Literatures In The Digital Era

This book guides readers through the most salient theoretical and creative possibilities opened up by the shift to digital literary forms.

Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilised as a consequence of being archived. Fieldwork reports by linguists and anthropologists in three continents provide concrete examples of overcoming barriers -- ethical, practical and conceptual -- in digital documentation projects. Oral Literature In The Digital Age is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.

The application of technology to information, communication, and culture has been through the history of humanity a key factor in social progress and well being. Literatures in the Digital Era: Theory and Praxis analyses in its twenty chapters the impacts of digital technology for the contemporary culture. The literary system is being powerfully affected in three aspects. In the first place, computer resources have been used to preserve and edit literary texts, associating to them graphical material, links with related texts or with dictionaries, and, above all, developing search tools of concordance and syntactic/semantic analysis. Secondly, we are watching the birth of a digital literature, with new generic characteristics, new creators, with knowledge of both, technological mechanisms and literary resources, and a reader capable of interpreting and enjoying texts on the screen. Thirdly, literary theory has expressed new postulates with regard to the multiple authorship of digital texts, the disintegration of the textual meaning, the intertextuality and implications of the reader in the creation process and the interpretation of the texts. These three impacts imply, for some authors, the search of a new paradigm for the creation, reading, and interpretation of digital texts, which points to a new humanism.

Drawing on approaches from literary studies, media and cultural studies, book history, cultural policy, and the digital humanities, this book asks: What is the significance of authors communicating directly to readers via social media? How does digital media reframe the “live” author-reader encounter? And does the growing army of reader-reviewers signal an overdue democratizing of literary culture or the atomizing of cultural authority? In exploring these questions, The Digital Literary Sphere takes stock of epochal changes in the book industry while probing books’ and digital media’s complex contemporary coexistence.

The book publishing industry is going through a period of profound and turbulent change brought about in part by the digital revolution. What is the role of the book in an age preoccupied with computers and the internet? How has the book publishing industry been transformed by the economic and technological upheavals of recent years, and how is it likely to change in the future? This is the first major study of the book publishing industry in Britain and the United States for more than two decades. Thompson focuses on academic and higher education publishing and analyses the evolution of these sectors from 1980 to the present. He shows that each sector is characterized by its own distinctive ‘logic’ or dynamic of change, and that by reconstructing this logic we can understand the problems, challenges and opportunities faced by publishing firms today. He also shows that the digital revolution has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on the book publishing business, although the real impact of this revolution has little to do with the ebook scenarios imagined by many commentators. Books in the Digital Age will become a standard work on the publishing industry at the beginning of the 21st century. It will be of great interest to students taking courses in the sociology of culture, media and cultural studies, and publishing. It will also be of great value to professionals in the publishing industry, educators and policy makers, and to anyone interested in books and their future.

“This is one of 13 romance novels that should be on every woman's bucket list."--Bustle.com I had the craziest idea when I decided to auction my virginity online. I have reasons for it. Good reasons. My mom’s hospital bills, for one. My medical school tuition, for another. By day, I’m a student and popular gaming blogger, but my dream is to become a doctor. This auction could free me from a crushing pile of debt and give me the cash I need to make my dreams a reality. And honestly, I’m also looking forward to cashing in that troublesome V-card. Win, win. My rules are set in stone: One night, then no further contact with the auction winner. Enter Adam Drake, the brilliant gaming company CEO and multimillionaire. He won my auction. He’s young, driven, and so damn sexy. It’s frightening how attracted I am - though I’d never admit it. And it’s clear I’ll need to protect my heart. But Adam is used to making the rules and before I can catch it, he's found a loophole. Every stipulation I made to protect myself is getting tossed by the wayside. I can’t help but wonder… Is he playing me? Or is he playing for keeps?

The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media.

Bringing together strands of public discourse about valuing personal achievement at the expense of social values and the impacts of global capitalism, mass media, and digital culture on the lives of children, this book challenges the potential of science and business to solve the world’s problems without a complementary emphasis on social values. The selection of literary works discussed illustrates the power of literature and human arts to instill such values and foster change. The book offers a valuable foundation for the field of literacy education by providing knowledge about the importance of language and literature that educators can use in their own teaching and advocacy work.