The December issue of our Birkbeck-run open access journal on 21st-century literature and literary criticism, Alluvium, featured original articles by leading international scholars researching the function of digital metaphors in the 21st century. The special issue on "Digital Metaphors" was guest edited by former Birkbeck PhD student Dr Zara Dinnen, who now works as Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham. As Zara writes in her Editor's Introduction:
Thinking of computing as a substantiated metaphor for a human-machine interaction pervades the way we talk about digital culture. Most particularly in the way we think of computers as sentient — however casually. We often speak of computers as acting independently from our commands, and frequently we think of them ‘wanting’ things, ‘manipulating’ culture, or ourselves.
In addition to Zara's Editor's Introduction, this issue features articles on women's labour and the history of computing by Birkbeck's own Sophie Jones, the proliferation of metaphors of computers as a sentient metaphor by Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths) and spatial metaphors in virtual game environments by Rob Gallagher (Concordia).
Image by Christian under a CC BY-NC-ND license.
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