Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors such as Dene Grigar, Sandy Baldwin, Carlos Reis, and Frieder Nake. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality.

Digital Textuality explores the ways in which the English language is used in new media technologies. This undergraduate textbook covers a range of digital text genres, including news sites, social media, collaborative fiction, hypertext fiction and poetry. Using Hallidayan linguistics, along with other approaches, such as Discourse Analysis, Multimodal Semiotics and Text World Theory, this book reflects the latest language-based research in digital texts. Topics included in these chapters are digital literacy, identity, online communities, hybridity and superdiversity.

Recent work on children's digital cultures has identified a range of literacies emerging through children's engagement with new media technologies. This edited collection focuses on children's digital cultures, specifically examining the role of play and creativity in learning with these new technologies. The chapters in this book were contributed by an international range of respected researchers, who seek to extend our understandings of children's interactions with new media, both within and outside of school. They address and provide evidence for continuing debates around the following questions: What notions of creativity are useful in our fields? How does an understanding of play inform analysis of children's engagement with digital cultures? How might school practice take account of out-of-school learning in relation to digital cultures? How can we understand children's engagements with digital technologies in commercialized spaces? Offering current research, theoretical debate and empirical studies, this intriguing text will challenge the thinking of scholars and teachers alike as it explores the evolving nature of play within the media landscape of the twenty-first century.

This book describes and explains the fundamental changes that are now taking place in the most traditional areas of humanities theory and method, scholarship and education. The changes flow from the re-examination of the very foundations of the humanities - its theories of textuality and communication - that are being forced by developments in information technology. A threshold was crossed during the last decade of the twentieth century with the emergence of the World Wide Web, which has (1) globalized access to computerized resources and information, and (2) made interface and computer graphics paramount concerns for work in digital culture. While these changes are well known, their consequences are not well understood, despite so much discussion by digital enthusiasts and digital doomsters alike. In reconsidering these matters, Radiant Textuality introduces some remarkable new proposals for integrating computerized tools into the central interpretative and critical activities of traditional humanities disciplines, and of literary studies in particular.

In literary investigation all evidence is textual, dependent on preservation in material copies. Copies, however, are vulnerable to inadvertent and purposeful change. In this volume, Peter Shillingsburg explores the implications of this central concept of textual scholarship. Through thirteen essays, Shillingsburg argues that literary study depends on documents, the preservation of works, and textual replication, and he traces how this proposition affects understanding. He explains the consequences of textual knowledge (and ignorance) in teaching, reading, and research—and in the generous impulses behind the digitization of cultural documents. He also examines the ways in which facile assumptions about a text can lead one astray, discusses how differing international and cultural understandings of the importance of documents and their preservation shape both knowledge about and replication of works, and assesses the dissemination of information in the context of ethics and social justice. In bringing these wide-ranging pieces together, Shillingsburg reveals how and why meaning changes with each successive rendering of a work, the value in viewing each subsequent copy of a text as an original entity, and the relationship between textuality and knowledge. Featuring case studies throughout, this erudite collection distills decades of Shillingsburg’s thought on literary history and criticism and appraises the place of textual studies and scholarly editing today.

In the age of "complex Tv", of social networking and massive consumption of transmedia narratives, a myriad short-lived phenomena surround films and TV programs raising questions about the endurance of a fictional world and other mediatized discourse over a long arc of time. The life of media products can change direction depending on the variability of paratextual materials and activities such as online commentaries and forums, promos and trailers, disposable merchandise and gadgets, grassroots video production, archives, and gaming. This book examines the tension between permanence and obsolescence in the production and experience of media byproducts analysing the affections and meanings they convey and uncovering the machineries of their persistence or disposal. Paratexts, which have long been considered only ancillary to a central text, interfere instead with textual politics by influencing the viewers’ fidelity (or infidelity) to a product and affecting a fictional world’s "life expectancy". Scholars in the fields of film studies, media studies, memory and cultural studies are here called to observe these byproducts' temporalities (their short form and/or long temporal extention, their nostalgic politics or future projections) and assess their increasing influence on our use of the past and present, on our temporal experience, and, consequently, on our social and political self-positioning through the media.

The newest volume in the distinguished annual

The first systematic, comprehensive reference covering the ideas, genres, and concepts behind digital media. The study of what is collectively labeled “New Media”—the cultural and artistic practices made possible by digital technology—has become one of the most vibrant areas of scholarly activity and is rapidly turning into an established academic field, with many universities now offering it as a major. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media is the first comprehensive reference work to which teachers, students, and the curious can quickly turn for reliable information on the key terms and concepts of the field. The contributors present entries on nearly 150 ideas, genres, and theoretical concepts that have allowed digital media to produce some of the most innovative intellectual, artistic, and social practices of our time. The result is an easy-to-consult reference for digital media scholars or anyone wishing to become familiar with this fast-developing field.

Art is a concept that has been used by researchers for centuries to explain and realize numerous theories. The legendary artist Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was a profound artist and a genius inventor and researcher. The co-existence of science and art, therefore, is necessary for global appeal and society’s paradigms, literacy, and scientific movements. Contemporary Art Impacts on Scientific, Social, and Cultural Paradigms: Emerging Research and Opportunities provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of present post-aesthetic art and its applications within economics, politics, social media, and everyday life. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as media studies, contemporary storytelling, and literacy nationalism, this book is ideally designed for researchers, media studies experts, media professionals, academicians, and students.

A new analytical framework for understanding literary videogames, the literary-ludic spectrum, illustrated by close readings of selected works. In this book, Astrid Ensslin examines literary videogames—hybrid digital artifacts that have elements of both games and literature, combining the ludic and the literary. These works can be considered verbal art in the broadest sense (in that language plays a significant part in their aesthetic appeal); they draw on game mechanics; and they are digital-born, dependent on a digital medium (unlike, for example, conventional books read on e-readers). They employ narrative, dramatic, and poetic techniques in order to explore the affordances and limitations of ludic structures and processes, and they are designed to make players reflect on conventional game characteristics. Ensslin approaches these hybrid works as a new form of experimental literary art that requires novel ways of playing and reading. She proposes a systematic method for analyzing literary-ludic (L-L) texts that takes into account the analytic concerns of both literary stylistics and ludology. After establishing the theoretical underpinnings of her proposal, Ensslin introduces the L-L spectrum as an analytical framework for literary games. Based on the phenomenological distinction between deep and hyper attention, the L-L spectrum charts a work's relative emphases on reading and gameplay. Ensslin applies this analytical toolkit to close readings of selected works, moving from the predominantly literary to the primarily ludic, from online hypermedia fiction to Flash fiction to interactive fiction to poetry games to a highly designed literary “auteur” game. Finally, she considers her innovative analytical methodology in the context of contemporary ludology, media studies, and literary discourse analysis.