Intermediality and transductive digital world literature

Abstract

Jerome McGann argues that “all text is marked text” with its “physical embodiments that shape the ideas and the process of thought.” From an intermediality standpoint, all the building blocks of communication, including the basic medium of “surface,” are mediated through technical and modalities choices (Elleström 2021). McGann’s articulation of the “markup” in terms of “the documentary level of your reading: paper, ink, book design, or the markup that controls not the documentary status of the text but its linguistic status” in his essay, “16. Marking Texts of Many Dimensions,” refers to the “qualifying” and “contextualizing” aspects of media in Elleström’s terms. Given the logic of change, then, how can the encoded literature that circulates in the digital domain be interpreted? Presently, pre-individual hyperlinks and hypermedia are employed to represent the database of encoded literary texts in terms of “intermediality.” This includes the internet, social media platforms, blogs, hashtags, Twitter, and the world wide web. By integrating machine learning algorithms and user-supplied data through artificial intelligence-trained neural networks, transductive Intermedia, an emerging technology, enables increased “hyper-connectivity” and “interoperability” across various platforms and devices (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube). The touchscreen or electronic interface functions to demonstrate how “code” can be regarded as a fundamental component of the “surface” in the context of a digital database of world literature. From the perspective of “intermediality,” the purpose of this presentation is to reevaluate the repercussions of the difficulties posed by the convergence of artificial intelligence, digital humanities, and digitized/born-digital world literature.