net literature

The interdisciplinary Science Data Center for Literature (SDC4Lit) reflects on the demands that net literature and born-digital archival material place on archiving, research and reading. The main goal is to implement appropriate solutions for a sustainable data lifecycle for the archive and for research purposes, which include introductory uses at university and school level. The focus is on the establishment of distributed long-term repositories for net literature and born-digital archival material and the development of a research platform. The repositories will be regularly expanded by the project and its cooperation partners and will form a hub for harvesting various forms of net literature in the future operation of SDC4Lit. The research platform will offer the possibility of computer-assisted work with the archived material. Since such a repository structure, which integrates collecting, archiving, and analysis, can only be accomplished through interdisciplinary collaboration, the project brings together partners with expertise in the subfields of archives, supercomputing, natural language processing, and digital humanities: The German Literature Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv) with a focus on archiving and preservation; the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) with a focus on computing; the Institute for Natural Language Processing and the Institute for Literary Studies at the University of Stuttgart with a focus on NLP, cultural and literary history and digital humanities. 

An important task of the project is the modeling of net literature and born-digital literature, which will initially be carried out in an example-oriented manner in dealing with an already existing corpus of net literature and exampes from the large born-digital collection at DLA. Underlying research on both technical and poetological challenges of digital, non-digital, and post-digital literature, e.g. on questions of genre or on computational approaches towards net literature and literary blogs as digital and networked objects. 

In addition to digital objects and corresponding metadata, the accruing research data are also stored in a sustainable manner. Research data includes, first, research data generated in the course of the project's work, especially data used by regular services on the platform such as named entity recognition trained with data from the archived material. Secondly, the repository should offer the possibility to store research data generated by users of the research platform in a structured way and to make it available for further research. The connection of archival repository, research platform and research data repository follows standard research data management practices (FAIR principles) and works toward the goal to support a sustainable research data lifecycle for archivists and researchers working with electronic literature (on the web) and born-digital literature archived at the DLA archive and potential future cooperating institutions.

To trail DADA traces on the net is a possibility to look up loose text satellites on a short-term and to bring singular DADA groups and sources to level a structural gap. Here, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about DADA per se, as approaches to and updates of DADAism as a historical phenomenon are too diverse: for instance, virtual identities settle in – present (babel, hugo baron, frieder rusmann, dadasophin) and historical ones (duchamp, tzara, serner, ball, schwitters), bananas are traded (anna banana) and indexed, art’s and the artist’s death is given shape (kunsttot.de), virtual countries are built (bananaland, rongwrong puppet empire) and, sometimes, even the audience is happily dispensed with (neumerz, dadasophin).
DADA TO GO bundles these different traces in an audio text which lets the DADA groups act within an environment which refers to computer games and makes DADAism get a move on. For: Boredom was in the beginning of DADA …
(Source: kunstradio.at)

50 years ago a calculator generated a literary text for the first time ever. And this was in Stuttgart my hometown.
Theo Lutz wrote 1959 a program for Zuse Z22 to create stochastic texts. On the advice of the Stuttgardian philosopher Max Bense, he took sixteen nouns and adjectives out of Kafka’s “Schloss,” which the calculator then formed into sentences, following certain patterns. Thus every sentence began with “ein” or “jeder” (“one” or “each”) or the corresponding negative form “kein” or “nicht jeder” (“no” or “not every”). Then the noun, selected arbitrarily from the pool of sixteen, was linked through the verb “ist” (“is”) with the likewise arbitrarily chosen adjective. Then the whole assembly was linked up through “und,” “oder,” “so gilt” (“and,” “either,” “thus”) or given a full stop. Following these calculation instructions, by means of this algorithm, the machine was able to construct such sentences as:

EIN TAG IST TIEF UND JEDES HAUS IST FERN
(A day is deep and every house is distant)
JEDES DORF IST DUNKEL; SO GILT KEIN GAST IST GROSS
(Every village is dark, thus no guest is large)

For the performance of “free lutz!” I use a web conversion of Theo Lutz’s program which I wrote in PHP. The Web interface generates stochastic texts on the basis of Lutz’s algorithm but permit additional word input. The nouns and adjectives of the original vocabulary can be replaced by the audience at the performance through a terminal.
In 1959, computer texts were connotated as literary texts twice over, firstly through the “Kafka” vocabulary, and secondly through corrections carried out by Theo Lutz. In an edited print out of a selection of stochastic texts, Theo Lutz corrected minor grammar errors and punctuation omissions by hand, and thus, out of keeping with the programming, he acted as a “traditional” author. In the performance, reference is made to these literary features (or one could almost say “human failings”) of the first computer-generated texts in two ways. The first is through the co-authorship of the listeners, the second is the literary production of the computer texts by a professional speaker reading off the screen and performing them as they were generated.

eft channel: hyper reader and writer hei+co@hyperdis.de (aka heiko idensen) says "live" what comes to his head ... (= SPEAK)

right channel: cut-ups and collages of historical/hysterical hyper texts (= LISTEN)

the mix is the bottom line:
who's sitting at the mixing desk? when is something faded in resp. out? which parameters and effects are used?

a hyper-text audio-book should definitely have a record button!

whilst hyper-text theorists and prophets predicted an exponential, uncontrollable increase of the electronic text rotation, publishing houses respond to the growing breakdown of the book market with audio books as a remedy.

as a consequence, in dealing with literature a revolution comparable to that in the music industry of the 1980s triggered off with the introduction of the walkman is finally happening: a mobilization of the listening situation taking the urban environment into account; the possibility to mix the internal listening space with any desirable external sound environment or everyday sound-scape.

and just as the text-message effect is introducing the mutation of cell phones into text tools (and, at long last, we can't only listen to our own music selection everywhere, but can also write texts at any time and place) ...

... hyper-listening is based on including tones, sound, the noise of different channels, the clacking of speaking tools and devices, the voice's scragginess ... in the electronic text rotation again:

classically, hyper-text has totally rid itself of the voice: as a topographical text, as a mapping of texts on books' pages (visual poetry) or monitors it rather performs a poetry of links and networking than of sound, of metrics, of the spoken word ... there is no story – not even to mention a narrator ... actually, hyper-texts are as unsuitable for speaking or reading aloud as source code ...

audio hyper-texts whispered into one's ear include dramatic scenes from hyper-text history; one can hear the clacking of the MEMEX's lever, and from far away foucault invokes the laughter of the chinese encyclopedia ...
...

it's not all about turning the audio-book into an mp3 audio-book, but to connect the production instruments and media of hyper-text (weblogs, text-message love stories, collective writing projects ...) with the worlds of sound and listening: web radios, experimental literature programmes, lectures, radio plays in and from the internet.

... to sing and orchestrate the old song time and again:

"to transform the broadcast from an apparatus of distribution into an apparatus of communication."
(bertolt brecht)

heiko idensen 2005