Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
“Endless Reader” is a children’s mobile application created by Originator, which has developed other recognized apps such as “Endless Numbers” and “Endless Alphabet.” This application is the follow-up to “Endless Alphabet,” integrating sight words with an interactive digital environment with the purpose of allowing children to hear words broken down to their simplest phonetic segments.
In the next few weeks, a series of entries will appear here that will concern themselves with the notion of a digital rebirth, a sort of digital reincarnation of printed texts. These entries will not refer to merely digitized versions of classic texts. Instead, they will highlight digital publications that present printed texts in a completely new light and that share with born-digital literature the need to be read in specialized devices.
In March last year, my attention was caught by iPoe, an edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories specifically designed for mobile devices. In turn, this sparked my interest in other similar publications and my involvement in the CantApp, an edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales conceived for reading in mobile phones and tablets which will be published this year. This reimagining of classical texts for modern multimedia devices is what I refer to as born-again digital literature.
This generative poem app for mobile devices was originally designed for iOS, but upon being rejected for inclusion in the Apple Store was adapted to Android and successfully published in the Google Play store. Its primary interest lies in the different kinds of input it is able to process in its generating algorithms, such as address books, location, WiFi hotspots. Its title and description are indicative of its goals and strategies.