On the Peripheries of E-lit: Study Digital Literary Cultures (Plus)

Presenter Information

• Kiera Obbard, University of WaterlooFollow
• Tanja Grubnic, Duke UniversityFollow
• Magdalena E. Korecka, University of HamburgFollow
• Kim Martin, University of GuelphFollow
• Tess McNulty, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignFollow
• Camilla Holm-Soelseth, Oslo Metropolitan UniversityFollow

Proposal Type

Panel

Location

Hypertexts & Fictions

Start Date

July 2026

End Date

July 2026

Abstract

On the Peripheries of E-lit: Study Digital Literary Cultures (Plus)

In April 2019, Leonardo Flores argued for a third generation of electronic literature (e-lit), defined as “a writing-centered art that engages the expressive potential of electronic and digital media” and “uses established platforms with massive user bases, such as social media networks, apps, mobile and touchscreen devices, and Web API services”. Within third-gen e-lit, Flores includes “Twine games, Twitter bots, Instagram poetry, GIFS, and image macro memes”. Seeing Instagram poetry legitimized by such a prominent scholar of e-lit was a significant moment for the panelists here as we are all scholars of digital literary culture–an area of scholarship that often isn’t taken seriously.

The panelists in this proposed panel are all co-directors of Digital Literary Cultures+ (DLC+) or members of DLC+’s Advisory Board. DLC+ is an open-access research network and resource for scholars of digital literary culture broadly defined. Operating on the peripheries of the e-lit community–as well as traditional literary, digital humanities, and media studies communities–our work both builds from and with the scholarship from the e-lit community, and can offer generative insights into the scholars and research at the forefront of the field of Instapoetry and other forms of third-gen e-lit.

In this proposed panel, the panelists will begin with a brief overview of their research, including their experiences working at the bleeding edge of third-gen e-lit from a variety of interdisciplinary bounds. Next, through an informal interview-style period, the co-directors will reflect on how we came together as graduate students located around the world to create and build DLC+ outside of institutional boundaries and without any external funding or support. In the style of a “fire-side chat” or moderated interview, the Co-directors will then pose questions to our Advisory Board members that invite them reflect on their role advising a cohort of emerging scholars (now, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, adjunct and assistant professors) as they navigate how to solidify and ‘professionalize’ the DLC+ community and research network while still existing outside of institutional bounds. We will end by posing questions for feedback to the audience, and inviting their questions on our experiences with DLC+.

75-minutes - Panel Flow: 

• ~10 mins total for us each to give quick overview of our research

• ~20 mins for Co-Directors to share creation of DLC+ (and challenges) 

• ~20 mins for “fire-side chat” with Advisory Board members 

• ~10 mins for feedback from audience

• ~10 mins for Q&A w audience

• 5 mins extra time for overflow in any area

Bio

Co-Directors, DLC+ Board:  

Kiera Obbard is a poet and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo where she studies the feminization and denigration of women’s writing and associated publishing technologies, from the poetess tradition to social media poets. Her current book project, The Instagram Effect (forthcoming WLU Press), argues against critics who dismiss Instagram poetry for its association with femininity and instead takes Instagram poetry seriously so as to critically evaluate the economic, technological, literary, social, and cultural risks of a globally popular literature being shared and read on third-party proprietary platforms.  

Tanja Grubnic is a researcher of digital literary culture and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Scholar at Duke University. She completed her PhD in English in February 2025 at Western University. Her dissertation, titled “Art or Con? Exploring Instapoetry at the Intersection of Influencer Culture, Authour-Entrepreneurism, and Literary Innovation” studies the convergence of artistic and entrepreneurial activity evident in instapoetry, a type of born-digital literature. Her interests include understanding how new readers engage with literature online for therapeutic purposes; the evolution of twenty-first century authorship into an entrepreneurial endeavour; and the shifting purposes of writing in the new attention economy.

Magdalena E. Korecka is a PhD Candidate at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and has been a research associate in the ERC project “Poetry in the Digital Age“ at the same university as well as at the University of Vienna in the ERC / FWF project “Poetry Off the Page“. In her dissertation, she investigates the interrelation of visual aesthetics and platformization in socially engaged and feminist poetry in English, German, and Polish with a focus on the social media platform Instagram and beyond through a mixed methods approach. She co-organized (with Dr. Wiebke Vorrath) the conference “Poetry and Contemporary Visual Culture / Lyrik und zeitgenössische Visuelle Kultur” (May 2022) and co-edited a subsequent publication. With degrees in “Anglophone Literatures and Cultures” as well as “Journalism and Communication Science” (Universität Wien), her research interests include post-digital socio-political aesthetic spaces, including poetry and art, as well as the methodological and ethical implications of researching them.

Camilla Holm-Soelseth has a PhD in Library and Information Science from Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), Norway, where she is currently employed as a research librarian at the level of associate professor. She is the current chair of the Norwegian national research network for digital humanities and culture organization (DHKO), as well as elected secretary of the organization Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB). She is also a curator of Oslo International Poetry Festival. Her research interests include social media, digital literature, pop culture, cultural metadata, and the use of digital methods in research. 

 

Advisory Board:

Kim Martin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Guelph where she co-created the Culture & Technology Studies program. She is the Associate Director of THINC Lab and the VP-English of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities (CSDH-SCHN). Her research interests include serendipity, feminist maker practices, oral history, and interdisciplinarity.  

Tess McNulty is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the English Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is currently working on a book about major genres of viral content, and her academic and popular writing have been published in venues like New Literary History, Cultural Analytics, and Harper’s.