Introduction by Adrian Miles  -- page 2 of 6

The Violence of Text is an anthology of not-quite-essays where the designer editors identified a major theme or idea in each piece and used that as a primary filter to inform the design and reworking of that content. What needs to be recognised through the anthology is the insistent manner in which not only is there a major idea which has become the design trope for each author, but that the design in or of the article moves from a representation of this idea to producing or performing that idea in the academic work itself. In other words, what this academic anthology demonstrates with some alacrity is the manner in which digital literacy – as an engaged and informing praxis – inevitably creates, makes, and performs, even while it attempts to represent. It ought to be hardly surprising that the materiality of the digital is so manifestly available given the specific content available, but it is surprising to find so many nascent possibilities realised so easily by these knowledge designers.

By way of introduction I have provided a brief map of what has happened to each academic’s work in the Violence of Text, helping to contextualise the work. This appears to me necessary for two reasons. The first is simply that many humanities academics have a limited set of literacies or competencies when it comes to reading or accommodating new media objects, largely because the majority of academic content in these new environments mirrors and privileges traditional paradigms – for instance there are very few genuinely multilinear essays published in electronic peer reviewed journals. The other is that without an introductory road map the work that has been achieved here risks being misunderstood as net art rather than the tentative experiment towards novel forms of academic writing that it is. In a screen literate world where print and the page are no longer exemplars for the expression of knowledge we remain hesitantly standing at the cusp of new academic genres. Hence, to use these works you need to be an active reader, at times you must do things with the text or digital artefacts for anything to happen, yet at other times the work will insistently run of its own accord. They are always variable, and readerly activity, as Espen Aarseth has taught us, is never trivial in cybertext.

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