Dene Grigar, DTC professor and Director of Creative Media & Digital Culture in DTC Vancouver, gave several presentations at the Electronic Literature Organization 2024 Conference.
With Polish scholar Mariusz Pisarski, she presented a paper, entitled “Media Translation and the Migration of Born-Digital Literature,” stemming from their book with Cambridge University Press (2024). From the abstract:
“The paper discusses the concept of media translation, a form of enhanced translation that goes beyond the linguistic. The case studies used as examples are drawn from reconstruction work undertaken in our labs, notably the migrations of Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid and Michael Joyce’s Twilight, A Sympathy from the Storyspace platform to open Web languages, as well as the reconstruction of Christy Sheffield Sanford’s Red Mona from an unsupported programming language to one that is compatible with contemporary browsers. We focus our attention on selected pre-Web features of born-digital literature––that is, the loading screen, multilink, Tinker and Bell Keys, and link names and paths.”
With Andrew Thompson, Professor Grigar gave a demo entitled “The Future of Text in XR: Phase 1 of the Project,” coming out of the project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. From the abstract:
“This demonstration is derived from the research currently being undertaken by an international team of artists, scientists, and digital humanities scholars about the future of text in XR. Our work, supported by a grant from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded us in 2023, looks at ways to harness the potential of Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR), commonly collectively referred to as Extended Reality, or ‘XR’, to expand academic communication through the development of open-source software to make it possible for users to read, manipulate, navigate, and create in three-dimensional space. At the heart of our project is to explore ways for those interested in using XR for research and creative activities to get the most out of their data without proprietary systems containing core data stripped “on export” (as is the case with authoring systems exporting to PDF today). It involves showing the progress of our work to make a personal library of academic articles (in the form of PDFs) accessible from one’s computer, read and interact with the documents in XR, and export the documents in useful formats.”