Biometric Poetics: The Case of Eververse

Eververse was a yearlong conceptual poetry project which used a poet’s biometric data as the basis for generating verse. This article describes the project’s conceptual contributions to the field of electronic literature and its technical development. Eververse operated by collecting biometric data from the poet with a commercial fitness tracking device; this data was sent to a custom-built poetry generator which deployed a number of processes from the domains of Natural Language Generation and Sentiment Analysis to generate poetry; the form and content of this poetry was designed to vary according to specific changes in the biometric data, resulting in a poetry that conspicuously correlated with the poet’s daily activities; this poetry was published in real-time on the project website and the full poem and associated data have now been archived. In addition to providing details on the technical implementation of Eververse, this article includes discussion that situates the work within the tradition of electronic literature and analyses its unique inscription of biometric data. The article examines that feature in the contemporary context of the quantified self, but also in its engagement with historic poetic theories of composition, creativity, and the textualisation of the body.

Visualizing Networks of Cultural Discourses in Latin American Electronic Literature

There are relatively few studies that explore the interdisciplinarity between electronic literature and digital humanities research methods. The present paper addresses this lack by combining close reading and distant reading methodologies to analyze networks of cultural discourses in a corpus of 30 Latin American e-lit works published from 1995 to 2020. To conduct the research, three network graphs were created using Gephi, an open-source software for the exploration and analysis of network visualizations. The graphs study the following relations between the e-lit works and the cultural discourses: the frequency of primary, secondary and tertiary discourses, the degree of multi-discourse, and the degree of cultural discourse co-occurrence. The results show the appearance of unexpected discourse variations and new co-occurrence patterns, the benefits of network graphs for revealing e-lit works’ families, and the potential use of data visualization techniques to study e-lit databases. Overall, the paper demonstrates the utility of digital humanities research methods to further examine electronic literature materials.

Literatura e tecnologia: Wlademir Dias-Pino e o poema como máquina analógica / Literature and Technology: Wlademir Dias-Pino and the Poem as an Analogical Machine

Resumo: Dentro dos estudos sobre Literatura e Tecnologia no Brasil, cabe lançar maior luz sobre as poéticas de vanguarda do século XX que tomaram o livro impresso como máquina a ser desmontada, transformada e reengenhada. Nesse contexto, o poeta, designer e artista multimodal Wlademir Dias-Pino antecipou, no suporte do papel, conquistas estéticas que só mais tarde seriam realizadas em meio digital. Antes do advento da literatura eletrônica, o artista já fizera do poema uma máquina analógica, cujas engrenagens variavam do verbal ao não verbal, do colorido ao preto e branco, do discursivo ao fragmentário. Neste artigo, procede-se a uma leitura por desmonte, isto é, a uma engenharia reversa, da imbricação entre o literário e o maquínico na poética de Wlademir Dias-Pino, com enfoque nos textos “A máquina que ri”, A máquina ou a coisa em si, A AVE e um de seus poemas-processo sem título, a fim de compreender como, ainda em meio analógico, o artista propôs uma estética de engrenagens visuais, voltagens poéticas e tensões imagéticas.Palavras-chave: Wlademir Dias-Pino; máquina analógica; literatura e tecnologia.Abstract: Among the studies on Literature and Technology in Brazil, more attention should be paid to twentieth-century avant-garde poetics that dealt with print books as machines to be disassembled, transformed and reengineered. In this context, the poet, designer and multimodal artist Wlademir Dias-Pino anticipated on paper aesthetical achievements only later made in digital media. Before the rise of electronic literature, the artist had already made poetry into an analogical machine whose cogs ranged from the verbal to the nonverbal, from color to black and white, from the discursive to the fragmentary. In this paper we carry out a reading by disassembling, i.e., doing a reverse engineering, of the connections between the literary and the machinal in Wlademir DiasPino’s poetics, focusing on the texts “A máquina que ri”, A máquina ou a coisa em si, A AVE and one of his untitled process-poems, in order to understand how, still in analogical media, he created an aesthetics of visual cogs, poetic voltage and imagistic tensions.Keywords: Wlademir Dias-Pino; analogical machine; literature and technology.

Diagnostic Accuracy of Clinical Tests for Subscapularis Tears: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Background: Previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses on the diagnostic accuracy of shoulder clinical tests do not reach conclusions regarding subscapularis tears. Purpose: To compare the diagnostic accuracy of commonly used clinical tests for subscapularis tears. Study Design: Systematic review; Level of evidence, 3. Methods: An electronic literature search was conducted using Medline, Embase, and the Cochrane Library/Central. Eligibility criteria were original clinical studies reporting the diagnostic accuracy of clinical tests to diagnose the presence of rotator cuff tears involving the subscapularis. Results: The electronic literature search returned 2212 records, of which 13 articles were eligible. Among 8 tests included in the systematic review, the lift-off test was most frequently reported (12 studies). Four tests were eligible for meta-analysis: bear-hug test, belly-press test, internal rotation lag sign (IRLS), and lift-off test. The highest pooled sensitivity was 0.55 (95% CI, 0.28-0.79) for the bear-hug test, while the lowest pooled sensitivity was 0.32 (95% CI, 0.13-0.61), for the IRLS. In all tests, pooled specificity was >0.90. Conclusion: Among the 4 clinical tests eligible for meta-analysis (bear-hug test, belly-press test, IRLS, and lift-off test), all had pooled specificity >0.90 but pooled sensitivity <0.60. No single clinical test is sufficiently reliable to diagnose subscapularis tears. Registration: PROSPERO (CRD42019137019).

RECOLHER, ESCOLHER, ACOLHER EM UM ARQUIVO LITERÁRIO DIGITAL: O PROJETO DA ELECTRONIC LITERATURE COLLECTION COMO COLETÂNEA E COLEÇÃO

No presente artigo, analisamos os três primeiros volumes da Electronic Literature Collection (ELC), antologia seriada de literatura eletrônica desenvolvida pela Electronic Literature Organization. Interessa-nos discutir como a ELC se institui simultaneamente enquanto coletânea e coleção (dois conceitos diferentes em Português para collection), mobilizando um par de funções inerentes aos arquivos literários digitais: a instituição de um cânone e a preservação das obras compiladas nessa iniciativa. Apontamos como os modos de arquivamento da ELC afetam formas de produzir, circular, armazenar, catalogar ou ensinar a literatura eletrônica, determinando não apenas o passado ou o presente da e-lit, mas também seus possíveis futuros.

Change of Direction Speed Tests in Basketball Players: A Brief Review of Test Varieties and Recent Trends

Change of direction speed (CODS) is essential for basketball performance, extensively assessed by various tests. This review aimed to summarize the CODS test varieties for basketball players on publications until 2019 and identify recent trends regarding what types of tests have gained attention in the 2010s. Electronic literature searches were conducted using three databases with relevant keywords. 104 studies were found eligible, conducting CODS tests 159 times in total with 48 test varieties. To facilitate distinctions between the tests, each test was categorized into one of three types based on the distinctive movement characteristics and changing angles as follows: Defensive (involving lateral shuffling), 180°-turn (exerting only 180°-turns), and Cutting (performing diagonal- or side-cut). We then counted the number of publications and adopted times reported per year for each test, and calculated the adoption rate for each categorized test type. The first CODS test performed in basketball players was the T-Test, reported in 1991, and this was the most commonly adopted test (44/159 times). The 2010s saw abrupt increases in the number of publications (1990s-2000s-2010s: 5-9-90) and test varieties (4-7-44). The adoption rates in the 2010s were similar among the three types (i.e., Defensive/180°-turn/Cutting: 37%/30%/33%), with the Cutting type gradually increasing over the last three decades (1990s-2000s-2010s: 0%-9%-33%). These results suggest that while CODS performances in basketball players are increasingly studied with various tests, recent studies give equal weight to all of the three categorized test types, with increasing adoption of the Cutting type, to assess specific CODS performances.