During our fifth meeting, we'll be talking about distant reading, maps, <a title="learn more" href="http://www.newleftreview.org/A2094" target="_blank">Moretti</a>, and abstract models for literary criticism. But before then, you'll have this opportunity to speak to the granularity---or the material and technical particularity---of digital objects. Get out your microscopes.

With a hypermedia novel like <em><a title="learn more" href="http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Funhouse.html" target="_blank">Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse</a></em>, materiality practically asserts itself. In hand we have a black box, cassette tapes, floppy disks, photocopied letters, instruction manuals, and so on. But when our attention turns to the flat screen, how do we talk meaningfully about stuff---about how, for instance, "this becomes that"? (See <a title="learn more" href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=1FLIHNPucroC&amp;lpg=PT64&amp;dq=media%20ecology%20fuller%20how%20this%20becomes%20that&amp;pg=PT25#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false" target="_blank">Matthew Fuller</a>.)

<strong>Learning Outcomes</strong>

For you to:

<ul>

<li>Survey the field of electronic literature,</li>

<li>Develop a nuanced sense of materiality in digital environments,</li>

<li>Write about the specificity of media as well as their relationships (or ecology), and</li>

<li>Account for both the persistance and the ephemerality of new media.</li>

</ul>

<strong>What You Should Include in Your Response (Option A: 500 - 1000 words + screenshots, or Option B: 1 - 2 minutes of video w/ a vocal or text track) </strong>

First, give Volumes <a title="learn more" href="http://collection.eliterature.org/1/" target="_blank">1</a> and <a title="learn more" href="http://collection.eliterature.org/2/" target="_blank">2</a> of the Electronic Literature Collection a gander. If you are new to e-lit, then I recommend perusing the index of keywords (for Volumes <a title="learn more" href="http://collection.eliterature.org/1/aux/keywords.html" target="_blank">1</a> and <a title="learn more" href="http://collection.eliterature.org/2/extra/keywords.html" target="_blank">2</a>). From all of those choices, pick the text that most interests you, watch/read/listen to it, and take notes as you do.

In your response to the e-lit, please:

<ul>

<li>Do your best to identify all of the media (e.g., images, video, audio, text (including markup / page source), maps, and code) involved,</li>

<li>Select two of these media and exhibit examples of their appearance in the e-lit (via screenshot or screencast),</li>

<li>Speak to the formal and/or forensic materiality of each medium (e.g., what it affords, where is it stored, its effects on the agency of audiences, or how (if at all) it can be interpreted computationally),</li>

<li>Speak to the relationships (including resonance and dissonance) between these two media and their distinct materialities in a single work of e-lit (e.g., shifting perceptions of the "literary," the kinds of subjectivity enabled, the aesthetics of transmedia, or the politics of multimodal expression), and</li>

<li>If and where applicable, gesture toward our discussions of Chun (e.g., the enduring ephemeral), Kirschenbaum (e.g., preserving complete environments), Goodman (e.g., allograph and autograph), and Hayles (e.g., genres of e-lit).</li>

</ul>

When you inscribe your response in our Scalar book, please tag it with your name (thus including it in your "user profile" at the top of the book) and---if you can---also add it to the "granulation" path. (The first person to submit will need to "make this page a path.") No need to create any additional paths, and feel free, too, to tag your response with names relevant to it (mentioned explicitly or not).

Remember: your response need not be one "page" in Scalar. Recall Turkel's claims for writing in small chunks of text. For instance, when does a paragraph---or even a sentence---warrant its own URL? How would distributing your paragraphs or arguments across unique addresses change how folks (me included) discover and comment on them? How would it alter the ways in which Scalar visualizes a network of our contributions?

Get in touch with questions.