The Digital Lit Class
I took a class last semester called Digital Storytelling. I've been interested and blogging about Electronic Lit for a few years now since I took that MOOC at Davidson College.
For the class we were asked to set up a blog and so I created one to review Electric Lit, https://digital-lit-reviews.blogspot.com that tracked my progress in the class. I was able to read a few new pieces that I really liked, such as:
- Witch Court Reporter by poet Richard Osmond. This is a Twitter feed that reposts news items from old European witch trials. The process of remediation (taking content from one media into another) really changes the meaning of the little blurbs.
- The Dionaea House by Eric Heisserer. This is a great haunted house story told through blogs and comment boards. You can see how the chaos of all the voices on all the blogs assembles the story.
- The Sick Land, a science fiction horror story by Jon Hill, also told through a single blog. Still good for the use of one blog to present a story.
- https://twitter.com/oscarwilde – Oscar Wilde on Twitter. Another example of re-mediating Wilde's quotes for Twitter. This inspired the project I eventually did.
The List
I've updated my master reading list: https://www.marymccray.com/elit-reading-list.html
The Podcast
My teacher and I also did a Podcast together about creating Digital Lit, thinking maybe we'd start a real serial podcast about writing.
About My Twitter Poem
So then we were asked to create our own project. I spent weeks working on mine. I blogged about the whole process in my class blog.
You can read about the project planning of it here: https://digital-lit-reviews.blogspot.com/2019/04/project-planning-twitter-poem.html
I finished the poem over a month ago and I noticed Twitter has already deleted some of the posts from my TrollGuy character, even though the insults were just nonsensical. Luckily I archived it in full already. But what a bummer.
The Jist of It: This is a collage poem about media history, trolling culture and pundit's soft-alarm-isms. Trolling is mostly between the authors William Blake, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane, an idea seeded in my head from a fellow student's tweet quoted from the fake Oscar Wilde site: https://twitter.com/oscarwilde. That blew my mind and I created accounts for the four dead poets. It wasn't easy in the post-Trump land of Twitter. Read more about that in the project planning link above.
Ways to Read It
There are various ways to approach digital lit pieces:
1. Interactively on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BellsTroll
Pros: You can play all the fun videos, animated gifs, click on the links and discover the hidden comment threads.
Cons: You might miss the hidden comment threads and all that multimedia in your haste to read it. Clues for hidden conversations are under these symbols at the bottom of each tweet:
Sometimes there are many more comments than one. Also, click anything that says “more replies.”
2. The archived, static version on my website: https://www.marymccray.com/bell-trolls.html
Pros: You won't miss any of the comment threads or profiles. And you'll see the comments Twitter has removed already.
Cons: You will miss all the fun videos and links. Boo!
3. The most comprehensive way would be to read the static poem (https://www.marymccray.com/bell-trolls.html) and then try to find the interactions in the live version (https://twitter.com/BellsTroll).
