We are excited to announce the second installment of our Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture series, mini-conferences devoted to studying the most pressing and emerging concepts actively shaping digital literary culture.

In 2025-2026, Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture will host two virtual mini-conferences consisting of four thematically-linked keywords actively shaping digital literary culture in the very online, very present moment. Our first installment featured “smut” and “lore,” and now we turn to “slop” and “nostalgia.” We are working at the bleeding edge of culture, and these mini-conferences are designed to be intimate, safe, and collaborative spaces to think with others about what we see emerging, as it is emerging. 

To that end, the conference will be held on a single day consisting of two panels organized around the keywords. For each keyword, we are soliciting submissions for three to four 10-minute papers to facilitate timely conversations about the pressing issues in digital literary culture today. Our aim is to invite conversation across the papers and across the keywords through a day spent reading and thinking together. 

For our Keywords Sessions, our selections ask potential participants to touch on these dynamics via the following keywords shaping digital literary culture today. Please see the call-for-papers below.

Slop

Slop has quickly become an ubiquitous word describing AI generated content, especially low-quality content that fails to pass as human. Enabled by the ease with which AI can output large quantities of material (a process that conveniently obscures the devastating environmental impacts of AI technology), our internet is now “sloppy”. AI generated text, images, and video all proliferate across digital spaces–sometimes humorously obvious, sometimes insidiously ambiguous. As we take in more and more of our information and entertainment through digital outlets, the proliferation of slop clogs our feeds and spams our platforms. 

We are interested in papers interrogating this ever-growing category of content, such as it is. We especially want to highlight scholars critically engaging with slop, past a blanket rejection of AI created content. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• The aesthetics of slop, including volume, tone, effort

• What constitutes or defines slop in comparison to other AI generated content

• Slop compared to AI content deemed to be of artistic value

• Computational approaches to slop

• The economics of slop

• Explorations into sub-categories of slop, i.e. misinformation, “workslop”

• Slop and authenticity or authentic writing

• Pre-cursors to slop: spam, surrealism

Nostalgia

Nostalgia, coined in 1688 by medical student Johannes Hofer, was originally diagnosed as a condition known colloquially as homesickness. Since the mid- to late-twentieth century, it has developed into a popular cultural phenomenon. Television shows like Happy Days and Mad Men remind us that a fondness for “simpler” decades past is not unique to the social media age. But nostalgia for previous eras has grown into one of the most pervasive aesthetic fascinations of the current decade. Nostalgia—partcularly for a pre-internet, pre-algorithmically and screen-mediated world—has become thoroughly entrenched in internet culture as an aesthetic and cultural mood. Perhaps paradoxically, social media ushered in the re-emergence of poetry as a best-selling artform and the re-branding of reading as an “offline” experience. At the same time, pastiches of analogue and early internet media prior to algorithms dominate visual social media feeds, not to mention the wave of AI-generated videos animating the last generations in living memory before the internet. 

Indeed, we live in a digitized, webified, and computerized world. Global screen times average over six hours per day and people spend far more time online than they would like to believe. As the internet becomes more and more pervasive, a longing for those allegedly familiar feelings of privacy, quiet, and disconnection grow stronger. Whether nostalgia bears any relevance to Hofer’s original definition is up for debate, but we are interested in papers that nevertheless diagnose the enduring significance of nostalgia in digital culture and literature. Areas of focus might include:

• Case studies of specific types or genres of nostalgic aesthetics online.
• The connection between nostalgia and other internet trends like “slop,” “brainrot,” and “touch grass.”
• The relationship between nostalgia and cultural anxieties about the internet.
• Representations of nostalgia for the pre-internet world in television, film, or literature.
• Idealizations of the pre-internet era.
• The rise of “offline” experiences (book clubs, reading retreats).
• Historicizations of internet nostalgia compared to earlier manifestations of theories.
• Attending discourses of mental health, wellness, and self-care.
• The irony of documenting internet nostalgia or non-internet activities online.

Submission Guidelines:

We welcome 250-300 word proposals for 10 minute presentations through our Google form by March 13th. We invite proposals from individuals at all career levels, including emerging scholars, graduate students, independent researchers, and practitioners. Please include your full name and pronouns, email, a 100 word biography, and a working title.

Authors of successful proposals will be notified by April 1st. The mini-conference will take place online on May 14th. Timing will be set to EST local time.

If we receive more abstract submissions than the mini-conference format has room for, the following criteria will apply:

• Presenters that can attend both panels (if time zones allow)

• Explicit thematic relevance

• Overall strength of submission

We anticipate accepting three to four papers per keyword and accommodating up to 15 attendees, including presenters, if your paper is not selected but you would still like to participate.

Please send any queries to Tanja Grubnic and Hannah Jorgensen at contact@dlcplus.org.