cfp.english.upenn.edu

We solicit contributions for an edited collection of scholarly essays entitled In the Margin: e-Text and its readers. Considerable scholarship of the past three decades has addressed the history, readership, and materiality of the book. The architecture of the page, paperstock, fount, blank spaces, and readerly annotation have been the subject of economic, material, and theoretical analysis. Attention to how books have been copied, signed, and annotated has illuminated a history of reading and literary activity. The codex, in short, has been invaluable to the material turn in bibliographic and literary scholarship. But what of the digital turn?

As books increasingly are published as digital artefacts, the margin as we know it is changing. This collection seeks to analyze and theorize the reader’s engagement with the digital book.

Essays will consider what it means to “write in the margin” of a digital hypertext—that space integral to the experience of reading because it is, literally and figuratively, where the reader marks presence, signals engagement, and makes the text one’s own. We are interested in papers that address the literal margin as it exists in hypertext and also the margin, more figuratively, as the navigable interactive space between the reader and the text.

The collection will cross-disciplinary boundaries and problematise conventional ways of thinking about active reading instantiated in digital culture. Essays are welcome from disciplines such as textual scholarship, hypertext studies, history of the book, pedagogy, theory, computer science, information management, digital humanities, and instructional design.

Topics of interest include:
* Hypertext editions and the margin
* Designing text and apparatus in hypertext
* The expanding apparatus
* Teaching hypertext
* Designing hypertext for the classroom
* Reading, links, and nodes
* The gendered hypertext
* The body and hypertext
* Interactive world in hypertext, game theory, fan fiction, etc.
* Hypertext and philosophies of literature
* The centre and the margin
* Queer hypertext

Proposals of no more than 500 words should be submitted to Drs. Ann-Barbara Graff and Kristin Lucas by 30 April 2012. Please indicate the intended length of the paper and include a brief biography.

Accepted papers (short papers of 1500-2000 words or long papers of 5000 words) will be due by 1 November 2012.