GUEST SPEAKER: Scott Rettberg
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
11AM

Scott Rettberg, Associate Professor and the Director of the Digital Culture Research Group from the University of Bergen, Norway, will present: “Visualizing Electronic Literature: Potential Research Applications in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base.” The Digital Culture Research Group at UiB is a very active multicultural unit combining researchers from various art and humanities disciplines who share an interest in studying how technology and culture interact.

Visualizing Electronic Literature: Potential Research Applications in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base
The ELMCIP Knowledge Base of Electronic Literature is an open-access research database, documenting information about creative authors, works of electronic literature, critical writing that references those works, publishers, organizations, events, and teaching resources about e-lit. The Knowledge Base is intended to document the field of electronic literature not only as series of distinct objects to be understood in isolation from each other, but as a field of practice in which the activities of writers, the activities of scholars, publications, performances, and exhibitions are all seen in relation to each other. With this in mind, the Knowledge Base has been developed as a platform in which cross-referencing is key. When a record of a critical article is documented in the KB, all of the works it references are noted, and cross-references then automatically appear on the record for the work itself. Similarly, cross-references are made to every other type of record it touches - when a work by a particular author is entered, a reference automatically appears on that author’s page, likewise for a publisher. The Knowledge Base is a contributory project, being built collectively. It offers authors, critics, and teachers of electronic literature an opportunity to document and share their work, and make it visible and usable to others in the field. Because the Knowledge Base is semantically structured and outputs records in RDF format, it also makes works entered it more visible in machine-readable and processable ways to search engines such as Google and to other scholarly databases. Because the idea of relationships between actors and objects is so central to the model around which the Knowledge Base is constructed, and because it captures so much information about those relationships, the potential of using information visualization to open up new avenues of research, particularly of the kind that Franco Morretti describes as “distant reading”, is rich. This presentation will focus on the ways that the UiB Electronic Literature Research Group is beginning to explore those avenues, and will seek advice and input from researchers at EVL on ways to enhance our research in this direction.