After reading Chapter 4 of The Book by Amaranth Borsuk, I began to find a new understanding for digital texts. Amaranth explains how technological advances such as the Kindle or Nook “aim to pour texts written for print into digital vessels” while other authors and artists are utilizing the technological layout to add an immersive, animated, or game-like experience for the reader (220). With this, we are able to create an infinite canvas where the reader is “non-linear reading” requiring the reader to interact with the text. This shift highlights how digital texts are not just replications of physical books, but rather remediations. They are new forms that borrow from the tactile and navigational qualities of print while expanding the possibilities of texts.
While reading about hypertexts and the way hyperlinks create a networked style of reading, I immediately thought back to “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” by Mark Marino. The feeling of being able to explore and interact with the text was a completely new experience that I hadn’t felt from a traditional physical book. I was so confused before we discussed the reading in class as I have always read for definitive answers. But while reading “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” I found myself navigating my own reading journey through a web of interconnected ideas, rather than following a structured, linear path. While clicking through the hyperlinks, I found myself digging deeper, bouncing from one hyperlink to the next with minimal to no structure or path. This sense of agency and mobility through the text demonstrates what Amaranth Borsuk writes as an “infinite canvas,” where the boundaries of a text are no longer fixed by the page but are dependent on the reader’s choices (221).
I remember discussing this experience with my peers and realizing that each of us had followed a completely different pattern of clicking and traversing through the intricate network of hyperlinks. Some clicked on certain links because they were interested in a phrase or idea, while others went down entirely different pathways. This truly resulted in unique interpretations from the same work. This variation revealed how hypertexts allow readers to engage with a text on an individual level, emphasizing the role of reader interaction in meaning-making.
Hi Micaela,
I really like your connection to Marginalia in the Library of Babel! I really like how you chose a non-linear electronic text because it shows that electronic media is not inherently just “information” (its just that Kindles and Nooks make it out to be). It makes me think about our in-class discussion about e-lit writing mediums as well. It would be nearly impossible to write Library of Babel in Word or Google Docs. While website creators like WordPress or Wix are making it easier to create and publish websites, it feels as though they are still fairly constricting. In a similar way to how there is a inhibitory learning curve with creating artists’ books, I feel that there is a similar phenomenon with e-lit (artists’ e-book?)
JJ
Hi Micaela! It just dawned on me that Otome games can reside in the same category you mentioned. It is a story where everything hinges on the decisions the player makes, which also makes that genre of games highly immersive. But I never thought of them as digital literature or texts. It’s like the choose your own adventure books, but put into a digital space and includes art along with the story. Although, while players have the choice, the choices are still limited and the players still live within the confinement of the story/game. It is the illusion of freedom and choice, especially when all choices are accounted for. Also I just realized I call them players, not readers, I wonder if it’s this terminology that caused me not to see it as digital literature at first.
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