Introduction: Electronic Literature as a Framework for the Digital Humanities

While electronic literature and the digital humanities have always been intimately intertwined, until recently they have been primarily addressed as distinctive fields. Electronic Literature has evolved as a specific field dedicated to born-digital literary forms, emergent from and responsive to computational technology and the networked environment. As self-reflexive literary artifacts and practices, works of electronic literature provide us with tutor texts for understanding changes taking place in the nature of human communications and society as nearly all aspects of culture have become digitally mediated. Less specific in nature has been the now established field of digital humanities, which began as “humanities computing” with a focus on applying digital tools and methods to traditional areas of humanities research, such as literature, history, information studies and archeology, and in recent years has broadened to include in its scope humanistic approaches to contemporary digital culture in an era of “big tent” digital humanities. Although the DH field has been widely opposed to rigid definitions or delimitations in its scope, the academic practice in its many institutionalized forms has created an unorthodox practical definition that acknowledges certain practices as “more DH” than others. There is a lingering perception that DH is most interested in exploring the past through different digital methods and tools, while e-lit is looking forward into the future, focusing on new forms of literature in digital media. The gathering of articles that we are initiating aims to satisfy significant lacks both in the corpus of work specifically addressing electronic literature and digital humanities at large.