This sounds to me like an excellent idea and I look forward to working with you on expanding our ‘tag team.’

My thanks also to the editors at nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human, for having given us a model that I hope we can bring to discussions on the e-lit directory.

JPT

Joe Tabbi says “I am troubled (here and in the post by Jason Nelson) by a lack of discipline and an overabundance of self-assertion.”

Really no self assertion was intended and the comment about “lack of discipline” is absurd. Rather, mine was a very simple and hopeful point. Speaking as a writer/creator of e-lit, I create to further the field, how we understand, let’s say digital poetics, for personal reasons and then for some type of audience. I don’t create to be popular, but somehow my work has had success both in the critical/academic realm and the wider net/web. I say this because it appears our goals, Joe’s and mine and others, are the same. To create, consider, expand and share.

And yet, for the most part, we have not been successful at sharing our work. And it would seem a directory such this would have sharing/spreading as one of its primary goals. So, perhaps we could occasionally borrow the directory and its subsequent entries and transformations as a platform for promoting e-lit directly. And I would be glad to lend a hand in bringing new eyes/hands and voices to the field.

How about this for an idea. Highlight different tags each week….much like wikipedia picks various articles to highlight. Thus introducing people to work, without making them slog through the directory.

Or having guest taggers….who create tags, apply them, then share which works they tagged, what the tag means and why they tagged them.

Jason

The discussion has been, as Davin Heckman said in his initial response to this thread, “useful” in refining my own sense of the literary possibilities, and also the limits, of the technology I’m currently using during a summer-long project of close reading, viewing, and description. In lieu of a “summary,” I’d like to invite the participants of this forum to view a draft of the oft-mentioned Electronic Literature Directory (version 2.0), where a small sample of e-lit works is now available:

http://eld.thedigitalreview.com/

I should emphasize that this is still under construction. The Directory won’t be launched probably until next month, when the initial works gathered by myself and my team of editors will be made available to the public, who will be invited, in turn, to comment on the works presented and to submit works (and keywords, commentary, and new descriptions) in turn.

I think of the Directory as a profile of an emerging field, whose outlines, tools, and techniques ought to be coterminous with developments in the Humanities generally. The kind of works being collected are the “facts” or “objects” that digital literary studies are given to work with. Bruno Latour speaks of “facts” as “gatherings,” and the question for digital literary studies would then be, what kind of discipline – what set of shared writing practices and habits of response – is suggested by the “gathering” now under way by literary scholars and artists working in electronic environments.

The Electronic Literature Directory is in no way “representative” of the sum total of online literary activity – no more than Latourian “facts” are representative of the world observed by scientists or sociologists. What the ELD offers, as does any scientific enterprise, is a sustained and continuous assemblage of facts a participant can return to, reflect on, contest when necessary, and reconsider in light of one’s own work and what others are reading and viewing currently.

as long as humanities scholars aren’t being liberated from gainful employment in the process.

Perhaps “liberated from”?

As far as I can tell, the only differences here are temperamental not substantial: you worry about the absence of anarchy, I am troubled (here and in the post by Jason Nelson) by a lack of discipline and an overabundance of self-assertion.

If you want to know ‘how deep’ a reading of e-lit goes, you could have begun by looking at what participants in the discussion have said about actual works of e-lit during the past week. In response to Gary Comstock, I spent some time discussing Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia. Dene Grigar illustrated her arguments with apt citations of Dan Waber, Reiner Strasser, Jennifer Hill-Kaucher, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and Michael Joyce.

I am not the one to say whether or not reading 300 novels or 300 e-lit works is possible. (I trust Coover, not to have read every word of every novel, but to have read far enough into each work to know the kind of object he was dealing with – ‘priestly,’ ‘popular,’ or that indescribable ‘third voice’ that is pursuant on Coover’s early descriptions and distinctions). I can’t know, until my published readings are engaged, whether they are superficial or deep. I cannot speak for how the tags I create or select will be received by “history” or by “absolutely everyone” (your terms of choice). I will be interested in seeing how e-lit tags are accepted, rejected, or transformed by “individuals” and by “crowds,” the terms put forward during the productive and sustained engagement between Alan Liu and Davin Heckman. I also appreciated Sandy Baldwin’s characterization of tagging: “description as aesthetic choice” and “Cool distributions of data, no end of sorting and selecting, and no end of tagging.”

So long as the project can be kept open-ended and /responsive/ (and the soon to be released ELO Directory is designed for this) , I think it’s unlikely that the activity of describing and tagging works will be the work of a “Directorate.” But that’s a matter of trust, not assertion.

Yes.

Let me once more, for the sake of contrast, take a look at biology. The business of classifying organisms on the basis of observed similarity (morphology) predates the consolidation of the evolutionary paradigm of random variation in the genome and selective retention of phenotypes. In the context of the evolutionary paradigm, however, classification has a very useful property: In those cases where inheritance is strictly vertical (from parent to child), the structure of the classification follows the structure of the genealogy of the organisms in the classification system. Classification mirrors a critical causal process (reproduction with variation); if you will, classification reveals being.

Alas, inheritance is not always vertical. In some areas of the plant kingdom hybridization between related species is common. Hypbridization involves horizontal transfer of genetic information. In the world of single-celled organisms horizontal transfer is quite common. In these cases phylogeny tends to take the form of a network rather than a tree and the principles of classificion are . . . obscure? . . . under investigation? I don’t really know the current state of thinking on such matters as I don’t follow them that closely, but I’m pretty sure they’re settled. Morphology no longer tracks phylogeny in a perspicuous way; the relationship between classification by morphology and being is obscure.

In the cultural sphere, inheritance is not, in general, vertical. Horizontal transfer of cultural traits is common. And the nature of causal processes is obscure. And classification by morphology is an obscure business. I suspect one reason genre theory is so troubled is that our texts simply do not sort themselves conveniently into taxonomic trees such that a given text properly belongs in only one taxon in a classification system. We are in a domain where the Borgesian cosmology is not so deeply parodic as one might wish, a world where the assertion of privilege for a given taxonomic scheme entails a burden of arbitrary invention.

In this world tags give us a way of organizing texts without forcing them into any particular taxonomic scheme, as others have already noted. Given a reasonable budget of tags and a good search engine we can explore the universe of texts according to schemes we make-up on the fly.