English, Creative Writing and Australian Studies

This paper sketches three different ways that contemporary writers of literary fiction locate a sense, not of the religious, but of the sublime in the technologies discussed in their twenty-first century texts. Jeanette Winterson‘s The PowerBook (2000), Zadie Smith‘s The Autograph Man (2002), and Gail Jones‘s Dreams of Speaking (2006) include references
to computers and other forms of information technology, and incorporate elements of the sublime or references to the divine connected in some way with those technologies.

co-authored with Kate Douglas.
This paper comes from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council funded project ‘Building Reading Resilience: Developing a Skills‐Based Approach for the Humanities’. In recent years many literature academics have noted a decline in students reading (that is, in both the quantity and quality of their reading). The project introduces the concept ‘Reading Resilience’ with the aim of considering ways that we might enhance students’ ability to read and interpret complex and demanding literary texts by drawing on new tools and technologies for promoting advanced, critical reading skills.
One issue that has come to light during this project has been students’ use of ebook readers (iPads, Kindles, etc.). These technologies are emerging in the classroom as a growing band of students opt to use electronic editions of texts in literature subjects. For example, many canonical novels are available for free download (or are very inexpensive online) and this option is proving economical and convenient for those students who have already invested in the ebook reader.
How might ebook readers support learning in the literature classroom? How might these readers change students’ (and indeed teachers) relationship with the literary text? In this pilot study we survey twenty students (via focus group) who have been using ebook readers in their literature studies during 2011. We gauge their experiences in using ebook readers to support their reading (to engage them and to enhance their skills), and explore any resistance to or difficulties with the technology (e.g., cost, nostalgia for the book, a suspicion of technology, and errors in ebook versions of texts).
We hypothesise that students using e‐readers will demonstrate a range of significant skills relevant to literary studies and to building reading resilience, often showing: a deep relationship with the text (able to access its tools and features); advanced skills in textual analysis, comprehension, knowledge of style and themes; research skills; the ability to more readily access textual quotes and examples and to be proficient note takers, and; skills in creative criticism and interpretation. Those reading via ebook will be highly active readers, attracted to the text as object and experiencing new ways of reading and engaging with the text.

Web 2.0 is often considered to be the life narrative platform of the internet. Suddenly, we are told, users could curate their lives online. Blogs, photo‐sharing and MySpace all enabled a boom in auto/biographical expression and social construction of the self. However, this view neglects the pre‐history of early web practices that themselves promoted, privileged and pandered to auto/biographical expression. Early web pages were statements of (promiscuous) identityconstruction. In a New York Times article disparaging the personal homepage phenomena, Edward Rothstein called these early web pages acts of ‘assertive confession’ (1996).
In Australia, artists and poets responded quickly and vibrantly to the call of cyberspace, in part because of Federal Government funding provided to pursue internet‐based cultural production. PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia), a National Library of Australia resource, is one of many efforts to preserve early internet artifacts, and at least some of these early personal homepages are now archived, if haphazardly.
This paper examines archived versions of early personal homepages by Australian artists and writers to question the role of proclaimed self in the lifecycle of the object from posting to preservation. It considers the layers of remediation and reverberation that this process creates, and asks what versions of the selves might survive in the cybertext’s archived form.
As a case study, this paper examines Kominos Zervos’s ‘cyberpoem’ ‘Childhood in Richmond’, which recounts childhood in Zervos’s parents’ fish and chip shop in suburban Melbourne. Viewing the poem via PANDORA results in numerous Quicktime and Flash errors that remind us of the vulnerabilities of electronic text and adds layers to the nostalgia already present in the poem. This act of ‘assertive confession’, then, takes on new meaning in the light of digital preservation methods where online identities proliferate in ways largely unaccounted for.

For Rainie et al, the authors of a recent report on e-reading as a growing practice, “The rise of e-books … is part of a larger story about a shift from printed to digital material” (2012, p.1) , which in turn is part of a history of technologies of publishing and reading that date back to antiquity. However, certain contemporary market conditions have seen Amazon become a force that not only impacts the selling of books but now also the formats in which they are published, which ultimately shapes reading practices. The Kindle’s dominance of the e-book market as a device and as a publishing platform has been widely noted and in an effort to continually value-add to the Kindle experience and to capitalise on the viral power of the social networking phenomenon, Amazon introduced a highlighting function to its e-book platform. Kindle Highlights allows a reader to select and mark passages of interest within an e-book and to create notes about a passage, chapter, or whole book. This is in part an attempt to mimic the material conditions of reading printed texts where readers can underline passages in books, make notes in the margin or attach sticky notes; however it also invests the device with significant capabilities of social networking.  Amazon indicates how many other people highlighted a particular passage (anonymously) and publishes on its website a “popular highlights” section that reveals how many people highlighted which passages of which books and, if you permit Amazon to do so, makes your notes public.  It is also a means by which Amazon collects as data information about users’ reading practices and the highlights and notes they make.

Popular media raises concerns over privacy and the level of access to individuals’ reading habits that Amazon has built into the Kindle and the information it now gathers as a result. Other concerns include how social highlighting might impact reading, and deep reading, in the longer term and whether perusing a collection of highlights on Amazon’s Kindle webpage may come to substitute for a reading of the text. And yet in the social networking era, transforming reading into a more social activity creates a foundation for reading communities and reorients the reading experience in light of technologically-supported reading and communication practices.

This paper considers the implications of social highlighting and social note taking on reading practices, readerships and reading communities. It looks at the impact of the Kindle’s popular highlights function on the device and on the web for the practices of close and distant reading, and argues that close reading takes on different dimensions when it becomes a social networking practice. It uses Katherine Hayles’ notion of hyper and deeper attention and considers how social networking influences these two reading practices.  As a case study, this paper analyses a series of highlights and notes identifying the kinds of passages that are most frequently underlined and what that might tell us about reading practices and communities of reading.

As a researcher working for AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, one of my tasks was to provide subject content indexing for a range of poetry publications. At the outset, this was an extremely laborious task that involved reading the poem, perhaps only a few lines long, over and over, pondering its themes, identifying a number of terms that encapsulated the poems' contents, and then beginning a process of negotiation with the metadata terms listed in the database. Over time, however, the task became easier and I would whip through a book of poems in little longer than it took to run my eyes across the lines. But I came to realise that my interpretation of the individual poem was now being funnelled through the metadata framework employed in the database. I wouldn't think about the poem in terms of what it was about, what the poet was trying to convey, what ideas it aroused in my mind but rather I would think about the poem in terms of the metadata items waiting for me in the database's thesaurus. At the same time, metadata travels in the other direction. Collections of items and their metadata are becoming texts in their own right. We are using algorithmic tools to assist us in both our reading and writing of texts, and in some cases to completely write the texts, as can be seen in Google's development of software that will automatically write city guides based on the photos people upload to social media. In this way reading and writing, and the interfaces and inscriptions that underpin them, can be collapsed, as Lori Emerson argues, into 'readingwriting'. This paper considers the workings of metadata as a practice that operates in two directions: funnelling thinking, interpretation and the experience of reading into a set of categories that emphasises generic traits across a series of instances and as well as generating from those categories an algorithmically-generated text that could be indistinguishable from human-generated text. It argues that operating in this environment requires stronger or different reading practices than we currently possess.

Reading has always been a contentious and political practice. For Katherine Hayles reading is " a powerful technology for reconfiguring activity patterns in the brain " (2010, p. 193), representative of attempts to connect the new neuroscience of reading with age old practices of literary endeavour. For Sven Birkerts, however, " the Internet and the novel are opposites " (2010). If we think of the printed book as an interface between two orders of thinking, we need to think about how the experience of reading a digitized copy of a formerly printed and bound book alters literary reception? How do the material traces left on digitised works benefit the reading process, as more and more electronic reading platforms take on the physical attributes of material reading experiences? The lively discourse surrounding Google Books and the human breaches of the material into the immaterial, as the work crosses the borders of formats and interfaces, raises valuable questions about the future of the book, reading in the twenty-first century, and the long and formidable shadow that centuries of material text production casts over Google Books' electronic utopia. This paper uses both book history and new media interface theory (Drucker, Galloway) to consider the multitude of diverse experiences that is literary reading in the contemporary moment.

Conference: Crossroads in Cultural Studies 2016, University of Sydney The 2015 Federal Government Senate Inquiry into the impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget decisions on the Arts received 2719 submissions. The robust response by Australian artists, arts administrators and the broader community tells us the inquiry process was seen as a crucial intervention in a moment of industry crisis. But it also answered a gap in the sector, providing an avenue for practicing artists and arts administrators to talk about the industry in a way they haven't been able to do before. This paper considers the submissions and hearings testimony as a public body of material constructing the artist and the state of the arts in the present moment under austerity and argues that the process itself was an important moment in informal cultural reporting and professional development for independent artists, speaking to notions of cultural value.

The conflation between the human body and the literary text has a long history. John Donne's seventeenth century Latin lines in 'Sed quae scripta manu, sun veneranda magis', for example, employ significant blood, flesh and birthing metaphors. However, in the contemporary moment the shift towards digital methods for cultural production and its scholarship highlight the tension between information and matter. The Visible Human Project, where the human body is rendered into data, is one example of this, but so too is the grand scheme to digitise the sum total of human cultural production. Controversies such as printing a 3D replica of Palmyra to replace what was destroyed, dismembering books to scan them into digital archives with complicated afterlives, or the extent to which metadata is distinguishable from its source data illuminate the affective power of the rendering of information and the extent to which they accentuate the material. Add to this the phenomenon of information management, of the sense of an ordered world presented by search engines and the way that the function of the search constructs the searcher as co-creator of content. This paper considers the way that the human body has come to be understood in informational terms just as texts been understood as fleshy bodies, and the growing crossover between the two. It examines the implications these epistemological shifts have for the growing prevalence of digitization as a medium for cultural circulation.

Google's controversial book scanning project digitised entire collections from its partner libraries, and this included numerous works of Australian origin. The material texts scanned had encounters with institutions and readers that left marks upon the pages, and this has implications for how Australian texts appear in the World Library. For example, the Internet Archive copy of Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting of Wisdom, (1910 edition, digitised from the University of Michigan in 2010) includes the handwritten inscription " Richardson, Henrietta " in the top right hand corner of the title page. But the work does not appear as a fully readable text in the Google Books archive at all, despite the connection between the two projects. This paper considers the fate of Australian literature in Google Books and the Internet Archive and uses a handful of case study texts to illuminate some implications of the ways in which Australian texts appear in the " World Brain ". Research Centres and project manager for the ARC Linkage-funded project Laboratory Adelaide: the Value of Culture. Her research considers literary engagements with new technologies, practices and implications of digitisation projects, technologies of reading and writing, and cultural value of the arts.

The controversial decision by Google to digitise every book ever published has been applauded in some quarters but has also resulted in numerous lawsuits from publishers and authors’ guilds. Google has agreed to pay enormous settlements while still proceeding with its digitization project. The discourse around the legal debate is illuminating. Additionally, human traces are observable in the digital archive. Marginalia that records a single reader’s or multiple readers’ responses to the text and in some ways opens a dialogue with the book, or accounts for the ownership of the book or constitutes a gift note, marks the transition from material to immaterial form, punctuated with traces of the text’s prior physical and communal life. Numerous scanning errors have been uncovered in the database, including the visible trace of human fingers upon the pages of the scanned editions. These ghostly remains, too, impact on the way we consider the digital copy of a material book. These human traces affect how we read and relate to the texts contained in the digital database, and cast the shadow of the books’ material forms over the digital reading experience.