Digital poetry in online latin american archives: convergences and divergences

ABSTRACT

As a result of the growing institutionalization of digital literature, we observe the maturation of this literary system in several aspects, among which we highlight the development of online archives for such creative works. Some of the aporias that emerge in discussions about literary and artistic archives in general are also present when it comes to repositories and anthologies exclusively dedicated to digital literature, with the extra challenges of categorizing works from a field in constant transformation, whether due to the incessant development of new technologies, or to frequent experimentations with emerging genres and literary forms in computational contexts. Faced with these issues, this paper discusses the solutions implemented in three different Latin American digital literary archives (the Antología LitELat - v.1., the Cartografía de la Literatura Digital Latinoamericana and the Atlas da Literatura Digital Brasileira) to include and categorize works tagged as digital poetry, or similar terms. To do so, we herein analyze the general architecture of such archives and their underlying taxonomies, paying particular attention to the metadata of the archived poetic texts and the way they relate to one another and to their respective works so as to outline possible understandings of what digital poetry is.

KEYWORDS:
Digital poetry; online archives; taxonomies; metadata; genres