James O’Sullivan examines ‘reproducibility’, one of the shortcomings of digital humanities, which uses computers to anaylse complex materials.

The annual Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Conference & Media Arts Festival was held at University College Cork in July 2019. This was the first time that the ELO conference, one of the major international gatherings of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection between literature and new media aesthetics, was hosted in…[Read more]

The annual Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Conference & Media Arts Festival was held at University College Cork in July 2019. This was the first time that the ELO conference, one of the major international gatherings of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection between literature and new media aesthetics, was hosted in…[Read more]

Literary Ireland has long embraced experimentation. So, in an artistic community that typically gravitates towards the new, it is culturally anomalous to see that electronic literature has failed to flourish. Ireland, sitting at the nexus between the North American and European e-lit communities, should be playing a more active role in what is…[Read more]

This is not a commentary on the definition, legitimacy, or future of digital humanities (DH) – there is already enough of that around. Rather, it is a treatment of one of the field’s most significant yet elided aspects – jobs. Not just any job, not the tenure-track professorship wherein digital humanities is combined with an established disci…[Read more]

Kant remarks that beauty “is what pleases in the mere judgment (and there not by the medium of sensation in accordance with a concept of understanding),” and the sublime “pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of sense”. Lyotard’s position is such that the sublime, as construed by Burke and Kant, “outlined a world of possibil…[Read more]

Electronic literature, essentially, must be electronic and literary. Even if we cannot define the literary, we can at least recognize it, and, from recognition, we can begin to build meaning. This chapter attempts to do just that: offer readers an account of some of the contexts that suggest literature that is inherently digital and extrapolate…[Read more]

This paper examines the stylometric similarities between James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, demonstrating which works from the latter’s oeuvre are stylistically the most Joycean. We will outline the results of a series of quantitative enquiries focused specifically on Joyce and O’Brien, before offering a number of literary interpretations. It has l…[Read more]