Over the last year I’ve spent many hours going through dissertations on electronic literature, entering information about them and the creative works they cite into the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base so that I could visualize the networks of works.

The final paper is now published in the July 2014 issue of the Electronic book review: “Visualising Networks of Electronic Literature: Dissertations and the Creative Works They Cite.” Hooray! I’ve also put the unedited (pre-visualized?) Gephi file on Figshare so you can download and play with the data yourself if you like. I’m sure there is more that could be done with the data – and it might be interesting (for me or for you – feel free!) to look at it again in five years time with five new years of dissertations.

Here are my previous blog posts about this research:

• Is a network analysis of cited works bound to be biased? (25 April 2014)
• The shift in genres of electronic literature 2002-2013 (24 April 2014)
• Dissertations on electronic literature 2002-2013 (23 April 2014)
• Tutorial: How to explore a network graph of electronic literature in Gephi (28 August 2013)
• Beginning a network analysis of creative works of electronic literature as cited in 28 PhD dissertations (5 July 2013)

It would be interesting to do a new analysis of this in five years time with the new dissertations that will be written by then. And no doubt there are other approaches that could be taken to the same data. If you want to play with it, or do anything with it, please feel free. I’ve licensed the Gephi data set under a CC-BY license and would really like to see what others might do with it.

Here’s a screenshot of the preview of the pre-visualized network at Figshare, ready to be downloaded – Figshare’s preview for Gephi files actually lets you click around in the network, it’s pretty nifty. Here I moused over the node for
Jukka Tyrkkö’s 2011 dissertation “Fuzzy Coherence: Making Sense of Continuity in Hypertext Narratives” and so I can see connections (edges) to all the creative works he cited.