Writing & society Research Centre seminar series

The practises of apprehending literature are changing due to digitisation. As texts are published using the multimodal affordances and network capacities offered by digital media, current concepts of literature and the practices of writing and reading shift toward using different semiotic resources, (e.g. language, gesture, images), modalities (e.g. visual, aural, somatic), as well as interaction. The sensorial modes in which reading takes place in this multimodal, literary media landscape change the act of reading itself. Therefore, this article will study the impact of digitisation on audio books and multimedia literary apps with a focus on how perception and the human sensorium in new ways are integral to the reading practices. BIO: Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen is Associate Professor in Aesthetics and Culture at the School of Communication & Culture, Aarhus University. She has written from a phenomenological and ground theoretical perspective and in interdisciplinary contexts on media, rhythm, the voice, aesthetics and meaning theory in the interrelationship between literature and music. Among her publications is Lyd, litteratur og musik: Gestus i kunstoplevelsen (Sound, Literature, and Music: Gesture in the Art Experience, 2008). Between 2006 and 2009 BSP during her post doc worked on Danish rap music as part of a research project supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research (FKK) entitled ‘Rytme, groove og gestik – dansk hip hop mellem det lokale og det globale’ (Rhythm, groove and gesture – Danish hip hop, between the local and the global). She is with co-editor Mads Krogh of Hiphop i Skandinavien (Hip hop in Scandinavia, 2008) and with Jan Hein Hoogstad of Off Beat - Pluralizing Rhythm (Rodopi, 2013). From 2011-2015 she worked with Iben Have on the research project ”The Digital Audiobook - New Medium, New Users, New Literary Experiences? (funded by AU – Ideas) resulting in a number of research articles in well-reputed journals and a monograph at Routledge, Digital Audiobooks: New Media, Users, and Experiences (Routledge, 2016). Has been co-editing Litteratur mellem medier (Literature between Media), Aarhus University Press 2018. Together with Iben Have founder- and editor of the international, peer reviewed online journal SoundEffects, www.soundeffects.dk.