digital writing

This dissertation is part critical essay and part poetry collection. The critical essay, “Flipping the Script: On the Pedagogical Relevance of Teaching Digital Creative Writing,” examines the benefits of digital creative writing, i.e. text-based, literary work that requires digital technology at every stage of existence, by organizing those benefits into five categories, or nodes: poiesis, literacy, identification, authority, and cognition. Then, it argues that digital creative writing, like print creative writing, reinforces and extends the goal of liberal education, i.e. to promote creative, critical, and conscientious citizens. As students read, or interact with, and construct their own digital literary objects, they simultaneously learn to read, interact with, and construct their various selves and knowledge. As for the poems in the collection, they act, in Pound’s words, as “radiant node[s] . . . from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” They enact a broad conception of the literary, one characterized by connectivity, interactivity, multimediality, non-linearity, performativity, and transformability, features that coincide with those of digital literary works. Diverse with regard to style, the poems narrate the mind and body at play amid the world’s charged states. The poems cohere around concepts and associations attendant to the anode, node, and ode. The “anode” poems explore relationships among larger cultural forces (e.g. poetry, art, identity, and politics). The “node” poems explore autobiography through the lens of experimental biopic. And the “ode” poems explore and destabilize the ode and its conventions. Ultimately, the work responds to its environment and strives to contain a world that resists being contained.

"Do it" by Serge Bouchardon is an app that encourages the reader to be a more active participant in their lives. Posted in this issue is a sample video of Bouchardon’s app. Upon opening the app, the reader is told they are at a job interview and then is prompted through the various existential anxieties that follow. You can shake, tap, and expand the narrative, but the most important thing asked of you during the experience is: can you adapt?

The work has been presented by "The New River" for the Spring 2018 edition.

The app is avaiable for Ios and Android devices and it can be found here:https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Spring/DoIt/DI.html

Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Spring/editor.html

The possibility of machines making works of art has fascinated mankind for centuries. Men have dreamed not only of machines equipped with a powerful artificial memory, capable of reproducing patterns and structures from previous texts; they have also devised machines capable of working on their own, producing beautiful works without any human input. That leads us to the startling hypothesis posed by Calvino (2009): “will there be a machine capable of replacing the poet and the writer?”. The fact that written verbal language consists of nothing but visual symbols rearranged into meaningful structures makes this system (and Literature, as well) a field where experimentations with automated creation tend to be prolific. The interactive computer system Library of Babel, created by the American writer John Basile, based on the central metaphor of the short story “The Library of Babel”, by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, is a remarkable techno-artistic product in this area. The system works on the mathematical principle of Combinatorics, so that any click on the refresh button triggers a different combination of 29 graphic symbols (the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the space, the full stop and the comma) among all possible rearrangements, filling in a page with 3200 characters. As if in a lottery in which one wins by buying tickets for all possible rearrangements (which would evidently cost more than the prize), the system Library of Babel encompasses, under massive layers of linguistic chaos, all texts (literary or not) that could be written with these 29 graphic symbols. With that in view, this paper discusses the ontological and aesthetic consequences of a “total writing”, the logical premise of a project like the Library of Babel, which lies somewhere between a machine that subsumes all possible writers, but also all possible archives. As to the theoretical bases for our analysis, we will analyze Basile’s system from the perspectives defended by Umberto Eco (2016), Italo Calvino (2009), Barthes (2004), Deleuze (1979) and Raymond Quenau (1961).

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/609/A+poe…

"This chapter examines the transformations of literary hypertext as a nonlinear digital writing format and practice since its inception in the late 1980s. We trace its development from the editorially closed and demographically exclusive writerly practices associated with first generation hypertext (also known as the Storyspace School) to the participatory, inclusive, and arguably more democratic affordances of the freely accessible, userfriendly online writing tool Twine. We argue that while this evolution, alongside other participatory forms of social media writing, has brought creative media practices closer than ever to the early poststructuralist-inspired theory of “wreadership” (Landow 1992), the discourses and practices surrounding Twine perpetuate ideological and commercially reinforced binaries between literature and gameplay. In view of the recent proliferation of text-based literary games, however, we argue that media literacies are bound to change and adapt to the cognitive challenges and distinct immersive qualities of literary-ludic hybrid artifacts, and readers/players will develop media-literate strategies of engaging with the clash between hyper- and deep attention" (Hayles 2007)

In the fields of literature, creative writing, and media studies, creative practice and critical analysis have long been parallel and complementary activities; the poet’s creative experience gives her unique insights into the poetry of others. Direct experimentation for the purposes of critical research, however, has long been relegated to science. Practice-based research, also called action research, is a tried and tested methodology in medicine, design, and engineering. While it has always been present to some extent in the arts and humanities, though generally restricted to practice and research, in recent years artistic practice has developed into a major focus of research activity, both as process and product, and several recent texts as well as discourse in various disciplines have made a strong case for its validity as a method of studying art and the practice of art.

Digital writing as a creative practice and field of scholarly study is similarly new; it is also singular in that a significant portion of its practitioners are equally academic researchers. Given that the affordances and limitations of digital storytelling tools are highly unique, encouraging experimentation with narrative form and content, it is timely that a direct approach to studying the process and results of digital writing is emerging as well.

This paper proposes a specific methodology for the practice-based study of digital writing. “Practice-based” connotes a focused project, a creative experiment designed to answer questions about the process and results of the practice itself: “it involves the identification of research questions and problems, but the research methods, contexts and outputs then involve a significant focus on creative practice” (Sullivan 2009, 48). The proposed method aligns foremost with Sullivan’s conceptual framework of practice-based research, in that the creative undertaking is an attempt to understand the artefacts themselves. As such, it incorporates ethnomethodological (Garfinkel 1967; cf. Brandt 1992) observation of writing activities, maintaining notes, journal entries, comments on drafts, and other relevant, observable paratexts to the composition, in order to “make continual sense to [the writer] of what [the writer is] doing” (Brandt 1992, 324). These notes and paratexts are later analyzed, placing them within the context of composition cognition (Flower & Hayes 1981), and post-textual, media-specific analysis (Hayles 2002) is conducted on the narratives that result. In this manner, the various strengths of practice-based research, ethnomethodology, cognitive process, and post-textual analysis are combined into a robust, widely applicable method of evaluating the activities of the practitioner/researcher.

The digital fiction Færwhile: A Journey Through a Space of Time (Skains 2013) was composed as a practice-based project using this methodology, and is used in this paper as a demonstration.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This paper will present Letter to an Unknown Soldier, a new kind of war memorial, made entirely of words. Created by writers Neil Bartlett and Kate Pullinger, the project was commissioned by Britain’s 14-18 NOW to mark the centenary of the outbreak of WW1. Inspired by Charles Jagger’s 1922 bronze statue of a soldier, who stands on Platform One of Paddington Station, London, reading a letter, the digital artwork invited everyone in the country to write their own letter to the soldier.

Letter to an Unknown Soldier began with letters commissioned from 50 well-known UK-based writers; it opened to the public for submissions from mid-May 2014, and all the letters received to date went online on 28 June (the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand). The website remained open for submissions for 37 days, until 4 August (the centenary of Britain’s declaration of war). The project quickly snowballed in popularity. By its close, more than 21,400 letters had been received from around the world.

Letter to an Unknown Soldier now stands as an extraordinary example of a crowd-sourced participatory media artwork written by thousands of people who don’t think of themselves as writers. It forms a vivid snapshot of what people think about war, and what it means to remember a war no longer within lived experience.

Website address: www.1418now.org/letter

Letter to an Unknown Soldier directly disrupts Britain’s increasingly hegemonic and nostalgic approach to commemorating war. In the UK, Remembrance Day, which marks the end of WW1, morphed into Remembrance Sunday, which became Remembrance Weekend, which is now in the process of becoming Remembrance Week. Heavily ritualised and pre-programmed, we are expected to remember war by watching the Queen at the Cenotaph on television, by wearing red poppies, and by observing the two minutes of official silence. Letter to an Unknown Soldier gave people the opportunity to speak into that silence by posing the following questions: What does it mean to remember something you can’t remember? If you could say whatever you wanted to say to the unknown soldier, what would you say?

Letter to an Unknown Soldier was an international transmedia writing event. Spread across many platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Wattpad, Figment, Tumblr, YouTube and Storify – but always focussed on the digital artwork itself, it has generated layers of data that transform the notion of the war memorial from something static to a work that reflects both lived and living experience. The diversity of responses to the project was both unusual and inspiring, including submissions from schoolchildren, serving soldiers, a huge range of the public, as well as the current British Prime Minister. We asked people to write a letter to the soldier and they responded, in their thousands.

During the project, Harper Collins UK commissioned a book of selected letters: this book includes 138 of the letters and was published in November 2014. Over the next few months the website, and all its digital traces and residues, will be transformed into both an archive of the artwork and an open access resource for educators and community organisations; using the archive, the British Library has created a dataset for researchers. This presentation will show the work as well as describing how it was made, how it was disseminated, and the future of the project.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Electronic (digital) literature is developing in every corner of the world where artists explore the possibility of literary expression using computers (and the internet). As a result, innovations in this genre of literature represent unique developments and there is a growing corpus of scholarship about all aspects of electronic literature including the perspective of digital humanities. Contributors to New Work on Electronic Literature and Cyberculture, a special issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture explore theories and methodologies for the study of electronic writing including topics such as digital culture, electronic poetry, new media art, aspects of gender in electronic literature and cyberspace, digital literacy, the preservation of electronic
literature, etc.

It's true, poets have been experimenting with producing writing (or simply writing, just writing of a sort not familiar to us - writing as input and writing as choosing) with the aid of digital computer algorithms since Max Bense and Theo Lutz first experimented with computer-generated writing in 1959. What is new and particular to the 21st century literary landscape is a revived interest in the underlying workings of algorithms, not just a concern with the surface-level effects and results that characterized much of the fascination in the 1970s and 1980s with computer-generated writing. With the ever-increasing power of algorithms, especially search engine algorithms that attempt not just to "know" us but to in fact anticipate and so shape our every desire, our passive acceptance of these algorithms necessarily means we cannot have any sense of the shape and scope of how they determine our access to information, let alone shape our sense of self which is increasingly driven by autocomplete, autocorrect, automata.

The "Googlization of Poetry," then, describes conceptual writing as an often overlooked aspect of electronic literature - my paper contends that the crucial contribution of conceptual writing as e-literature to contemporary poetry, poetics, and even media studies is an articulation of a 21st century media poetics. Building on the 20th century's computer-generated texts, conceptual writing gives us a poetics perfectly appropriate for our current cultural moment in that it implicitly acknowledges we are living not just in an era of the search engine algorithm but in an era of what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls "The Googlization of Everything." "Google has permeated our culture. That's what I mean by Googlization. It is a ubiquitous brand: Google is used as a noun and a verb everywhere from adolescent conversations to scripts for Sex and the City." (2) In other words, when we search for data on the Web we are no longer "searching" - instead, we are "Googling." But Conceptual writers such as Bill Kennedy, Darren Wershler, and Tan Lin who experiment with/on Google are not simply pointing to its ubiquity - they are also implicitly questioning how it works, how it generates the results it does, and so how it sells ourselves back to us. Such writing is an acknowledgement of the materiality of language in the digital that goes deeper than a mere acknowledgement of the material size, shape, sound, texture of letters and words that characterizes much of twentieth-century bookbound, experimental poetry practices. Otherwise put, these writers take us beyond the 20th century avant garde's interest in the verbal/vocal/visual aspect of materiality to instead urge us to attend to the materiality of 21st century digital language production. They ask, what happens when we appropriate the role of Google for our own purposes rather than Google's? What happens when we wrest Google from itself and instead use it not only to find out things about us as a culture but to find out what Google is finding out about us?

In this sense, this cluster of Conceptual writing which both probes and is driven by the search engine in fact enacts a kind of study of software. Lev Manovich writes in Software Takes Command, "Software Studies has to investigate both the role of software in forming contemporary culture, and cultural, social, and economic forces that are shaping development of software itself." (5) And so if the search engine is currently one of the most powerful pieces of "cultural software," then, again, it's my sense that Conceptual writing's critique of Google ideally positions such writing as a mode of 21st century media poetics.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

When we strip the lexical band-aid ‘embodiment’ off the more than 350 year-old wound inflicted by the Cartesian split of mind and body, we find animation, the foundational dimension of the living. Everything living is animated. Flowers turn toward the sun; pill bugs curl into spheres; lambs rise on untried legs, finding their way into patterned coordinations. The phenomenon of movement testifies to animation as the foundational dimension of the living.

We propose that the importance of movement in the distribution of space and time is one of the things digital media works make palpable. While western aesthetics – consonant with its spatialised images of subjects and objects – has traditionally paid more attention to spatial form, this is being challenged by new forms of mobility made possible by digital media. These provide both the opportunity for immersion in mediated and programmed/programmable environments, but also the opportunity to move through existing and technologically augmented environments in different ways, using different surfaces and forms of literary inscription.

In these contexts, for example, the silent and stable forms of letters and words on a page that we associate with books take on an animatory force. Letters move and make sounds, as in the programmable works of writers such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland , Maria Mencia,, or else they are reclocated off the page so that one can touch and play with them (exemplary here is Camille Utterback’s ‘Text Rain’, or more recently, work being done in the CAVE environment at Brown University) , or else they are transported and translocated in processes that bear witness to movement and mobility through landscapes.

The programmable and interactive works that we analyse in this paper re-designate and redeploy of sensory ecologies in terms of movement through space. By introducing movement as an aesthetic dimension these new forms of writing and aesthetic practice implicitly acknowledge the importance of time or duration in the constitution of being, that is, in the constitution of objects, subjects and things which echo and mimic processes of ‘Life’.

(Source: Authors' abstract, ELO 2013 conference site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/ethos-life-digital-w… )