The Challenges Of Born Digital Fiction

The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction: Editions, Translations, and Emulations addresses the growing concern about how best to maintain and extend the accessibility of early interactive novels and hypertext fiction or narratives. These forms of born-digital literature were produced before or shortly after the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web with proprietary software and on formats now obsolete. Preserving and extending them for a broad study by scholars of book culture, literary studies, and digital culture necessitate they are migrated, translated, and emulated – yet these activities can impact the integrity of the reader experience. Thus, this Element centers on three key challenges facing such efforts: (1) precision of references: identifying correct editions and versions of migrated works in scholarship; (2) enhanced media translation: approaching translation informed by the changing media context in a collaborative environment; and (3) media integrity: relying on emulation as the prime mode for long-term preservation of born-digital novels.

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

Providing an up-to-date and accessible overview of the essentials of narrative theory, Narrative: The Basics guides the reader through the major approaches to the study of narrative, using contemporary examples from a wide range of narrative forms to answer key questions including: What is narrative? What are the "universals" of narrative? What is the relationship between narrative and ideology? Does the reader have a role in narrative? Has the digital age brought radically new forms of narrative? Each chapter introduces key theoretical terms, providing thinking points and suggestions for further study. With an emphasis on applying theory to example studies, it is an ideal introduction to the current study of narrative.

"An excellent primer on what it means to live digitally. It should be required reading for adults trying to understand the next generation." -- Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital The first generation of children who were born into and raised in the digital world are coming of age and reshaping the world in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture, and even the shape of our family life are being transformed. But who are these wired young people? And what is the world they're creating going to look like? In this revised and updated edition, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a cutting-edge sociological portrait of these young people, who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow. Exploring a broad range of issues -- privacy concerns, the psychological effects of information overload, and larger ethical issues raised by the fact that young people's social interactions, friendships, and civic activities are now mediated by digital technologies -- Born Digital is essential reading for parents, teachers, and the myriad of confused adults who want to understand the digital present and shape the digital future.

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics 2e provides an updated overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. Over a decade on from the first edition of the Handbook, this collection of 47 chapters from experts in key areas offers a comprehensive introduction to both the development and use of corpora as well as their ever-evolving applications to other areas, such as digital humanities, sociolinguistics, stylistics, translation studies, materials design, language teaching and teacher development, media discourse, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, second language acquisition and testing. The new edition updates all core chapters and includes new chapters on corpus linguistics and statistics, digital humanities, translation, phonetics and phonology, second language acquisition, social media and theoretical perspectives. Chapters provide annotated further reading lists and step-by-step guides as well as detailed overviews across a wide range of themes. The Handbook also includes a wealth of case studies that draw on some of the many new corpora and corpus tools that have emerged in the last decade. Organised across four themes, moving from the basic start-up topics such as corpus building and design to analysis, application and reflection, this second edition remains a crucial point of reference for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars in applied linguistics.

Written for and read on a computer screen, digital fiction pursues its verbal, discursive and conceptual complexity through the digital medium. It is fiction whose structure, form and meaning are dictated by the digital context in which it is produced and requires analytical approaches that are sensitive to its status as a digital artifact. Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

This handbook reviews efforts to increase the use of empirical methods in studies of the aesthetic and social effects of literary reading. The reviewed research is expansive, including extension of familiar theoretical models to novel domains (e.g., educational settings); enlarging empirical efforts within under-represented research areas (e.g., child development); and broadening the range of applicable quantitative and qualitative methods (e.g., computational stylistics; phenomenological methods). Especially challenging is articulation of the subtle aesthetic and social effects of literary artefacts (e.g., poetry, film). Increasingly, the complexity of these effects is addressed in multi-variate studies, including confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. While each chapter touches upon the historical background of a specific research topic, two chapters address the area’s historical background and guiding philosophical assumptions. Taken together, the material in this volume provides a systematic introduction to the area for early career professionals, while challenging active researchers to develop theoretical frameworks and empirical procedures that match the complexity of their research objectives.

In 11 original essays highly reputed scholars from both the United States and Europe take a fresh look at the plurality of contemporary scientific cultures and their respective methodologies and discursive practices. While some investigate recent advancements in life and computer sciences (nanotechnologies, robotics, genetic coding, electronic communication and databases etc.) and their repercussions in the social and political field, others discuss new approaches, especially in the humanities, that may help to bridge the gulf between the "two cultures" (C.P. Snow) and open up new perspectives for 'cross-cultural' fertilization. Each essay - if to varying degrees - also probes the regulatory political and institutional mechanisms that determine both the success and public acceptance and reputation of specific scientific cultures, particularly with respect to scientific ethics and the frequently invoked 'moral' obligation of scientists and researchers.