EDGE DPUB emerged from my studies in electronic literature and digital publishing. My work represents a convergence of the literary practices of electronic literature and the publishing industry. Enhanced e-books, such as the EPUB3 format, enable the creation of multimodal and multimedia e-books with interactive features borrowed from the web. Thanks to this technology, it is possible to publish and sell electronic literature as a product.
My fascination with the innovations brought about by web technologies in literary studies began in the noughties, and between 2010 and 2025, I published a few articles testifying of the transition from print literature to electronic literature and finally to the publishing industry. This page contains the articles I have published on these topics, such as an essay on digital comics, a survey of digital publishing in Italy and an essay on the analogies between electronic literature and printed literature in the 14th century. The final article on this list is a summary of my PhD dissertaton, in which I explain in a few pages what the focus of my research was and how I applied linguistics to analyse the performative materiality of source code and machine code.
This an article I wrote for the book "Parla come navighi. Antologia della webletteratura italiana" (2010). The term webliterature is not commonly used by scholars of electronic literature, however, my article takes its cue from this terminology to bring to light the analogies between text (testo) and texture (tessuto) and to argue that the web is a new medium suited for the production of literature.
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In the attempt of understanding the works of electronic literature, this article shows various analogies between print literature and electronic literature with the help of comics. Commonly regarded as "paraliterature" or "trivial literature", comics have never really been considered as literature. Nevertheless, they share many plot devices with works of electronic literature can be found in comics too.
This article was originally published in May 2016, on the web page of Gruppo Giada a research group in the field of electronic literature.
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In the last ten years, the digital publishing industry has gone through an important development as far as the creation of new software is concerned. E-books, that are widely known and used as PDF formats, can now be entirely designed with a software and enriched with multimedia and multimodal features which can furthermore embed Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technology. This essay illustrates the many similarities between enhanced e-books and the works of electronic literature and suggests an inclusion of digital publishing in the study of electronic literature.
The interviewees are Paolo Albert, co-founder of Pubcoder (2013), Francesco Leonetti, co-founder of ePubEditor (2013), Fabrizio Venerandi, co-founder of Quintadicopertina (2010), Michela Di Stefano, founder of Studio 361° (2007), Antonio Tombolini, founder of Streetlib (2006), and Gino Roncaglia, co-founder of Liber Liber and Progetto Manuzio (1993).
The survey takes in consideration a time span that starts in 1971, the year Project Gutenberg was founded and focuses on the decade that goes from 2007 – when Amazon launched the Kindle and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) released the EPUB format – to 2017 – when the IDPF was combined into the World Wide Web Consortium.
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This essay is an elaborated transcription written in Spanish of a 15min video that I submitted to the "II Congreso Internacional. En los márgenes de la literatura: nomadismo y fragmentación" organised by the University of Salamanca.
Taking its cue from the word 'fragmentation' the article starts with some considerations of the famous work "Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta" by Francesco Petrarca to make a comparison with works of electronic literature where the fragmens are constituted by the strings of code. In the attempt to discover analogies between works of print literature and electronic literature, the article offers many more examples of authors of the 20th Century.
There are some basic concepts of what literature should do, how literature should be written, what the characteristics of the words and how reality is represented which are challenged by socalled "experimental literature". These aspects of literature and linguistic are not revolutionary nor anti-convential, but inherent characteristics of human language. The question is how modern readers and literary critique interpret them.
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I wrote this article for the Brazilian review "Paraguaçu: Revista de Estudos Linguísticos e Literários", which unfortunately was not published. Nevertheles, it was a good mental exercise to try to explain in the most succint way what my research study was about. Indeed it helped me redefine a few basic concepts and make my theory more precise.
Building on the communicative model developed by Roman Jakobson in 1960, I describe the differences between the sociocultural context in which human language exists and develops, and the digital context in which code exists and operates. Thanks to this distinction, it is possible to recognise that code is an artificial language designed to perform specific actions within a machine, in contrast to human language, which is a natural language. Code must be understood as a formal language and analysed in terms of the functions it performs within the context of the browser.
In conclusion, I describe the performative materiality of code at the high level of source code and the low level of machine code and their role in the creation of UI aesthetics.
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