About DLC+

Digital Literary Cultures, known as DLC+, is an open-access research network and resource for scholars exploring digital literary culture broadly defined

Our network is interested in literary engagements with everything from novel cultural productions like instapoetry to nostalgia for obsolescent media to artificial intelligence and computational methods. DLC+ provides research resources for a host of topics related to social media, digital culture, and literature as it adapts to emerging communications technologies and digital environments.

DLC+ was established in 2020 under the former name of Instasociety.

Founders and Leaders

Tanja Grubnic is a researcher of digital literary culture. She is currently making final revisions to her doctoral thesis at the University of Western Ontario. Her dissertation, titled “Art or Con? Exloring Instapoetry at the Intersection of Creator Culture, Digital Entrepreneurship, and Artistic Innovation” studies the convergence of artistic and entrepreneurial activity evident in instapoetry, a type of born-digital literature. She is trained in literary studies, with a specialization in Canadian literature; cultural studies; and digital humanities. In 2022-2023, Tanja was elected to a Fulbright fellowship at Duke University as part of her dissertation research. Her interests include understanding how contemporary individuals engage with literature online for therapeutic purposes; the evolution of twenty-first century authorship; and the shifting purposes of writing in the new attention economy. Email her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @tanjagrubnic.

Camilla Holm is finalizing her PhD in Library and Information Science at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), Norway. The thesis focuses on the platformization of cultural production of poetry from a media ecological perspective. The project also involves the use of methods from the digital and computational humanities. She is one of the founders and current leaders of the Norwegian national research network for digital humanities and culture organization. Her research interests include social media, digital literature, pop culture, and the use of digital methods in research. You may reach her at [email protected] or follow her on BlueSky at @supercamilla.

Tanja Grubnic is a researcher of digital literary culture. She is currently making final revisions to her doctoral thesis at the University of Western Ontario. Her dissertation, titled “Art or Con? Exloring Instapoetry at the Intersection of Creator Culture, Digital Entrepreneurship, and Artistic Innovation” studies the convergence of artistic and entrepreneurial activity evident in instapoetry, a type of born-digital literature. She is trained in literary studies, with a specialization in Canadian literature; cultural studies; and digital humanities, though she does not use computational methods. In 2022-2023, Tanja was elected to a Fulbright fellowship at Duke University as part of her dissertation research. Her interests include understanding how contemporary individuals engage with literature online for therapeutic purposes; the evolution of twenty-first century authorship; and the shifting purposes of writing in the new attention economy. Email her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @tanjagrubnic.

Magdalena Elisabeth Korecka is a PhD candidate and research associate in the ERC project “Poetry in the Digital Age” at the Universität Hamburg in Germany. In her dissertation, she investigates the interrelation of visual aesthetics and platformization in socially engaged (e.g. feminist) poetry in English, German, and Polish across several social media platforms through a mixed methods approach. She co-organized (with Dr. Wiebke Vorrath) the conference “Poetry and Contemporary Visual Culture / Lyrik und zeitgenössische Visuelle Kultur” (May 2022) and co-edited a subsequent publication. With degrees in “Anglophone Literatures and Cultures” as well as “Journalism and Communication Science” (Universität Wien), her research interests include post-digital socio-political aesthetic spaces, including poetry and art, as well as the methodological and ethical implications of researching them. You may reach her at [email protected] or follow on Twitter at @m_e_korecka

Founding Member

Yasamin Rezaei is a PhD student in Cultural, Literary and Linguistic Studies at the University of Miami, Florida, the U.S, where she studies French and Italian dramatic literatures of the 20th century and teaches both languages. Exploring the intersections of language and media from a sociolinguistic point of view, her research interests include social media, pop culture, new media studies, digital performance and theatre studies, digital humanities, and the future of humans and technology interactions from a posthuman point of view.

She often writes about community and the notion of nostalgia, and also creates, explores, and theorizes Instapoetry among Iranian users of Instagram and aims to introduce it to the Persian literary community.

She obtained her BA and MA in Process Engineering from the Universities of Tehran in Iran and Bologna in Italy. You may reach her at [email protected] or @YasaminRezaei on Twitter

Members

Kiera Obbard is a poet and PhD Candidate in The School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, and a resident at The Humanities Interdisciplinary Collaboration (THINC) Lab. Her SSHRC-funded project, The Instagram Effect: Contemporary Canadian Poetry Online,examines the complex social, cultural, technological and economic conditions that have enabled the success of social media poetry in Canada. Her fields of specialization include new media, platform studies, Canadian literature, and digital humanities. She completed her M.A. in Cultural Studies and Critical theory at McMaster University and her Honours B.A. with a joint major in English and Communication at the University of Ottawa. You can reach her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter at @kieraobbard

Bella Boqo is completing her PhD at the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies, South Africa. She is committed to doing research that contributes to inclusive social transformation. Her current study adopts a Southern epistemologies approach to examine how Black, and mostly women, instapoets use the form and Instagram platform as a site of decolonial enunciation. That is, to challenge coloniality of power, knowledge and being. Her research interests lie at the intersections of race, gender, digital media and popular culture, though she occasionally finds herself drawn to feminist economics.

You may reach her at b.m.boqo@gmail.com or @bellaboqo on Twitter.

You may reach her b.m.boqo@gmail.com or @bellaboqo on Twitter.

Hannah Jorgensen is a PhD candidate in English at Duke University. She is working on a dissertation on the influence of the digital on literary character. She was a Rhodes Doctoral Fellow in Computational Humanities and her work includes computational and digital humanities methodologies. She works in the sociology of literature, fan studies, popular culture studies, and performance studies, with an abiding interest in readers. She may be reached at hannah[email protected].