About

SIGNificant is a blog devoted to exploring electronic literature. My name is Amelia Harnish and I am a journalim and English double-major at the University of Florida, where I am taking a class called “Internet Literature” with professor Greg Ulmer.

Over the past 20 years, we have seen an increase in technological effects on our everyday lives as personal computers have become not only a normal accesory to life, but a necessity of life.

It is only a natural consequence that technology has begun to affect the human archive that is literature. Experiments with various software programs and computational mediums by writers, teachers, poets, graphic designers, mixed media artists and so on have resulted in the birth of electronic literature.

With SIGNificant, I aim to present my own experience of e-lit using the framework established by Italo Calvino’s brilliant work — “Six Memos for the Next Millenium” — as well as the work of N. Katherine Hayles, a scholar of e-lit and editor of the e-lit anthology, from which I will use examples.

You can see 10 categories on the right. By clicking on the first five, you can explore my experience of Calvino’s qualities lightness, quickness, and so on. The second five are slight variations of those qualities (quick, light, exact, etc) I have added for the second-half of this project. The qualities are the same, the subtle name change is for organization’s sake only, but in these categories I explore my experience of Calvino’s qualities in “The Little Prince” by Antoine De Saint-Exupery.

For the second part of this project, we were to develop, using Maggie Macnab’s “Decoding Design,” a logo or brand for our chosen work of literature. The posts in the second five categories are basically an outline of my own creative process as I tease out Calvino’s qualities in “The Little Prince” and find ways to incorporate those meanings into my final design.

You can view the final logo on the brand page.

also, thanks to Penny LamKK for header image via flickr