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Digital Humanities

Dissertations on electronic literature 2002-2013

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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.

44-dissertations-2degree-works-and-dissertations

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1 Comment

  1. the library

    Please give a word, if you want the library to try to find the english dissertations among the 12.

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