Mr Daniele Giampà

Research project: Beyond the Boundaries of the E-Book. Aesthetics in the Age of Post-Digital Print.

Abstract

Since the mid-2010s, the publishing industry has gone through an important development as far as digital publishing is concerned. The electronic book that is commonly known and used by readers in the PDF format has been modified and enriched with interactive, multimedia, and multimodal features. As a result, both the creation process and the reading process of an e-book have changed accordingly, and these changes can be understood as an innovation of the aesthetics of the e-book.

The new format is defined by publishers and experts in the field as enhanced e-book or with the acronyms EPUB (electronic publishing) and DPUB (digital publishing) and it situates itself in the middle of multiple literary traditions and cultural streams like experimental literature, artists' books and electronic literature.

My research aims to describe the aesthetics of these enhanced e-books on the level of software, to show how programming languages create the aesthetics of the user interface. The basic idea is that programming languages not only describe the elements and actions that appear on the screen, but also create these elements and actions. Code therefore has a descriptive and performative function, just like human language.