As we continue to move through a moment of pervasive digital culture, and increasingly ubiquitous digital technology, new aesthetic paradigms emerge across the arts. This thesis explores those paradigms, representations of the digital, as they appear in contemporary American culture. Rather than reflecting on this concern through the parameters of digital texts, this thesis will develop an expanded idea of digital culture, one that includes print and analogue works that reflexively engage with the digital. The digital environments we negotiate today are culturally rooted in the US. Despite its history, the presence of digital culture as a formative aspect of contemporary American literature and art has been little explored from within the discipline of American studies. This thesis will argue that more sustained critical attention is needed to consider how the digital emerges as a subject of American culture since 2000. Beginning with a study of the status of the book in the digital age, this thesis contends with its subject through examinations of remixing in literature, and of the representation of code in visual culture, before moving on to consider themes of location and identity in networked environments. It will provide close readings of a range of texts: books by the publishers Mcsweeney's; literary works by Mark Amerika, Jennifer Egan, Robert Fitterman, Jonathan Lethem, Richard Powers, and Gary Shteyngart; the films The Social Network and Catfish; and artworks by Cory Arcangel, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Takeshi Murata. This thesis will argue that the digital is a key subject for American culture of the last fifteen years. It will consider the digital as materially, and formatively, embedded in culture. To address the complexity of this approach, this thesis will study contemporary American literature and art through the lens of digital theory.

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Ebooks have the potential to change the way we read but the ebook industry is not growing as it could be because it is faced with a number of challenges. The British fiction book market struggles as it grows with no clear idea of how each of the book chain areas is challenged by the effect of them. There is the need to identify these effects and challenges faced by the book chain both in the individual areas and the book chain as whole. By identifying these effects and challenges, the British ebook community can address them and grow with the knowledge and assurance that they are working together towards a successful book future. This thesis aimed to investigate what these challenges and effects were and the differences between the ebook and pbook chains. Three specific stakeholders from the book chain were investigated: publishers, libraries and ebook users. The research methods used to obtain information included interviews with publishers both in America and Britain, a telephone questionnaire of all British public library authorities and an online questionnaire available to an international audience of ebook users. The research found that the pbook and ebook chains were different and included different stakeholders. It also found that the publishing processes between pbooks and ebooks had numerous similarities and differences. The effects and challenges for all stakeholders were discussed in relation to the five key areas that had become apparent from the original research and literature; rights, cost, formats, perceptions and knowledge. The fiction ebook market will continue its slow growth until the time that either some of these challenges can be rectified or they become so problematic that the ebook fiction market fails completely.

Stories, themes, concepts and references are organized structurally and purposefully in most books. A person reading a book needs to understand themes and concepts within the context. Schank’s Dynamic Memory theory suggested that building on existing memory structures is essential to cognition and learning. Pirolli and Card emphasized the need to provide people with an independent and improved ability to access and understand information in their information seeking activities. Through a review of users’ reading behaviours and of existing e-Book user interfaces, we found that current e-Book browsers provide minimal support for comprehending the content of large and complex books. Readers of an e-Book need user interfaces that present and relate the organizational and narrative structures, and moreover, reveal the thematic structures. This thesis addresses the problem of providing readers with effective scaffolding of multiple structures of an e-Book in the user interface to support reading for comprehension. Recognising a story or topic as the basic unit in a book, we developed novel story segmentation techniques for discovering narrative segments, and adapted story linking techniques for linking narrative threads in semi-structured linear texts of an e-Book. We then designed an e-Book user interface to present the complex structures of the e-Book, as well as to assist the reader to discover these structures. We designed and developed evaluation methodologies to investigate reading and comprehension in e-Books, in order to assess the effectiveness of this user interface. We designed semi-directed reading tasks using a Story-Theme Map, and a set of corresponding measurements for the answers. We conducted user evaluations with book readers. Participants were asked to read stories, to browse and link related stories, and to identify major themes of stories in an e-Book. This thesis reports the experimental design and results in detail. The results confirmed that the e-Book interface helped readers perform reading tasks more effectively. The most important and interesting finding is that the interface proved to be more helpful to novice readers who had little background knowledge of the book. In addition, each component that supported the user interface was evaluated separately in a laboratory setting and, these results too are reported in the thesis.