I realise that things have been a little quiet on this blog recently. I blame the onset of a fair-to-middling Swedish summer, which has encouraged me to get out of the office slightly more often than usual (not to mention the fact that the entire campus here in Karlskrona seems to have shut down over the summer break, library included).

Nevertheless, I’ve been thinking a lot about electronic literature over the past few months, which is just as well given that I’m currently undertaking a post-doc on the subject. I have to admit that even six months into the post-doc, I still feel like a complete n00b when it comes to e-lit. In many ways it’s been a real challenge to my preconceived notions about writing and the digital realm.

One experience that really helped to put my mind into focus in terms of grappling with these issues was attending the ELMCIP workshop my colleagues and I organised last month in Karlskrona on the subject of electronic literature pedagogy. While I did not present at the workshop, I did undertake the task of updating the ELMCIP twitter feed for the duration.

I must say, as someone who’s always thought that the people at the BBC who update the ball-by-ball text commentary during cricket matches have the best job in the world, that I really enjoyed the experience of composing short tweets on the presentations, responding to the tweets of others following the proceedings and re-tweeting various pithy statements.

The problem of course, as with many manifestations of electronic or digital media, that much of the context of that experience is/was temporal – ie, impermanent. It’s impossible to capture the full extent to which the ELMCIP stream was followed, responded to and digested. Nevertheless, I think it’s still necessary to do whatever one can to document these sorts of experiences.

So, I’ve made a screenshot of the hundred-odd tweets I wrote during the workshop. While the screenshot cannot capture the number of tweets that were re-tweeted, it does, hopefully, give a kind of summary which I can look back on with pride in my dotage (ie the duration of my life post-post-doc). Check it out, as they say, ‘over the fold’.

Continue reading →