The Library of Nonhuman Books

The Conversation, 2020

Books are always transforming. The book we hold today has arrived through a number of materials (clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, pixels) and forms (tablet, scroll, codex, kindle). The book can be a tool for communication, reading, entertainment, or learning; an object and a status symbol. The most recent shift, from print media to digital technology, began around the middle of the 20th century. It culminated in two of the most ambitious projects in the history of the book (at least if we believe the corporate hype): the mass-digitisation of books by Google and the mass-distribution of electronic books by Amazon. The survival of bookshops and flourishing of libraries (in real life) defies predictions that the “end of the book” is near. But even the most militant bibliophile will acknowledge how digital technology has called the “idea” of the book into question, once again. To explore the potential for human-machine collaboration in reading and writing, we built a machine that makes poetry from the pages of any printed book. Ultimately, this project attempts to imagine the future of the book itself.

IJELS, 2022

Posthuman" does not mean after human or beyond human. It is only a reconfiguration of what it means to be human in the rapidly changing technological scenario. Though the Enlightenment concept of the human as autonomous, as a rational creature who by the use of the faculty of reason, can give any shape to the self as s/he wishes, has been discredited by Darwin's theory of evolution, Marx's dialectical materialism, and Freud's psychoanalysis, yet the biological and the technological world had not infringed upon the human, thereby reducing all claims of autonomy to sarcasm, as they do in the present era. The posthuman denotes, Cary Wolfe says, "the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being is not just its biological but also its technological world (Qtd Seldon etal 284). N. Katherine Haylesin How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodie in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999) contends that normal human beings become post-human by using prosthetic body parts adopting computer technologies. Donna Haraway has indeed conceived of the humans as cyborgs who are part human and part machine, the machine being a prosthetic extension of the human. In this age of Information Technology and social media, a natural corollary of the posthuman condition is Digital Humanities: This essay explores how the post human condition and digital humanities impact the interactive composition and interpretation of the literary text.

Amaranth Borusk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012) is an augmented-reality book of poetry: a codex filled with QR (“quick response”) codes that activate an networked Internet connection to produce literature between the book’s pages and the reader’s computer screen. The work’s title suggests its formal technopoetic and its posthuman commentary on the role of the human reader in the postprint, digital literary circuit. The reader of Between Page and Screen is depicted onscreen, alongside the book and the text projecting from it. The result is a mirror effect that is visual, poetic, affective, and conceptual; it depicts the human reader incorporated into the digital network that produces contemporary literature. This essay argues that Between Page and Screen’s aesthetic depiction of its human reader offers an opportunity to explore how digital literature complicates traditional, print-based expectations of reading by focusing on how we readers become posthuman along with our postprint literature.

With the exponential expansion of information technology, it is superfluous to expound the virtues of computers in reproducing and making written works available to large numbers of readers. It is however crucial to understand that such technology is not simply a neutral vehicle for conveying words and messages, for the fundamental reason that language is not primarily about meaning and communication of ideas. It therefore becomes apparent that the complementary acts of reading and writing necessarily involve the material and the subjective (understood in logical terms as Lacan’s subject of the unconscious) dimensions of human existence. We can then see that Computer technology entails the eradication of the material aspect of writing: kept at an incalculable distance behind a screen, the book becomes ‘virtual’. At least two consequences can be observed. Firstly, one can read only the page which appears on the screen, the rest vanishes. Secondly (the ‘Google effect’), we are lead to believe that nothing is forgotten or lost, that everything is immediately available thanks to a search engine. What is lost is the material and tactile aspect of reading and writing: both concern the material and physical trace on the page, that correspond to the original inscribing of the subject’s body into the humanizing world of language. Thus, reading, for example, requires the dialectic movement back and forth through the pages of a physical book, a movement that involves alternation between forgetting and recall, rediscovery and anticipation. The same physical dimension involved in inscribing is called upon in all forms of creation (dance, painting…). Our research thus aims to explore what is at stake for individual liberty and creativity, taking into account the physical – or even carnal dimension – of existence that is systematically evacuated from post-modern approaches. Keywords: Book, Computer, Writing, Psychoanalysis, Memory, Language Stream: Books, Writing and Reading Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English or French Paper: Books and Computer Technology, Books and Computer Technology

Poetics Today, 2024

With the advent of ChatGPT and other large language models, the number of artificial texts we encounter on a daily basis is about to increase substantially. This essay asks how this new textual situation may influence what one can call the “standard expectation of unknown texts,” which has always included the assumption that any text is the work of a human being. As more and more artificial writing begins to circulate, the essay argues, this standard expectation will shift—first, from the immediate assumption of human authorship to, second, a creeping doubt: did a machine write this? In the wake of what Matthew Kirschenbaum has called the “textpocalypse,” however, this state cannot be permanent. The author suggests that after this second transitional period, one may suspend the question of origins and, third, take on a post-artificial stance. One would then focus only on what a text says, not on who wrote it; post-artificial writing would be read with an agnostic attitude about its origins. This essay explores the implications of such post-artificiality by looking back to the early days of text synthesis, considering the limitations of aesthetic Turing tests, and indulging in reasoned speculation about the future of literary and nonliterary text generation.

Script and Print 36.2, 2013

The Digitization of Literature: A History and a Future, 2023

This article examines the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the literary world, as well as its ethical and creative implications. The potential benefits of AI-generated texts are examined, including their potential to broaden readers’ views and pose new challenges to traditional literary styles. Concerns are voiced about the potential for AI-generated texts to perpetuate bias and the status quo. Overall, the study provides an intriguing investigation of the interplay between digital media, AI, and literature. Keywords: computerization, artificial intelligence, books, and writings

“dis-Covering the Early Modern Book” is a description of an experiment conducted during a single day spent in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. The purpose of the experiment was primarily to find out what kind of digital artefact could be generated from an early modern book. Secondarily, we wanted to contemplate potential use for such an artefact, which subsequently was clearly established to be teaching bibliography, or book or print culture.

2018

Attacked. Defended. Worshipped. Ridiculed. Recycled. Books today are subject to all of these treatments. Books are used as home décor, mousepads, bill folders, and sculptures. Books are also pulped and anonymously converted into other, non-book related products. It is no coincidence that such transformations and transmutations abound, nor that these bookish forms are variously being shared, promoted or decried. The current digital era both encourages and enables this. But why is the book object still celebrated? How do these celebrations of the book manifest? How much of the ongoing cultural interest in the book is driven by its materiality? Focusing on just one way in which these celebrations manifest, this article displaces questions of text and authorship and instead offers a refreshed, object-orientated account of books today as lively, material ‘things’ and interrogates our taken-for-granted relationships with them. As evidenced in physical and virtual spaces, there is ongoing ...

2019

In this essay, we reflect on distant reading as one of the various takes on reading that currently prevail in literary scholarship as well as the teaching of literature. We focus on three concepts of reading which for various reasons can be considered inter-related: close reading, surface reading and distant reading. We offer a theoretical treatment of distant reading and demonstrate why it is closely related to the concept of machine reading (part of artificial intelligence). Throughout, we focus on the role of the individual reader in all this and argue that Digital Literary Studies have much to gain from paying closer attention to the so-called “natural” reading process of individual humans.