Literature and Computation: Platform Intermediality, Hermeneutic Modeling, and Analytical-Creative Approaches

Literature and Computation presents some of the most relevantly innovative recent approaches to literary practice, theory, and criticism as driven by computation and situated in digital environments. These approaches rely on automated analyses, but use them creatively, engage in text modeling but inform it with qualitative[-interpretive] critical possibilities, and contribute to present-day platform culture in revolutionizing intermedial ways. While such new directions involve more and more sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence, they also mark a spectacular return of the (trans)human(istic) and of traditional-modern literary or urgent political, gender, and minority-related concerns and modes now addressed in ever subtler and more nuanced ways within human-computer interaction frameworks. Expanding the boundaries of literary and data studies, digital humanities, and electronic literature, the featured contributions unveil an emerging landscape of trailblazing practice and theoretical crossovers ready and able to spawn and/or chart the witness literature of our age and cultures.

Chris Tanasescu is a poet and academic with backgrounds in English and computer science. The Graph Poem project he started 15 years ago has outputted natural-language-processing and network-science-based poetry classifiers, intermedia performances, and computationally assembled poetry anthologies. His alias Margento refers to a cyber cross-artform ensemble and an international coalition of poets-translators, visual artists/musicians, and coders throwing events and launching publications on and off-line in four continents. Chris is currently Research Scientist on the PIETRA project at University of Galway and has previously served, among other positions, as Coordinator of Digital Humanities at University of Ottawa, Altissia Chair in Digital Cultures and Ethics at Université Catholique de Louvain, and Senior Researcher in Global Literary Studies and Complex Systems at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.