![]() ![]() ![]() I use the term speculative in an open sense. The speculative in print fiction and scholarship largely takes place within familiar genres (novel, short story, poem, dissertation, journal article, library card catalogue), but electronic literature and the digital humanities have had to invent and reinvent their material interfaces again and again. In electronic literature and the digital humanities, the speculative mode is expressed in the interfaces chosen as well as in the content of the story or the archive. Speculation is an essential element in both fiction and humanities research. To speculate is to imagine possible futures, possible alternatives to the ways we live, think, and read. After discussing these three examples, I follow the threads of speculative interfaces into digital humanities projects. Each of these speculative interfaces is a form of world-building, speculating about aspects of the relationship between humans and technologies that are particularly salient at the time: automation and narrow gender roles in the 1950s, interactivity and the availability of more information than a single human can ever meaningfully absorb in the ’80s and ’90s, and the unsettling ways that our personal data are used by technology companies to manipulate us in the 2010s. ![]() Each of these creates a new, speculative interface: Strachey programmed a mainframe computer to generate love letters, Joyce pioneered hypertext fiction, and Pullinger created a narrative for smartphones that integrates the reader’s location and visual surroundings into the story. Love Letter Generator (1952), Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story (1990) and Kate Pullinger’s Breathe (2018). I will discuss the interfaces of three works of electronic literature, each written decades apart: Christopher Strachey’s M.U.C. This paper follows the threads of speculative interfaces through electronic literature and the digital humanities, arguing not only that the speculative interface is a key attribute of electronic literature, but also that speculative interfaces are an important methodology in the digital humanities. ![]()
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