Digital Writing

Abstract

Through the framing concept of the ‘platform’, this chapter shows how digital texts frequently impose voluntary constraints upon themselves. Digital media distinguish between what Lev Manovich calls the database and interface. Print texts have only one interface on their fictional worlds, while in a digital work our encounter with that material is variable. Initially this distinction manifested itself in works like hypertext fiction that still functioned within a traditional literary framework of authorship. More recent work has, however, exploited text generated in other ways: through communal authorship, or through computational models, where texts are generated either out of a fixed body of material or in response to real-world events. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary examples, this chapter shows how the digital writer working within the boundaries of these self-imposed constraints resembles a curator or remix artist. He or she becomes an ‘author’ by arranging existing data in novel and meaningful ways.