Digital Poetry and Critical Discourse: A Network of Self-References?

Abstract

This article emerges from macroanalysis of several works of critical writing in the field of digital poetry, which have been documented in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. The problems addressed in this context are the self-referentiality exhibited by authors who are both practitioners and theoreticians, and the need for a wider selection of digital poems in critical discourse. The dataset consists of monographs and Ph.D. dissertations on digital poetry (1995-2015), which have been exported into visualization software. Macro and network analyses enable new debate concerning the outlined problems and new findings. My findings suggest that criticism in this domain is chiefly endogenous and that a limited number of poems is being canonized. Therefore, a meta-discourse perspective can pave the way for an external view of the field, concerning its epistemology and evolution. The dataset is available online for download and can be tested and reconsidered by other researchers.