Hannah Maria Leontine Ackermans

Position

Postdoctoral Fellow

Affiliation

Research groups

Short info

Hannah Ackermans is a postdoctoral researcher within the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen (Norway). As part of their postdoc, Ackermans is project coordinator for the Living Glossary of Digital Narrative, the Digital Narrative Knowledge Base, and the CELL project.

Research

Hannah Ackermans researches disability and accessibility within electronic literature. Electronic literature authors are known for using technology in counterintuitive ways, even using glitches or bugs as key narrative devices. Moreover, electronic literature tends to be multimodal, including different medial modes such as text, visuals, audio input and output to create works. I argue that electronic literature’s commitment to formal experimentation is already the perfect place to consider the effects of multimodality on different readers—if only we are willing to decenter the able-bodied reader in our scholarly and creative practice.

Beyond the more narrow scope of this project, Ackermans writes about the intersection between disability, digital culture, and the environment. This includes an exploration of the digital practices associated with Norwegian Sign Language poetry, what we can learn from disabled people to address the climate crisis, and how electronic literature about illness can transform our lives.

Publications

2026

2025

2019

2024

2020

2016

2015

2023

2021

See a complete overview of publications in NVA.

Consortium on Electronic Literature

Hannah Ackermans is the current project coordinator of the Consortium on Electronic Literature (CELL). CELL is a cross-database collaboration in the field of electronic literature. Currently, CELL is hosted and led by the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) at the University of Bergen, Norway, in collaboration with all member databases.

The centerpiece of CELL is The Index, which gives access to an expansive collection of records across electronic literature databases through one Wikibase. It is a peer-reviewed collection of Wikidata items. The Index makes the data of individual databases more available to the electronic literature community and the public. This in turn gives the individual databases a larger readership.

In addition to the Index, CELL also encourages further collaboration among electronic literature scholars. CELL has a quarterly newsletter to which all members can contribute to share their events, achievements and requests with the wider community. CELL organizes events and roundtalbes to communicate with its members and prospective members about current projects and future strategy. We also offer to host a Wikibase environment for working groups who would like to create a database but do not have the support for the technical structure.