary critical endeavor in some manner beyond fact-checking, it must endeavor to assist the critic in the unfolding of interpretive possibilities.”

After several meetings and a large GoogleDoc, we decided to structure our presentation with three mutually-agreed upon questions. Although we brainstormed the questions and our responses together, we decided to answer each question individually. We hope that the intersections between our ideas will become even clearer during the Q&A.