Rita Raley, the editor of the September 2006 issue of the Iowa Review, has dedicated a whole edition to what she calls the “spatial turn” of digital writing.
In her introductory essay “Writing 3D”, Raley calls for a new type of reading, “deep reading”, a new type of analysis similar to the Jamesonian “archisemiotics” which acknowledges the semantic significance of spatial design and takes into account the new dimension of writing, the extension of poetic space into the third dimension. Raley argues that those multi-dimensional works that integrate the z-axis into their repertoire require a fundamental reorientation of spatial perspective and new critical frameworks for their analysis. A fourth type of reading becomes necessary, volumetric reading along the z-axis, “reading surface to depth and back again.” “The unit of poetic analysis has shrunk from line to word to letter and now we have need of another unit”, she writes: “the three-dimensional projecting plane.”
In her introductory essay “Writing 3D”, Raley calls for a new type of reading, “deep reading”, a new type of analysis similar to the Jamesonian “archisemiotics” which acknowledges the semantic significance of spatial design and takes into account the new dimension of writing, the extension of poetic space into the third dimension. Raley argues that those multi-dimensional works that integrate the z-axis into their repertoire require a fundamental reorientation of spatial perspective and new critical frameworks for their analysis. A fourth type of reading becomes necessary, volumetric reading along the z-axis, “reading surface to depth and back again.” “The unit of poetic analysis has shrunk from line to word to letter and now we have need of another unit”, she writes: “the three-dimensional projecting plane.”
