#digital-writing — Public Fediverse posts

On February 20, 2026, I presented a paper at the Future of Writing symposium 2026, whose main theme was “adaptability”. The symposium was organized by Mark Marino and Z.D. Dochterman and it was presented by The Dornsife Writing Program at the University of Southern California, the Institute on Ethics & Trust in Computing, the Viterbi Engineering in Society program, the Ahmanson Lab, the Electronic Literature Organization, and the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab.

I do not actually teach writing, but digital writing is the focus of my academic research and I teach digital literacy workshops (with the Socialini collective). These two experiences led me to present a phenomenological approach to teaching writing, a method that is in debt to C.I.R.C.E.‘s “hacker pedagogy” and their interface analysis, which I apply to writing interfaces. The title of the paper is The Daimon of the Interface: an (Alien) Phenomenological Approach to Writing Technology.

The overall goal of this approach is to help students develop a deep awareness of the interconnection and interdependence of writing and thinking, and of the influence that the tools we use have on our cognitive and writing processes.

Since my academic career is likely coming to its end soon, I thought it was better to publish it as a working paper on my Zenodo profile instead of going through the everlasting and exhausting process of developing it as it should be done, then submitting it to an academic journal and going through the full loop. I know this is a shortcut, but I also think that in the paper there could be some interesting ideas and the method I propose could be of some use to teachers. So in a spirit of openness and sharing, I prefer to put it out in the world. Of course, I’ll be more than happy to receive comments, critics and feedback: if you want, get in touch!

Why AI can’t take over creative writing
#Tech #AI #CreativeWriting #AIvsHuman #WritingCommunity #LLM #ChatGPT #HumanCreativity #WritersLife #AIEthics #Storytelling #GenerativeAI #WritingTools #DigitalWriting #PromptEngineering #OriginalityMatters
https://the-14.com/why-ai-cant-take-over-creative-writing/

[Publication] Critical Digital Humanities: text, code and algorithms

The timing of the academia, it is known, can be really long and sometimes things just get stuck. I forgot about this article for a long time, then in the last days I remembered it. It is the updated version of a paper I presented at a conference in april 2021 (actually, it was my first conference as a doctoral candidate) and I thought it was useless in a folder on my laptop so I published it on Zenodo. Now it’s out there – to be read and criticised, to be part of the debate about tools and methods for Digital Humanities or, at least, just to show the starting point of my research. Here is the abstract:

Writing is a technology and technology is never neutral. Furthermore, in the digital environment everything is writing: behind every piece of content “is a written system of protocols and controls” (Seymour, 2019). Digital technologies, including the software used in Digital Humanities, help researcher all around the world with new tools and new approaches, but what do we know about these software? About how they are built and structured? About the codes and algorithms they contain? Some researchers have argued that we can bring the critical approach we use in Humanities to the Digital (Berry, 2014), also with the trans-disciplinary help of Modern Languages studies (Pitman – Taylor, 2017): Critical Digital Humanities. But there are other ways to participate “critically” in DH. First, we can consider electronic literature as DH on the basis that “a computer is not a tool or prosthesis that helps us to accomplish our work; rather, it is the medium in which we work” (Grigar, 2021). Second, since we are in a digital environment, we can use the concept of “hacking” as a method (Klein, 2011; Saum-Pascual, 2020;), not limiting it to the software world. If this approach is workable, it can help to overcome the postmodernist “naive trust in the screen which makes the very quest for ‘what lies behind’ irrelevant” (Žižek, 2008). Codes and algorithms are languages – “the ur-writing of contemporary civilization” (Seymour, 2019) – and, as languages, shape our experience of reality: understanding them, especially in the research field, is a necessary step to build an approach that is, at the same time, theoretical, practical and critical.

#digitalHumanities #digitalWriting #hacking

https://wp.me/pa8vBQ-ll