Demystifying and Challenging the Settler Colonial Nation through Digital Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholarship of digital literature frequently eschews considerations of national contexts, and for good reason: works of digital literature are primarily distributed over the Internet, which easily transcends national borders, while creators and scholars of digital literature frequently find community online and internationally as the study of digital literature is still typically marginalized within artist communities, scholars’ home departments, and academic studies more generally. The transnational positioning of the digital literature community further enables creators and scholars to avoid the national designations that have held sway—frequently arbitrarily and without consideration for how these nationalizations uphold status quos—in academic disciplines of other artforms. In my presentation, I consider how the transnational or even a-national approaches of digital literature and its scholarship can be trained back on the nation to demystify and challenge the development of the cultural imaginary of a nation according to hegemonic norms of dominant socio-ethnic and -economic groups within a given state. This becomes particularly important, I argue, within a context of working towards decolonization in settler colonial states (or, more accurately, on lands occupied by settler colonial states), as national ideologies work to enforce the appearance of the permanence and immutability of the nation and the state which in turn makes attempts toward decolonization feel impossible. While I focus on the context with which I am most familiar—the settler colonial state Canada and its cultural imaginary of the nation—I believe these insights can be extrapolated to considerations of other settler colonial national contexts and more generally to the workings of hegemonies with national contexts of any kind. Using examples from works by the High Muck a Muck Collective and Skawennati (Mohawk), I demonstrate how these works use digital rhetoric to confront the hegemonic writing of the cultural imaginary of the Canadian settler colonial nation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".