Digital media

This review of digital media is divided into five sections: 1. The Expanded Matter of New Media; 2. Miraculous Convergence: Digital Narrative; 3. Electronic Literature and Cognitive Work; 4. Software Studies: Codes Work; 5. Cybercultures Histories. Focusing on the 'computational' turn the review opens by briefly considering claims for the new inherent in the label new media, asking how these claims contrast with what is identified as a moment of retrospection for digital media theory-which now has a substantial history. Within this context work on interactive narrative and electronic literature is considered in relation to the material engagement with informatics each develops and in relation to canon formation. Later sections consider contrasting approaches found in software studies and in a cultural history of the digital industries. The review concludes that work in the field of digital media increasingly intersects with work in the digital humanities and may raise questions of disciplinary field formation. Divisions between traditionally complementary approaches, based on a division between the sphere of the literary and the sphere of life itself, may need to be rethought.