That summer he developed-'With some aesthetic advice from his sister Barbara, using Turing's random number generator, and perhaps in collaboration 'With Turing-a Mark Iprogram that created combinatory love letters. This was the first piece of digital literature, and of digital art, predating by a decade the earliest examples ofdigital computer art from recent surveys (e.g., Paul)

Digital" information, as opposed to "analog'' information, is represented by discrete ratherthan continuous values. It's actually related, according to the Oeford EnglishDictionary, to the sense of fingers and numbers as "digits."

also store its instructions in the same read/write memory as the data on whichit acted.

Turing's paper wasn'tremarkable for imagining a machine that could carry out the work of humancomputers.

they were expected to follow aknown and specified set of instructions which, together, formed an effectiveprocedure for solving a particular kind of problem

Acomputer was a person who calculated answers to mathematical problems.

What do we need to read, to interpret, when we read digitalliterature?"">o I

To me, "digital art" is the larger category of which "digital literature" is apart. It encompasses all the arts that require digital computation, not just theliterary arts

I mean the arts that call our attention to language, present us with characters, unfold stories, and make us reflecton the structures and common practices of such activities.

I mean literary work that requires the digital computation performedby laptops, desktops, servers, cellphones, game consoles, interactive environment controllers, or any of the other computers that surround us

Craig Robertson, associate professor of media and communication studies, argues that ordering paper at the document level and storing it in a filing cabinet changed our relationship to information, that people came to envision information itself as a discrete thing, “Information, grasped as individual pieces of paper, became malleable, both in its physical shape and its contents.”

I had a number of sheets of newspaper, and I took a Stanley blade and cut through them, and little bits and pieces looked so amusing to me that I started jiggling them around as one would in a collage.” Gysin had accidentally rediscovered the cut-up method, a technique that can be traced back to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s.

“Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different—cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise—in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite.”

The cut-up method is best-known as a literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text.

But beyond working with basic text animation and variations on hypertext, other artists have approached electronic writing as a way to experiment with light versions of artificial intelligence (creating programs that themselves write “original” works of literature), as experimental graphic design and typography (finding a tradition in one of the great typographical experiments of the 20th century, Stephen Mallarme’s exquisite poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard”), as a way to tweak the conventions of video games (which, in their more elaborate guises, such as “Red Dead Redemption,” can themselves be seen as works of literature), or as ways to play with the conventions of the web itself — “fake” websites, such as the notorious early works of the Yes Men, or significant one-off, “Blackness for Sale.”

I generally understand Web 2.0 as the replacement of static HTML pages with a series of mathematical procedures, or algorithms, that construct brand-new pages on the fly after you click a link. Back in the day, an individual “hand-coded” an HTML page, put it on a web server, and the page sat there, appearing every so often on some computer screen somewhere once a link to it was clicked. But today, for instance, you click on “Scott Walker” in the musical preferences of your Facebook page and a little program is activated which searches out, and then collates, all of the names of the people in the Facebook database who like Scott Walker and creates a brand-new, never-before-seen, never-before-imaged (since who, after all, likes Scott Walker?) web page, untouched by human hands.)

Other artists have come at it from the more familiar (at least in the community) angle emerging out of the flurry of interest in hypertext as a next step in the evolution of written language — the book is dead, long live the link. Ironically, more theory about hypertext was produced in the days before the web, when one had to work one’s way back to the one computer in the computer science department reserved for creative efforts, as Shelley Jackson did at Brown University when she was writing her now canonical Patchwork Girl (which is now, unfortunately, largely illegible due to the inability of Eastgate Systems, her publisher, to keep up with OS upgrades), than now, when hypertext is a way of life.

“electronic literature” — it’s a creaky phrase that doesn’t survive parsing, hence the wavering between this term, “new media writing,” “digital literature,” etc.

It suggests that differences in cognitive patterns between print and electronic works, assumptions of what constitutes the quality of "literariness," and even requirements for tenure and promotion contribute to its lack of presence in the academy.

Grigar further argues that as video games and other popular culture digital media forms mainstream into the academy, so too will Electronic Literature. Students inculcated from birth by digital media will ultimately be the final arbiters of its popularity and growth.

In beginning a study of Electronic Literature, the best place to start is N. Katherine Hayles' book, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, published by Notre Dame Press in 2008. The first chapter, especially, is helpful since it lays out its definition, provides a historical context for what she identifies as "generations" of works of electronic literature, identifies some of its genres, and cites examples of important works. A version of this chapter was first published online by the Electronic Literature Organization and is generally seen as "the first systematic attempt to survey and summarize the fast-changing field of electronic literature, artists, designers, writers, critics, and other stakeholders" ("ELO Publications").

While in Europe the term "Digital Literature" is used to refer to Electronic Literature, in the U.S. digital literature is generally seen as print-based literary work digitalized for the web and stand-alone technologies like a CD-ROM. Examples of digital literature would include a copy of Homer's Odyssey found at The Perseus Digital Library or an electronic edition of Emily Dickinson's "manuscripts" at the Dickinson Electronic Archives. Put simply, Electronic Literature is considered a "born digital" art form with unique approaches to thinking about and working with digital technologies for the purpose of creating literary art.

"literary works created with the use of a computer for the electronic medium such that they cannot be experienced in any meaningful way without the mediation of an electronic device"

But if we think of it within the framework of literature expressed in yet another medium, the digital, then it can easily be regarded as the continuation of a very long tradition, one that is exploring the affordances and constraints of this new medium

Through our conference series, we provide a way for artists, writers, and scholars to productively discuss existing work and to further develop the field.

ELO is the only scholarly body in the U.S. dedicated solely to the investigation of literature produced for the digital medium.

What makes the work that the ELO does absolutely imperative in this “Digital Information Age,”