Meredith's Wk 1: Bring it to the Table

 I thought it was interesting that the chapter highlighted how electronic literature was different from texts that were made to be digital, for example, books being published on the Kindle app. Instead of being easily read on paper or on a screen, electronic literature is different in that it relies on its medium to communicate the message. It needs the capabilities of the computer to link ideas to other ideas with a click, or demonstrate its idea through the use of sound, image, and text all at once. It is much more interactive and dynamic than traditional text. One of the things I had questions about related to my reference. The chapter talks about language being used “not as a direct semantic signifier, but instead as conceptual or visual material...the process of inscription and recoding take the place of representational semantics” (p. 5). What I gathered from this, despite the fact that I didn’t understand half the words in the sentence, was that electronic literature diverts from traditional literature by trying different techniques to communicate ideas. 

When I searched Giselle Beiguelman’s Code Movie 1 (2006), the first thing I noticed was how I found it in the Electronic Literature Collection. The logo on the link was ELO, which is the Electronic Literature Organization that we read about in the chapter. A sticky note on the site states that “this Flash work has been preserved with Ruffle by the Electronic Literature Lab in 2021,” which I thought was fantastic because I really hadn’t considered the major losses of digital works that we must have had with the discontinuation of Adobe Flash. I remembered playing Coolmath Games and the site requesting Flash Player so it brought me back to then. Learning more about Flash has made me curious about what video games use now. The website talks about WYSIWYG (which I learned means “What You See Is What You Get” after a quick Google search). It refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles the final product. I'm curious, what would HTML code be more useful for? Wouldn’t it be better to see the final result of your webpage while you edit?