media-specific analysis

For the last year or two I’ve been focusing most of my research and writing on the notion of ‘interface’ – a technology, whether book or screen, that is the intermediary layer between reader and writing. What I’ve found is that ‘interface’ gives us a wedge to approach the broad and complex question of how the reading and writing of poetry have changed in the digital age and how the digital age has in turn changed the way in which we understand what I call “bookbound” poetry. It seems to me that a discussion of digital poetry in terms of interface – a discussion whose methodology is driven by the field of Media Archaeology – could be a crucial intervention into both poetry/poetics and media studies in that it meshes these fields together to 1) make visible the Human-Computer interfaces we take for granted everyday; and 2) to frame certain works of electronic literature as instances of activist media poetics.

In part influenced by the so-called “Berlin school of media studies” that has grown out of Friedrich Kittler’s new media approach, Media Archaeology is invested in both recovering the analog ancestors of the digital and reading the digital back into the analog. And so the argument I keep trying to make is this:  nineteenth-century fascicles as much as mid-twentieth century typewriters and later-twentieth century digital computers are now slowly but surely revealing themselves not just as media but as media whose functioning depends on interfaces that fundamentally frame what can and cannot be said. I am, then, trying to move the definition of “interface” outside its conventional HCI-based usage (in which interface is usually defined as the intermediary layer between a user and a digital computer or computer program) and apply it to writing media more broadly to mean the layer between reader and any given writing medium which allows the reader to interact with the text itself. Moving the fields of HCI and literary studies closer together through a simple widening of the term “interface” does not just signal a mere shift in terminology. Instead, my sense is that a hybridizing of the two fields helps to move the study of electronic literature into the post-Marshall McLuhan, enabling us to go beyond repeatedly pointing out how the medium is the message and take up Katherine Hayles’ well-received injunction for “media-specific analysis” to get at not just particular media, but particularities such as the interface in the individual media instantiations of e-literature.

It also seems to me that an attention to interface – again, made possible through attention to certain works of e-literature – is a crucial tool in our arsenal against a receding present…by which I mean without attention to the ways in which present and past writing interfaces frame what can and cannot be said, the contemporary computing industry will only continue un-checked in its accelerating drive to achieve perfect invisibility through mulit-touch, so-called Natural User Interfaces, and ubiquitous computing devices. My sense is that the computing industry desires nothing more than to efface the interface altogether and so also efface our ability to read let alone write the interface.

(Source: Author's introduction to the essay)

This presentation asks what we can learn about a foundational work of electronic literature – Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl – by porting it to a new platform. More than this, it asks what we can learn about the source and target platforms of such a porting exercise.

Thanks to a great deal of path breaking work, much scholarship on electronic literature now makes use of what Katherine Hayles calls media-specific analysis (MSA). The field has followed the lead of scholars such as Hayles, Nick Montfort, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Terry Harpold, and many others in assuming that the materialities at play in a digital artifact actively shape expression and interpretation. We no longer treat the screen as another page. Work adjacent to electronic literature has asked these same questions, attending to the role of software and hardware in digital expression. Platform studies offers one version of this line of inquiry, and it asks how a given computational platform shapes and constrains creative processes and products. Much like the tenets of MSA, platform studies insists that the various computational machines at work in a given piece of digital media act as more than a conduit or background to expression. Scholarship on electronic literature has already begun to engage with platform studies, most recently by way of Anastasia Salter and John Murray’s study of Flash. In their book-length study of this platform, Salter and Murray take up a number of works of electronic literature by authors such as Jason Nelson and Stuart Moulthrop.

This presentation will continue that work by porting Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl to the Twine platform. When Chris Klimas released Twine, it immediately drew comparisons to Storyspace, the platform used to create Patchwork Girl and many other works of electronic literature. Where Storyspace has guard fields that set up conditions by which text can be hidden from or revealed to the interactor, Twine implements an “if” Macro. Where Storyspace allows authors to group together lexia with “paths,” Twine offers a similar function called “tags.” Further, both platforms offer the writer a kind of “node-and-edge” view of the writing space. However, the very fact that these pieces of software were created two decades apart, by different developers, and in different media ecologies suggests that there are important differences between the two. In order to shed light on the differences and similarities of these platforms and also in the interest of returning to Patchwork Girl, this presentation will walk through what we learn from a Twine version of Jackson's work.

Hayles describes MSA as a kind of game: “Using the characteristics of the digital computer, what is it possible to say about electronic hypertext as a literary medium?” In this presentation, I propose a different version of Hayles’s game: What do we learn about a work of electronic literature, its native platform, and the target platform when we port it to a new platform?

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

«Like Reading a Movie»: Students' Reading of Electronic Literature This thesis is an empirical investigation of students' reading of electronic literature. The main goal has been to study the skills required to get the most out of this kind of literature. Theoretical approaches include reader-oriented theories, where Jonathan Cullen and his concept of literary competence creates an overall basis, and media-specific theories, particularly parts of the multimodal theory derived from a social semiotic perspective. The theoretical framework also includes perspectives from researchers who have written about e- literary competence. The empirical evidence has been collected through qualitative research interviews with five 17-year-old students attending the branch of general studies performed after lessons. The students read episode 1 and 3 of Inanimate Alice by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, and part 1 and 2 of Nightingale's Playground by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston. The theme of the interviews focused on how the respondents perceived these texts, and to what extent they benefited from them. The fact that the survey is carried out in a school context, is emphasized in the thesis. The study shows that these respondents do not find electronic literature as difficult to perceive as much previous research shows. They showed good control of both the navigation and the plot. One reason for this is that the texts these students read, do not have a typical hypertextual structure. About the interplay between the various modalities they showed good understanding. The field, in which the informants have the most room for improvement, is in the thesis described as the area of general literary competence. This applies especially when reflecting on the contents of the texts. Thus, one can see the e-literary competence more in the context of traditional literary skills than as something entirely new. Electronic literature in school can act as a link between leisure culture and school culture and thus help strengthen students' literary skills that can be useful in terms of both electronic and printed literature.

Source: Author's Abstract

The purpose of this study is to expand on Wayne Booth's work in the Rhetoic of Fiction regarding methods directing readers toward understanding in fiction to include the possibilities for pursuation avaiable in electronic mediums. The story theorizes the the answers to the following: How are writers in electronic spaces appropirating, expanding, and subverting electronic devices honed in print? How has the kairos, or situational context, of electronic spaces been exploited? What new rhetorical devices are being developed in electronic spaces? What does the dialogue between print-based and electronic-based works offers to rhetorical scholars in terms of rhetorical analysis and composition? 

The study analyzes the rhetoric of electronic litearture, creative works composed for display in digital environments. Analysis focuses on works that remediate classic printed literature to electronic publication. Analysis begins with close reading and develops N. Katherine Hayles's theory of media-spesific analysis as well as the Bakhtinian-based concepst of dialogism. The work analyzed fit the definition of electronic liteature posted on the electronic literature webside, that is, "works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capapilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone networked computer". The study analyzes Shelly Jackson's Patchwork girl; George Hartley's "Madlib Frost Poem, Peter Howard's "Peter's Hiku Generator, Edward Picot's "Thirteen Wys of Looking at a Blackbird", and Helena Bulaja's "Coation Tales of Long Ago". For contast, the study analyzes John Barthes "Click", a printed short story that remediated electronic signinfiers. Six author interviews expand on data gained rhetorical analysis.

The study reveals how inovators in electronic mediums appropriate, expand, and subvert thetorical techniques honed in print-based practices. The study finds that since remediation changes kairos, the act provides an opportunity to understand emerging rhetorical thecniqus responsive to medium. Authors in electronica literature often wed literary techniques to technological possibilities, exploiting the capabilities of the new medium to advance literary and political rhetoric. The study finds that print-based practices linger in electronic publications and that electronic-based practices have become significant to print.    

Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.

Weaving together Kaye's pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott's groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski's cult postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips's artist's book A Humument. Hayles concludes by speculating on how technotexts affect the development of contemporary subjectivity.

(Source: Publisher's description)

Designed by Anne Burdick.