criticism – Page 3 – loriemerson

from “Web Stalker” to the Googlization of Literature

I’m nostalgic for a moment I never lived through – when we were concerned enough with monopolies over access to information online that not only did we call the competition between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator a “browser war,” but there were even competitions such as the Amsterdam-based “Browserday” to design new, innovative browsers. […]

by Lori Emerson

It’s Not Digital Humanities – it’s Media Studies

Thanks to the generosity of people at the Library of Congress such as Trevor Owens, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst on the LOC’s blog The Signal. I especially wanted to talk with Ernst not only about his Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF), which bears a strong affiliation to […]

by Lori Emerson

From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly

Below is an excerpt from chapter two, “From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly,” from my book Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press 2014). It is also the basis of the talk I gave at MLA in January 2013 and the full version of […]

by Lori Emerson

D.I.Y. Typewriter Art

Download the pdf here. This lovely oddity arrived in the mail yesterday – Bob Neill’s Book of Typewriter Art (with special computer program) from 1982. It’s so difficult to capture its lovely oddness is just a few sentences or images so I decided to scan the entirety of the book and make it available here […]

by Lori Emerson

“The whole world is faking it”: Computer-Generated Poetry as Linguistic Evidence

The following is a short review I wrote of discourse.cpp (pdf available here) by O.S. le Si, ed. Aurélie Herbelot, published by the Berlin-based Peer Press in 2011. The review was just published in the December issue of Computational Linguistics. * discourse.cpp (Peer Press, 2011) is a short collection of computer-generated poetry edited by computational linguistics […]

by Lori Emerson

Media Archaeology and Digital Stewardship

I was fortunate to have the chance to think through the relationship between the field of media archaeology, the Media Archaeology Lab, and digital preservation/stewardship thanks to this interview with Trevor Owens on the Library of Congress blog, The Signal, called “Media Archaeology and Digital Stewardship: An Interview with Lori Emerson.” The invitation to talk […]

by Lori Emerson

Media Studies and Writing Surfaces (introduction to Selected Fiction of John Riddell)

Below is the introduction that Derek Beaulieu and I wrote for Writing Surfaces: Selected Fiction of John Riddell that Wilfred Laurier University Press is generously publishing in April 2013. Please do pre-order a copy through your local independent bookstore. The collection is, I think, a perfect instance of literary experimentation with media archaeology. * Introduction: […]

by Lori Emerson

“Reading Writing Interfaces” Book Project Description

Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (forthcoming University of Minnesota Press, 2014) Table of Contents: Introduction Chapter 1: Indistinguishable From Magic | Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier 1.0 Introduction | Invisible, Imperceptible, Inoperable 1.1 Natural, Organic, Invisible 1.2 The iPad | “a truly magical and revolutionary product” 1.3 From Videoplace […]

by Lori Emerson

Laughing Gland (pdfs)

After studying and writing poetry under the guidance of Douglas Barbour at the University of Alberta, in the late 1990s I made my way to the University of Victoria to do an M.A. with Barbour’s long-time sound poetry collaborator Stephen Scobie. I went there to write a thesis on bpNichol and sound poetry and, in […]

by Lori Emerson

Greaseball Comics, featuring Milt the Morph as Lonely Fred 2nd issue (part 9)

Along with a nearly complete set of grOnk magazine, Nelson Ball also generously sent me other bpNichol ephemera including this second issue of Nichol’s “Greaseball Comics, featuring Milt the Morph as Lonely Fred” from June 1972. You can download the pdf here. You can also download the eighth issue from bpnichol.ca > See also grOnk […]