nterestingly, Patchwork Girl has more citations in the humanities and social science journals primarily indexed by MUSE and ProQuest. It seems that afternoon may have influenced a broader audience of scholars, but that Patchwork Girl has influenced literary scholars more heavily. Finally, the purple column shows references in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, which only tracks the field of electronic literature, but which is not yet complete. At the time of writing, the ELMCIP Knowledge Base is only a little over a year old.

Some of my inspiration for this method of studying a field comes from reading Franco Moretti’s book Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, where he talks about “distant reading” based on large quantities of data about a literary system. For instance, he looked at publication data from different countries, specifically the dates of publication of early novels. From this, he saw that it took about twenty years for the early British novel to grow from a point where only five or six novels were published annually to a critical mass with new novels being published more than once a week. Moretti ran the same test against other countries’ statistics, and found that this twenty year cycle can be seen to repeat itself in a range of countries, though with different starting points according to when novels began to be published in that country: “See how similar those shapes are: five countries, th

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. Additionally, 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. The call to action found at the end of the essay has given rise to this Electronic Liter

advocate for the preservation, archiving, and free c