Last year, at ELO2013 in Paris, I presented a network analysis of creative works of electronic literature cited by PhD dissertations in the field. I’m revising the paper for publication in the Electronic Book Review next month, and I’ve added lots more dissertations to the data. Spreadsheets and Gephi are starting to drive me mad, but I’m getting there!
Here’s a list of the 44 dissertations in my data sample. In total they cite 467 different creative works of electronic literature. Sorry there are no links, but you can find entries for all these in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, and each entry includes links to entries for the works they cite. Many of the dissertations also have full text available.
| Michael Mateas | Interactive Drama, Art, and Artificial Intelligence | 2002 |
| Anders Fagerjord | Rhetorical Convergence: Earlier Media Influence on Web Media Form | 2003 |
| Carolyn Guertin | Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: The Archival Text, Digital Narrative and The Limits of Memory | 2003 |
| Jill Walker | Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World | 2003 |
| Scott Rettberg | Destination Unknown: Experiments in the Network Novel | 2003 |
| Anna Gunder | Hyperworks: On Digital Literature and Computer Games | 2004 |
| Donna Leishman | Creating Screen-Based Multiple State Environments: Investigating Systems of Confutation | 2004 |
| Edward Maloney | Footnotes in Fiction: A Rhetorical Approach | 2005 |
| Cheryl E. Ball | A New Media Reading Strategy | 2005 |
| David Ciccoricco | Repetition and Recombination: Reading Network Fiction | 2005 |
| Roman Zenner | Hypertextual Fiction on the Internet: A Structural and Narratological Analysis | 2005 |
| Serge Bouchardon | Le récit littéraire interactif. Narrativité et interactivité | 2005 |
| Anne Mangen | New narrative pleasures? A cognitive-phenomenological study of the experience of reading digital narrative fictions | 2006 |
| Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Expressive Processing: On Process-Intensive Literature and Digital Media | 2006 |
| D. Fox Harrell | Theory and technology for computational narrative: an approach to generative and interactive narrative with bases in algebraic semiotics and cognitive linguistics | 2007 |
| Jeremy Douglass | Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media | 2007 |
| Jessica Pressman | Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media | 2007 |
| Maria Engberg | Born Digital: Writing Poetry in the Age of New Media | 2007 |
| Nick Montfort | Generating Narrative Variation in Interactive Fiction | 2007 |
| Cheri Crenshaw | Exploiting Kairos in Electronic Literature: A Rhetorical Analysis | 2008 |
| Hans Kristian Rustad | Tekstspill i hypertekst. Koherensopplevelse og sjangergjenkjennelse i lesing av multimodale hyperfiksjoner | 2008 |
| Andrew Hutchison | Techno-historical Limits of the Interface: The Performance of Interactive Narrative Experiences | 2009 |
| Daniel C. Howe | Creativity Support for Computational Literature | 2009 |
| Florian Hartling | Der digitale Autor. Autorschaft im Zeitalter des Internets | 2009 |
| Markku Eskelinen | Travels in Cybertextuality. The Challenge of Ergodic Literature and Ludology to Literary Theory | 2009 |
| Zuzana Husárová | Písanie v interaktívnych médiách. Digitálna fikcia /Writing in the Interactive Media. Digital Fiction | 2009 |
| Leonardo L. Flores | Typing the Dancing Signifier: Jim Andrews’ (Vis)Poetics | 2010 |
| Van Leavenworth | The Gothic in Contemporary Interactive Fictions | 2010 |
| Anders Sundnes Løvlie | Textopia: Experiments with Locative Literature | 2011 |
| David Jhave Johnston | Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry as Ontological Probe | 2011 |
| Fabio De Vivo | eLiterature, analisi critica, strumenti interpretativi, potenzialità e possibilità applicative | 2011 |
| Giovanna Di Rosario | Electronic Poetry: Understanding Poetry in the Digital Environment | 2011 |
| Jukka Tyrkkö | Fuzzy Coherence: Making Sense of Continuity in Hypertext Narratives | 2011 |
| Luciana Gattass | Digital Literature: Theoretical and Aesthetic Reflections | 2011 |
| Maya Zalbidea Paniagua | Reading and Teaching Gender Issues in Electronic Literature and New Media Art | 2011 |
| Rulon Matley Wood | Hypertext and Ethnographic Representation: A Case Study | 2011 |
| Talan Memmott | Digital Rhetoric and Poetics: Signifying Strategies in Electronic Literature | 2011 |
| Holly Dupej | Next Generation Literary Machines: The “Dynamic Network Aesthetic” of Contemporary Poetry Generators | 2012 |
| Jeneen Naji | Poetic Machines: an investigation into the impact of the characteristics of the digital apparatus on poetic expression | 2012 |
| Jennifer Roudabush | Theorizing Digital Narrative: Beginnings, Endings, and Authorship | 2012 |
| Ugo Panzani | “I think, therefore I connect”. Database, connessionismo ed esopoiesi nel romanzo anglo-americano (1995-2011) | 2012 |
| Anaïs Guilet | Pour une littérature cyborg : l’hybridation médiatique du texte littéraire | 2013 |
| Fernanda Bonacho | A Leitura em Ambiente Digital: Transliteracias da Comunicação | 2013 |
| Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen | Digital Poesi. Æstetisk Analyse og det Mediales Rolle i Kunstværkers Kommunikation | 2013 |
This is all the dissertations on electronic literature between 2002 and 2013 that I’ve been able to find minus the following 12, which I couldn’t include because I either couldn’t access the full text, couldn’t read them (I could sort of read the German in Lang’s dissertation on Chinese electronic literature, but I couldn’t find anyone who could help me with the Chinese, and all the creative works referenced are in Chinese) or there were no links to creative works of electronic literature.
| Belinda Barnet | Lost in the Archive: Vision, Artefact and Loss in the Evolution of Hypertext | 2004 |
| Christy Dena | Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments | 2009 |
| Clara Mancini | Towards Cinematic Hypertext : A theoretical and Empirical Investigation | 2003 |
| Gavin Stewart | A homecoming festival : the application of the dialogic concepts of addressivity and the awareness of participation to an aesthetic of computer-mediated textual art | 2006 |
| Lisbeth Klastrup | Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds. Multiuser Textuality and the Emergence of Story | 2003 |
| Lori Emerson | The Rematerialization of Poetry: From the Bookbound to the Digital | 2008 |
| Mark C. Marino | I, Chatbot: The Gender and Race Performativity of Conversational Agents | 2006 |
| Mirona Magearu | Digital poetry: Comparative textual performances in trans-medial spaces | 2011 |
| Wilton Azevedo | Interpoesia: Le Debut de L’ecriture en Expansion | 2009 |
| Wilton Azevedo | Interpoesia: o Inicio da Escritura Expandida | 2009 |
| Xiaomeng Lang | Der Dialog der Kultur und die Kultur des Dialogs: Die chinesische Netzliteratur | 2008 |
| Zoltàn Szüts | Szellem a gépben. A hypertext | 2007 |
It would be interesting to do even more with the data. I really regret having shaved the data too much when I imported it into Gephi – I should have kept more of the metadata, but at the time I thought of it as a mess that would just complicate the affair. Now, though, I don’t have publication years or the university the PhD was granted by or the language it was written in, and so I can’t easily see how patterns of citation may have changed over time, or how geography, language or institutional links may affect citation practices. It’s pretty obvious that the French cite French works and the Portuguese Portuguese language works, but I have no idea whether the British cite different works from the Americans, for instance. The data’s all in the Knowledge Base. But I’d have to re-export it and there are way too many fiddly bits for me to do that right now. Maybe it’s good to have some questions still open for another time or another person to answer.
Here are all the creative works that are cited by at least two dissertations, along with links to the dissertations that cite them.
the library
Please give a word, if you want the library to try to find the english dissertations among the 12.