Jessica Pressman

Digital literature poses many challenges to traditional literary criticism, for such works combine text, audio, moving images, and computational processes as well as hardware and software technologies to produce their aesthetic effects. This project models a new practice of collaborative literary analysis in which three digital humanities scholars each apply radically different methodological perspectives to works of electronic literature in an effort to produce shared readings. Through a series of case studies, they develop a collaborative method of digital humanities scholarship that integrates “traditional” hermeneutics with more recent methodologies—namely, media visualization, critical code studies, and digital forensics—to provide the multiple perspectives necessary to approach digital media and its poetics. To enable these collaborative reading practices, they will create a web-based critical media compendium to present their methodologies and application. It will also provide data sets and working models as a framework for future scholarship in this emergent field. Building upon a manuscript in-progress written by the collaborators, the project demonstrates the necessity of collaborative transmedial research and publication. Award period: January 1, 2013 – December 31, 2013