Electronic Literature Directory

Although a database tends to be made to store and publish information rather than to create an aesthetic and literary experience, interaction with a database constructs narratives and aesthetic imaginaries, including ontologies and ideologies of the database's subject. Manovich opposes database and narrative, yet a database’s affordances do set up the potential for narrative and coherence. Readers actualize this potential through the process of interpretation, whose experience include a familiarity with databases in daily life.

The "metainterface" is a concept that highlights the current ubiquity of networked and responsive interfaces. This ubiquity makes the interface more difficult to locate yet more influential in peoples’ everyday lives.

In modern language, an avatar is a computer-generated body or figure, controlled by a person via a digital device. It can be a computer animation image in a virtual reality environment or a robot in the real world. Avatars are most commonly found in the form of icons or moving images that represent a specific person on social networks, video games, Internet forums, and elsewhere: most often, it is a visual manifestation of a person with which one can interact in real-time.

Interactive fiction
A subform of electronic literature, Interactive Fiction (IF) is a type of “program that simulates a world, understands natural-language text input from an interactor and provides a textual reply based on events in the world” (Montfort 2005). IF blends elements of story and game, and readers enter short text commands in order to receive chunks of narrative information and to control either a character or the environment described. It’s one of the earliest forms of computer games and often features adventures.

Instapoetry

Digital modernism refers to a particular category of electronic literature: second-generation, primarily text-based, and – crucially – closely engaged with literary modernism. The term was first outlined by Jessica Pressman in her book of the same name (2014). By ‘modernism’, Pressman refers both to the traditionally-understood category of artistic output in the early 20th century and a general temporal alignment.

Bookishness describes a common literary or aesthetic response to the fears surrounding the death of print. The term is closely associated with literary scholar Jessica Pressman, who describes bookishness as both "a twenty-first-century phenomenon" and "omnipresent" (Pressman 2020, 1). The adjective 'bookish' is itself applied by the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary to those who are "interested in reading and studying, rather than in more active or practical things".