The “Répertoire des écrivaines et écrivains numériques”. Archiving and institutionalization of digital literature

What are we talking about when we say “digital literature” today? If the early works of electronic literature – hypertext fiction, hypermedia literature, generative texts – could be identified by the distinguishing feature of hyperlink or technology in a wider sense, nowadays Twitterature, literary blogs, and Facebook writings challenge more and more the possibility to define this kind of literature under a solely technology-based perspective. The Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities' project “Répertoire des écrivaines et écrivains numériques,” inspired by the CELL project, is an attempt to mind the existing gap between these new textual objets and literary studies. In this presentation, we will show and discuss the criteria upon which we have defined what is a digital literary object and a digital author, the archiving modalities of those objects, and the epistemological structure of our project in order to think about the impact of the digital turn on literary concepts such as author, authorship, literary work, and genre.