Articles

EDGE DPUB started as a side project of my PhD study about the aesthetics of enhanced e-books. During my study, I have published some articles that I would like to share on this page.

Interactive Webcomics (May 2016)

Abstract

In the attempt of understanding the works of electronic literature, this article shows various analogies between print literature and electronic literature with the help of comics. Commonly regarded as "paraliterature" or "trivial literature", comics have never really been considered as literature. Nevertheless, they share many plot devices with works of electronic literature can be found in comics too.

This article was originally published in May 2016, on the web page of Gruppo Giada a research group in the field of electronic literature.

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Amore di plastica. A survey on digital publishing in Italy. (2019)

Abstract

In the last ten years, the digital publishing industry has gone through an important development as far as the creation of new software is concerned. E-books, that are widely known and used as PDF formats, can now be entirely designed with a software and enriched with multimedia and multimodal features which can furthermore embed Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technology. This essay illustrates the many similarities between enhanced e-books and the works of electronic literature and suggests an inclusion of digital publishing in the study of electronic literature.

The interviewees are Paolo Albert, co-founder of Pubcoder (2013), Francesco Leonetti, co-founder of ePubEditor (2013), Fabrizio Venerandi, co-founder of Quintadicopertina (2010), Michela Di Stefano, founder of Studio 361° (2007), Antonio Tombolini, founder of Streetlib (2006), and Gino Roncaglia, co-founder of Liber Liber and Progetto Manuzio (1993).

The survey takes in consideration a time span that starts in 1971, the year Project Gutenberg was founded and focuses on the decade that goes from 2007 – when Amazon launched the Kindle and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) released the EPUB format – to 2017 – when the IDPF was combined into the World Wide Web Consortium.

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Literatura Electronica Italiana. Fragmentos de Cosas en Código. (2021)

This essay is an elaborated transcription of a 15min video that I submitted to the "II Congreso Internacional. En los márgenes de la literatura: nomadismo y fragmentación" organised by the University of Salamanca.

Taking its cue from the word 'fragmentation' the article starts with some considerations of the famous work "Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta" by Francesco Petrarca to make a comparison with works of electronic literature where the fragmens are constituted by the strings of code. In the attempt to discover analogies between works of print literature and electronic literature, the article offers many more examples of authors of the 20th Century.

There are some basic concepts of what literature should do, how literature should be written, what the characteristics of the words and how reality is represented which are challenged by socalled "experimental literature". These aspects of literature and linguistic are not revolutionary nor anti-convential, but inherent characteristics of human language. The question is how modern readers and literary critique interpret them.

Este ensayo es una transcripción elaborada de un vídeo de 15 minutos que presenté al "II Congreso Internacional. En los márgenes de la literatura: nomadismo y fragmentación" organizado por la Universidad de Salamanca.

Tomando como referencia la palabra "fragmentación" el artículo parte de algunas consideraciones sobre la famosa obra "Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta" de Francesco Petrarca para hacer una comparación con las obras de literatura electrónica donde los fragmentos están constituidos por las cadenas de código. En el intento de descubrir analogías entre las obras de la literatura impresa y la electrónica, el artículo ofrece muchos más ejemplos de autores del siglo XX.

Hay algunos conceptos básicos sobre lo que debe hacer la literatura, cómo debe escribirse, cuáles son las características de las palabras y cómo se representa la realidad que son cuestionados por la llamada "literatura experimental". Estos aspectos de la literatura y la lingüística no son revolucionarios ni anticonvencionales, sino características inherentes al lenguaje humano. La cuestión es cómo los interpretan los lectores modernos y la crítica literaria.

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