The five-part model presented here as follows:
1) Data. This includes text, images, sound files, specifications of story grammars, declarative information about fictional worlds, tables of statistics about word frequencies, and so on. It also includes instructions to the reader (who may also be an interactor), including those that specify processes to be carried out by the reader.
2) Processes. These are processes actually carried out by the work, and are central to many efforts in the field (especially those proceeding from a computer science perspective). As Chris Crawford puts it: “processing data is the very essence of what a computer does." Nevertheless, processes are optional for digital literature (e.g., many email narratives carry out no processes within the work) as well as for ergodic literature and cybertext (in which all the effort and calculation may be on the reader's part).
3) Interaction. This is change to the state of the work, for which the work was designed, that comes from outside the work. For example, when a reader reconfigures a combinatory text (rather than this being performed by the work's processes) this is interaction. Similarly, when the work's processes accept input from outside the work-whether from the audience or other sources. This is a feature of many popular genres of digital literature, but it is again optional for digital literature and cybertext (e.g., Tale-Spin falls into both categories even when not run interactively) and for ergoilic literature as well (given that the page exploration involved in reading Apollinaire's poems qualifies them as ergoilic). However, it's important to note that cybertext requires calculation somewhere in the production of scriptons--either via processes or interaction.
4) Surface. The surface of a work of digital literature is what the audience experiences: the output of the processes operating on the data, in the context of the physical hardware and setting, through which any audience interaction takes place. No work that reaches an audience can do so without a surface, but some works are more tied to particular surfaces than others (e.g., installation works), and some (e.g., email narratives) make audience selections (e.g., one's chosen email reader) a detennining part of their context.
5) Context. Once there is a work and an audience, there is always context so this isn't optional. Context is important for interpreting any work, but digital literature calls us to consider types of context (e.g., intra-audience communication and relationships in an :MMO fiction) that print-based literature has had to confront less often.