EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Rui Torres (FCHS/UFP) and Manuel Portela (FL/UC)

The use of computers in the humanities raises creative, as well as institutional and intellectual questions. One important set of questions concerns new methods for editing and organizing different kinds of texts (graphic, audio, video, etc.). The impact of hypertext and hypermedia on the scholarly archive, which is increasingly published in electronic formats, has fostered a conceptual shift from the archive as a classified hierarchical collection of texts to the archive as a decentred and reconfigurable network of texts.

At the same time, the convergent multimodality of digital textuality opens up a new editing and archival space for multimedia and intermedia forms of writing. In the current technological context, innovative and experimental literary forms become relevant, as many of the operations that the machine provides can be found in previous literary practices: from collages and automatic writing to narrative permutations and intermedia poetry. This issue of the journal is specifically concerned with the problems of representing, archiving and publishing experimental literary forms in digital spaces.

RANGE OF TOPICS

The academic journal Cibertextualidades welcomes research papers about processes and methods of representation, preservation and dissemination of intermedia and multimedia literary practices using digital archival systems.

This Call for Papers is open to original contributions in the following three topics:

1. Visuality and intermediality in experimental literature: The expressive use of materials and spaces is a defining feature of visual forms of poetry and fiction. Visual and intermedia experimentation has also originated new literary forms in electronic media, and multimodality is one important material aspect of current online environments. Digital media created the conditions for a new encounter between the tradition of intermedia works and new multimodal, networked, and programmed spaces. Works based on techniques such as calligraphy, photocopy, collage, graffiti, holography, etc.; practices such as installation, happening, and performance; and works based on sound, image, and video recording media, allow us to explore the potential of digital archives for representing and simulating large corpora of non-digital intermedia works. Sub-topics may include:
   1. Remediation and interartistic migrations;
   2. The materiality of signifying forms;
   3. Technological mediation in contemporary poetry;
   4. Analysis of hybrid forms dependent on verbivocovisual practices;
   5. Digital re-coding of the visual and performative materiality of experimental practices.
2. Combination and generativity in cyberliterature: Cyberliterature designates those literary texts whose construction is based on computing procedures: combinatory, multimedia, or interactive. This topic includes studies about programming languages and software involved in the creation of literary works, as well as archival and preservation issues. Subtopics may include:
   1. Digital re-coding of the visual and performative materiality of experimental practices;
   2. Problems of preservation and dissemination of digital texts, particularly of its early forms;
   3. Translation and interoperability of programming languages used in specific works;
   4. Studies in the emulation of software used in specific works.
3. Digital archives and electronic publishing models: New possibilities for archiving, displaying and disseminating multimedia works, including such subtopics as:
   1. Taxonomies for organizing, understanding, and classifying the conceptual and material relations in born-digital literature and in electronic versions of pre-digital intermedia works;
   2. Methodologies for establishing and maintaining hypermedia digital archives, particularly in terms of the contributions of Humanities, Computer Science, and Library Information Science;
   3. Conceptual reflections about the design and implementation of digital archives, including data modeling, database structure, interface design, navigation systems, and editorial and electronic publication models.

For further information and Publication Norms, download the Call For Papers

The aim of PO.EX’70-80 is to provide continuity to the Project “Portuguese Experimental Poetry – a CD-ROM of Dossiers and Catalogs” (FCT 2005-2008, Ref. POCI/ELT/57686/2004), which studied Portuguese literary experimentalism of the 1960s and created a digital archive with the most relevant magazines, catalogs and publications of that group of poets. Requests by several agents and recommendations from our consultants have led us to identify the need to extend the reproduction of Portuguese Experimental Poetry into the 1970s and 1980s. This new timeline will allow us to develop the studies and the collections already begun, now including visual and sound poetry, video-poetry, happenings, and cybernetic literature – all of which can be seen as extensions and renovations of literary experimentalism of the previously analyzed period. Within this framework, we will consider a connection between concrete and digital poetics.

The present project, characterized by its openness and free access to resources, will therefore continue the task of preserving a literary legacy which may be at peril. The following goals should be highlighted:

• To actively contribute to a better knowledge and dissemination of Portuguese poetry of the 20th century;
• to motivate new theoretical propositions and new didactic and research methodologies, by connecting theoretical investigation to the development of a hypermedia archive;
• to contribute to the preservation of literary documents that are fragile and rare;
• to freely distribute and disseminate experimental literary production in schools, universities and cultural institutions, creating the conditions and strategies for the use of new technologies in the production and dissemination of contemporary literature;
• to attain new and diverse audiences, by means of free Internet access to the resources, proposing literary readings by means of electronic media which students can understand and enjoy;
• to encourage the production of electronic literature by offering young writers the required skills and technical conditions for the use of digital tools and platforms in their creative processes.

It should be stressed that we aim to start, within the scope of this project, a Laboratory of Digital Writing, coordinated and supervised by team members. In this Laboratory we expect to offer adequate technical conditions for the development of artistic residences of poets and writers with an interest in multimedia and hypermedia digital platforms. The potential of programming languages as specific technologies for literary writing could be explored on a collaborative basis. In this way, we hope to foster the development of internal networks of production and digital literary creativity, documenting and later extending the process and its results, namely by means of an on-line publication platform.

More info can be found @ www.po-ex.net

Cibertextualidades 3

The third issue of the academic journal Cibertextualidades has just been published by Fernando Pessoa University Editions, with essays on cyberliterature, digital culture and new media.

The organizers, Rui Torres and Sergio Bairon, have chosen to discuss the relation between Knowledge and Hypermedia, proposing a reflection about the conditions of knowledge production within digital media platforms. The articles selected for publication articulate different theoretical positions, negotiating the implementation of models of hypermedia reading in different contexts. Amid this diversity, it is possible to identify an interaction between human/social sciences and communication/information technologies which transform the way we perceive and produce literature, communication, and culture. There is also a common concern with methodologies for the use of hypermedia as a tool for the creation and the communication of science. In this sense, relevant academic hypermedia productions which question the modes of representation of both analytic and reflective thinking are reviewed and analysed.

This issue discusses typologies and taxonomies for the understanding of cybertextualities.

The articles, fully available on the UFP’s Digital Library, are all written in Portuguese, but I will provide here a translation of the titles:

• Production of knowledge in digital media, Rui Torres & Sérgio Bairon
• From verb to pixel: Interfaces of the poetic in hypermedia, by Débora Cristina Santos e Silva
• Flash script POEX: The digital recoding of the experimental poem, by Manuel Portela
• Is there a new ‘Cordel’? Imaginary, tradition and cyberculture, by Maria Alice Amorim
• Educating for hypermedia reading: Methodological challenges, by Fabiano Correa da Silva
• The zoon tecnologi.com: Emerging entity of the information neocyberestructure, by David Parra Valcarce
• The im@ge thinks: Quantic aspects of the cybernetic image, by Luis Carlos Petry
• The digital medium and media production, by Lawrence Shum
• Analysis of hypermedia language productions, by Arlete dos Santos Petry
• TECNOMPB: Conceptual taxonomy for a technocentric approach to cultural forms, by Sergio Basbaum, Ilana Seltzer, Lucas Meneguette & Lucca Vicente
• A meaningless encyclopedic-poetic attack in cyberspace, by Fabio Oliveira Nunes & Edgar Franco
• Randomness and the creation of new reticular structures, by Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri
• «Page»: The reconfiguration of communication design in digital culture, by Sofia Gonçalves
• What’s common between thesauri and ontologies, by Rodrigo de Sales & Lígia Café

Paper versions can be bought at Ed. UFP website.

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Timestamp
24 hours of networked writing

an online exhibition and live writing event launching Saturday, Dec. 5, 2009 @ subitopress.org

http://streamflowconditions.subitopress.org

~Beacons~
John Cayley (CA)
Roderick Coover (US)
Ian Hatcher (US)
Mez Breeze (AU)
Jose Carlos Silvestre (BR)
Stephanie Strickland & Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo (US)
Rui Torres (PT)

code poetry ~~ code proper ~~ ghosts in the network ~~ river expeditions ~~ edges of chaos ~~ immersive horizons ~~ eco-poetics

TIMESTAMP: ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT DECEMBER 5th @ 4:35pm UTC-7 [MST*]

Beginning at 4:35pm MST (sunset in Colorado, physical location of Subito Press) on December 5, 2009, the artists of the online exhibition, Streamflow Conditions, will perform online for 24 hours through networked writing, live coding, streaming video, or other means.

[ *use this to translate into your timezone:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html ]

curated by Judd Morrissey