Publications

While “born digital” artefacts such as video games and works of e-literature have been part of secondary school English in Anglophone countries for more than two decades (Beavis, 1998; Durrant & Beavis, 2001; Gee, 2003; Buckingham & Burn, 2007; Cowdy, 2016; O’Mara, 2019), databases of mass-digitised (and hence “re-mediated”) literary texts are yet to have a significant presence in, or influence on, literary work in subject English. The authors contend that engagement with these digitised texts requires us to enact a postdigital (Ablitt 2019) ‘literary literacy’ (Green 2006).

The authors explore how “distant reading” (Moretti 2013), which involves applying digital tools to large-scale data to identify patterns beyond the scale of human perception, offers a form of postdigital literary literacy that can be enacted alongside others, including productive reading and code switching. Using the example of the To be continued database of fiction originally published in 19th and early 20th century Australian newspapers, the article argues that postdigital literary objects offer new possibilities for literary knowledge and new ways of thinking about the purpose and role of literary study and teacher expertise in English in the 21st century.

Presentations

  • Katherine Bode, “From Text to Database: Digital Literacy at Scale.” Keynote for the International Federation for the Teaching of English / Australian Association for the Teaching of English conference. Sydney. 7–10 July.

  • Larissa McLean Davies, Wayne Sawyer and Katherine Bode. “Possibilities for Agency? Exploring the interface of digital humanities and L1 literary education.” ARLE: International Association for Research in L1 Education, Lisbon. 26–28 June.