Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Journey Of Doctor Fernand Linares To Morocco A Medical Officer At The Service Of The French Colonial Project During The Reign Of Sultan Moulay El Hassan, Farida Samadi

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

Dr Fernand Linares unanimously represents a leading figure who has played a crucial role in the French colonial enterprise in Morocco, both in terms of his medical action and his diplomatic role, which he has never ceased to fulfil with skill, tact and great discretion. Taking advantage of his proximity to the Cherifian Court, he has earned the esteem of the sovereign Moulay El Hassan, thanks to his good collaboration in the affairs of the Makhzen, his Moroccan clothing and his mastery of the Arabic language. In doing so, he has provided France with invaluable services in favor of a …

Gender Aspects Of Rihla, El Gharoussi El Mobarik

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

Controversially contested, rihla is a genre by itself for the very reasons it is contested for. Anchored in its Arab-Muslim culture, the hijra of the prophet, the cult of pilgrims, and scientific peregrinations, flourished in the Muslim West: it is primarily a Magribine genre. No genre enjoys absolute purity, so does the rihla. It has links with geographical literature, fahrâsa and autobiography. The writing of the narrative in linear form and circular content systematically challenges didactics, pleasant and ethical digressions, but also books: the genre is intertextual.

Models And Functions Of Contemporary Travel, Marie Lasnier Stanford

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

The translated part of the study by Canadian researcher Marie Helene Lasnier provides an approximate picture of the dialectical relationship between the political, economic and ideological changes observed by the West and its impact on international relations in general and the West’s relations with others. This has led to the emergence of two different models of Western travelers: traveler/traveling-writer and writer-traveler. The study concludes that intensive tourism could now be the end of the original and voluntary journey.

The Moorish Ambassador’S Journey To Spain: Cultural Encounters In Ahmed Ben Mehdi Al-Ghazāl’S Natījat Al Ijtihād Fi Al-Mohādana Wa Al-Jihād (1766), Lhoussain Simour

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This article attempts to read al-Ghazāl’s travel account Natījat al Ijtihād fi al-Mohādana wa al-Jihād as a valuable archival material and an eighteenth-century subaltern narrative that offers the re-interrogation of the discourse of the Self and the Other from the perspective of the Moroccan traveler. Natījat al Ijtihād is a travel account that gives further historical evidence about one of the less discussed experiences in literature and annals of history, the abduction of Muslims in foreign lands. Such an interdependent overlap between these thematic concerns and the historical context that fuels up al-Ghazzal’s travel-inspired text would give readers the chance …

Travel And Writing, Michel Butor

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

In this study, Butor reconstructs the relationship between two dimensions: thinking about all the questions they expose and the concepts they use. All this is done within a science he invented, it is Iterology. A new science that will study the concept of travel in its four dimensions, and in a relational perspective that links it to reading and writing. These two dimensions are concretized in the following relationships: reading as travel, travel as reading, travel as writing and writing as travel. It also challenges many concepts that are immanent to the concept of “travel”, which extends it to include …

Two Algerians In Morocco: Two Laudatory Visions, Ahmed Makkaoui

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This article deals with few contemporary situations in the history of Morocco, based on two Algerian travel accounts: The first by Hamza Bokousha in the late 1940s and the second by Abu Qasim Saadullah in the early 1970s. This contribution puts us in the context of travel, highlighting its motivations, its journey, the major issues addressed, and revealing the cultural, political, social and economic aspects in Morocco under the French Protectorate and after Independence.

From Writing The Journey To The Journey Into Writing, Alkhamissa Allaoui

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

Through this article, we seek to emphasize that travel stimulates and enriches imagination. The travel writer tries to transcend the banal aspect of travel and observation to question the obvious and capture the incredible. Indeed, he is convinced that his movement in space and time allows him to observe with circumspective eyes, drawing on imagination, to escape, through his text, into the charms of the mysterious.

Ethnography And Narration In “Women’S Life In Yemen”, Ibrahim Abotalib

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

The travel text (written text that describes the author’s journey to a distant and foreign place) is varied, as are its modes of presentation of ethnographic subjects and observations of a community in a given period. This study deals with topics related to the question of “gender” in the lives of women in Yemen in the 1950s, 60s and 70s of the 20th century, in travel narratives. The narrative by the French doctor “Claudie Fain”, who was in Yemen as an anthropologist as well, tells, according to her friend “France Hoss”, many women’s stories about their suffering. Life and history …

Literature Of The Pilgrimage Trip: The Late Moresque Journey, Abdelhadi Saadoune

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This study aims to introduce a rather little knownliterary text: a manuscript of poems composed by one of the last Spanish Muslimsat the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century. This text is part of an important literary genre that recovers the connections between Moorish Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca, which are an extension of the journeys of Andalusians and Maghrebians of earlier times. This researchendeavor attempts to excavate the journey of a Morisco, a unique historical document on the life, thought and beliefs of an important Muslim community, as well as on the countries, cities, …

Between Dream And Travel, Lina Jammal

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

Dreams were motives for travel (Riḥla) during medieval Islam in literary and historical contexts. This article addresses this common motive in the opposite direction, and focuses on travel as a stimulus for dreams. It shows how dreams are actually journeys, but in two different spatial/temporal dimensions. To this end, this article uses contradictory examples to prove that the dream can achieve certain travel objectives such as pilgrimage, knowledge, trade, therapy and the construction of a new identity.

Ibnu Fadlâne And The Creation Of The Literary Travel Text, Abdelrahim Elkurdy

SOROUD: The journal of Literacy Criticism

This article attempts to highlight Ibn Fadlan’s founding role in the establishment of the Rihlagenre, through making a transition from pure scientific reporting to literary description that sees the facts of the journey from the perspective of the narrator/hero, as found in the modern novel. The hero faces real risky adventures. The narrator uses the process of manipulating the temporalities of history and discourse, and the processes of moving through space, as used by novelists. The pleasure of the text is aroused by the textures of expectation and anticipation, and also by the astonishment caused by the strange and wonderful …

Look Out For Our Kind, Christof Koch

Animal Sentience

Strongly supportive overall of Birch’s broad tent Sentience Project, I offer an alternative dyadic, single-class, two-stage process based on estimating the probability for sentience, and the associated confidence, for any individual or taxonomic group. I criticize Birch’s narrow computational framework when addressing the question of algorithmic sentience; there are alternative approaches.

Can An Ai System Be Creative? A Critical Perspective From Art And Engineering, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

This paper examines the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be creative, approached from the dual perspective of a researcher trained in electrical engineering, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks, who has also spent most of his life engaged in the arts as actor, stage and film director, writer, composer, and visual artist, and in philosophy. Drawing on Margaret Boden’s foundational framework — both her three properties of creativity (novelty, surprise, and value) and her three types of creative processes (combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational) — the paper argues that AI systems are structurally incapable of creativity in …

Ai Is Not The Kind Of Thing That Can Ever Be Sentient, Lori Marino

Animal Sentience

Sentience evolved to allow organisms to move through their environment avoiding harms and achieving benefits. Sentience did not evolve from computation. It evolved from valenced feelings. AI (even robots) are not embodied and are not the kind of thing that needs to be sentient. There is no way to get from computations to feelings. They are qualitatively different things. We should avoid being lulled into thinking that an inanimate object designed to engage our propensity for anthropomorphism, like AI, is actually a mind.

Jerusalem, City Of David Visitor Center: The Early Islamic, Medieval And Late Ottoman Pottery, Benjamin J. Dolinka

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

The excavation at the entrance to the Visitor Center in the City of David uncovered a small but significant assemblage of ceramics, all from stratified contexts, including bowls, basins, storage jars, jugs, a cooking pot and a clay tobacco pipe. The pottery dates from the Abbasid period (ninth–tenth centuries CE), the medieval period (mid-twelfth–late fourteenth centuries CE) and the late Ottoman period (mid- to late nineteenth century CE). The ceramic evidence from the excavation provides important insights into the occupational history of the site during these periods.

Jerusalem, City Of David Visitor Center: The Late Roman And Byzantine Pottery, Debora Sandhaus

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

This article analyzes two pottery assemblages excavated at the entrance of the City of David Visitor Center in Jerusalem, providing important evidence for the occupation and development of the city during the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. The first assemblage, recovered from above the floors of the Stratum VI building, is a homogeneous domestic collection dominated by serving and food-preparation vessels, including arched-rim basins, bowls/lids and a complete Bet Naṭṭif lamp. These finds date the structure to the third–fourth centuries CE and suggest activities associated with food preparation and communal use rather than storage. The second assemblage, recovered from a …

Jerusalem, City Of David Visitor Center: Remains From The Late Roman–Late Ottoman Periods, Joe Uziel

Qadum: Journal of Excavation Reports from Israel

The following report presents the results of an excavation conducted on the summit of the City of David, Jerusalem, which exposed remains of six strata, spanning the Late Roman to the Medieval–late Ottoman period. Although the excavation area was quite narrow, important remains were exposed, contributing to our knowledge of the settlement and character of this portion of the city. Several surfaces interpreted as roads were exposed, beginning with an Abbasid road and continuing until the Medieval–late Ottoman period. Beneath these surfaces, a layer of garden soil, similar in character to the layer exposed in the Giv‘ati Parking Lot, was …

"The First Web Novel At 30: The Collection And The Creative Process", Robert Arellano, Scott Rettberg

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Summer 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Sunshine '69, recognized as the first novelistic hypertext fiction published on the web. While the full work remains accessible online—an "(un)supervised" preservation achievement in itself—the archive remains split between boxes and memory. This conversation between the work's creator and a major scholar in electronic literature documents both specific preservation challenges and systemic patterns in what the field chooses to preserve.

Topics include: figuring out web-born composition before established methodologies existed; the three decades of technical decisions that kept a 1996 work alive through format obsolescence and server migrations; and what gets lost …

The Question Is A Node: Online Quizzes As Interactive Non-Fiction, Michael Merriam

ELO (un)supervised 2026

The quiz is the most widely deployed form of interactive text in education. Even when it is not digitally administered, it presents a prompt, receives a response, and contains within it a formula determining the consequences of that response. A wrong answer is taken as a failure of learning (not mere recall) and, by virtue of their quasi-digital objectivity, a batch of low quiz scores might warn of difficulty in reaching benchmarks. Ergo, quizzes embody the automation of the supervisory function of the instructor, and the supervision of curricula. 

Quiz questions have something in common with nodes in digital interactive …

Reacting To Electronic Literature In Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, Faith Samuel Bassey

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Electronic literature is still quite new in our country, and we do not have enough manpower to drive a literary or scholarly movement.  We need to introduce these concepts to many people; however, we do not have the people we need who know the field well enough to pass on their passion and prowess to get others enthused about electronic literature.

In this talk, I will describe the ways that I have presented my work, The Water Seller, Mai Ruwa, with Deena Larsen. In October 2025,  I presented this work in an in-person conference in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra …

Vibe Coding: Ai, Digital Text Recycling, And The Remediation Of Digital Poetry, Yohanna Joseph Waliya

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This paper theorises Vibe Coding as a novel method of AI-assisted creative practice within electronic literature. Vibe Coding describes an affective mode of communication with AI that enables coding via natural-language prompts, in which the author collaborates with generative AI systems to recycle, remediate, and reconfigure existing digital texts into new poetic forms, including interactive animations. Rather than treating code as a fixed procedural logic, Vibe Coding focuses on rhythm, intuition, and affect as central compositional forces shaping both textual production and computational interaction. Relying on theories of remediation, digital recycling, and posthuman authorship, the paper examines how AI functions …

Aesthetic Relationship Of The Female Character Design And Peacocks In Art Nouveau And Art Deco, A.L Rawan Reda Atef Elzeky, Prof. Dr. Manal Abdel Rahim, Prof. Asmaa Abu Bakr El-Nawawy

Journal of Art, Design and Music

The Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements (1890–1940) produced a rich visual vocabulary in which the female figure and the peacock emerged as recurring and symbolically charged motifs. Despite extensive scholarship on both movements, the specific aesthetic and symbolic relationship between these two elements, and their collective contribution to the development of character design principles, has received limited scholarly attention.

The aim is to enhance understanding of the visual diversity presented in the selected works, despite the shared fundamental elements represented by the woman and peacock. The complementary relationship between them, whether it is a spatially intertwined and harmonious relationship …

Unrequited Love, Kevin Timpe

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Nobody has ever accused me of being pollyannish. In fact, one former colleague once told me “there’s no silver lining you can’t find a cloud around.”

That may mean that in addition to being a faculty member at a Christian university, I’m also perhaps the target audience for a book that the Guardian describes as “sparklingly sardonic and hilariously angry” on the back cover. I read Peter Fleming’s 2021 Dark Academia: How Universities Die while at the lake this summer.

Man.A.Machine.Txt, James H. Pardue

ELO (un)supervised 2026

man.A.machine.txt is an audiovisual composition generated in real time through a real-time multimedia system that remediates the words of Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine, a foundational text of eighteenth-century materialist philosophy. The system produces cut-up poetry and a particle cloud, transforming the original text into a shifting field of language and data. In Man a Machine, La Mettrie argues that body and soul are inseparable, proposing sleep as the moment in which their unity becomes undeniable. By remediating this text, I seek to reactivate its materialist concerns within our present technological condition—one increasingly defined by …

Archival Storytelling: Remembering Our Digital History, Dene Grigar

ELO (un)supervised 2026

In When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Reshaping Our Future, Abby Smith Rumsey argues that memory is required for survival and impacts not only the survival of a species but of that species’ culture. Needed in this “Age of Matter,” as she calls it, are documentation practices that address the way in which physical and digital memory systems can be combined and harnessed to preserve human experience (13).

This paper addresses Rumsey’s challenge. Using the physical and digital archives held in The NEXT’s collections, it introduces archival storytelling as a method for documenting and, thus, remembering …

“Huir Sí Es Mejor Plan”: Rethinking The Subject In Digital Literature, Fernanda Mugica

ELO (un)supervised 2026

As an extension of my research on contemporary appropriative practices that experiment with deviant uses of technology, this paper explores the question of subjectivity in digital literature. My aim is to examine how a set of contemporary works of electronic literature problematize the relationships between writing, technology, and subject formation. Within this framework, I propose a reading of Huir sí es mejor plan (2020), a work created in Twine by Argentine writer Valeria Mussio. To address the question of the subject in an algorithmic culture, it is essential to attend to the spatial modulations (Angeliki 2021) that traverse it: media …

(Un)Supervised Translation: How Fans Fill In The Gaps In Visual Novel Localization, Sara Raffel, Mónica G. González Burgos

ELO (un)supervised 2026

A translator must consider multiple cultural contexts when translating a work of electronic literature; no longer concerned only with the text, they might need to examine images, platform, interactivity, and the code itself. As identified by Przbyszewska, translating works of e-lit can require attention to the code and platform of a work, with the extent dictated by “the interaction inherent in the semantics of the text” (28). Meanwhile, Marecki and Montfort differentiate e-lit translation from its traditional literary counterpart because the translator is no longer “invisible” where e-lit is involved (90). This presentation extends this discussion of e-lit translation to …

Electronic Literature In Ai Data Work, Mihai Bacaran

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This paper is based on my personal experience of working as a transcriber for AI projects between 2023 and 2025 in a Business Process Outsourcing company located in Eastern Europe. The job of transcribers is to listen to audio recordings provided by The Client (a major tech company whose name cannot be mentioned due to nondisclosure agreements) and either transcribe them from scratch or correct an AI generated transcription. The recordings are gathered from users of digital devices, many of whom appear unaware of being recorded.

During the transcription work, probably due to the excruciating boredom of performing the same …

Migritude In The Digital Space: An Analysis Of Migration Narratives In Twenty-First-Century Electronic Literature, Ruth Oluyemi Akande

ELO (un)supervised 2026

The study examines the concept of migritude in the field of digital literature, highlighting the importance of African and diasporic movements in the development of modern electronic narratives studies. Drawing upon digital humanities, postcolonial theory, and African literary studies, the study posits that electronic literature transcends mere representation of migration; it actively enacts migritude through its formal, procedural, and interactive design.

This research will  careful analyse the specific electronic literary works, demonstrates how nonlinear narratives, hypertextual fragmentation, and reader involvement reflect the inherent discontinuities of migratory experiences, while also highlighting African epistemologies, linguistic hybridity, and cultural memory. These digital narratives, …

Agent Of The Wild Heart, Allison Whittenberg

The Sucarnochee Review

No abstract provided.