Digital Arts and Humanities - Book Chapters
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Item Teaching Digital Humanities: Neoliberal logic, class, and social relevance(University of Minnesota Press, 2023) O'Sullivan, James; Croxall, Brian; Jakacki, Diane K.The digital humanities have a class problem. This is not to say that other disciplines are immune from socioeconomic disparities, but that DH is a space in which students, across all stages of education, benefit from access to resources that would not normally be a necessity in the arts and humanities. To succeed in the digital humanities often requires privileged knowledge and resources, access to expensive equipment, software, expertise and training networks that remain beyond the reach of many students and their institutions. Many students do not have access to computers capable of performing substantial analytics, or they attend institutions where licensed platforms commonplace in DH are not provided. Many students do not have access to digital libraries providing readings and datasets, or cannot afford the majority of the field’s major publications, still in print and quite expensive. Many students do not have the resources to attend the field’s many training networks, and many students, in this age of remote learning and working, do not even have sufficient bandwidth to engage with DH through web-based tools and communities. Education is always subject to the dynamics of class, but the humanities before the digital turn were at least a space through which social relations could be challenged, relatively free of the cultural logic and resource requirements that heighten inequalities.Item The origins of electronic literature as net/web art(Sage Publications, 2018-12-24) O'Sullivan, James; Grigar, DeneItem AI and the editor(Future Text Publishing, 2023-11) Whittle, Sophie; O’Sullivan, James; Pidd, Michael; Hegland, Frode Alexander; Irish Research Council; Arts and Humanities Research Council; UK Research and InnovationDigital scholarly editing remains an industrial craft: the materials, medium and methods are technological, but the work itself remains largely manual and bespoke. And because digital editions are labour intensive, they can be limited in scale. Editors - that is, textual scholars and the makers of editions - were among the first in the arts and humanities to recognise the publishing affordances of the digital. And so it is surprising that machine learning and natural language processing have not yet played a greater role in scholarly editing; that newer forms of computation have not advanced editions to the same degree as markup languages did in the final decades of the twentieth century.Item Literary games, walking simulators and the new wave of digital fiction(Routledge, 2023-08-30) O'Sullivan, JamesHas the promise of digital literature ever really been realised? Or is the form, as suggested back in 2008 by Andrew Gallix, just one big anti-climax? Is hypertext fiction, essentially just a computerised version of the old-fashioned choose-your-own-adventure model, or generative writing, based on algorithms which string together words from pre-determined pools, all this field has to offer? Or do we find in new genres like the ‘walking simulator’ examples of fiction which brings text-based storytelling to rich, vibrant gamespaces, merging the expressive power of language with the immersion of present-day computer graphics? Since Gallix published his provocation in The Guardian, a series of critically acclaimed works which might be considered to be both literary and digital have been produced, titles like Dear Esther (2012) and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2017). But one could contend, as does Gallix, that digital literature is dead because the form is no longer reliant on language for creative expression and is thus no longer literary. This chapter explores the current status of digital literature in the context of walking simulators, offering a typological account of the form, its origins and the state of the art, before asking: have works like Esther and Rapture really rejuvenated digital literature, or are they something else entirely? The chapter begins with a brief survey of dominant definitions, resolving any tensions between terminologies like literature, digital literature and videogames, establishing what is meant by a ‘walking simulator’, and detailing the genre’s major aesthetic and mechanical characteristics. The argument that walking simulators are representative of a ‘new wave’ of digital literature is then advanced, comparing such aesthetic traits with older, what will be described as partly scholastic, experimental forms. This chapter argues that the art of digital literature has moved into an era where there is an explicit tension between literature as technical experimentation and literature as immersive digital storytelling. In doing, it is hoped that this chapter, through its focus on the walking simulator genre, demonstrates what digital literature looks like in the twenty-first century.Item Sharing as CARE and FAIR in the Digital Humanities(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022-11-03) Egan, Patrick; Murphy, Órla