open source

Lisette Gonzales reviews a book of essays by Matthew Fuller that examines the way we are programmed by software.

As the technical affordances that shaped early electronic literature’s frontiers have become commonplace, hypertextual structures abound in our experiences of online texts. Many tools make it easier than ever to generate these types of works, but one of the most interesting for its demonstrated literary potential is Twine: a platform for building choice-driven stories easily publishable on the web without relying heavily on code. In software studies, a platform is defined by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort as a hardware or software system that provides the “foundation of computational expression.” This definition can encompass any of the tools we use to develop procedural content, as Bogost noted on his blog: “a platform…is something that supports programming and programs, the creation and execution of computational media.” Examining Twine as a case-study among current open, non-coder friendly platforms probes the future of interactive narrative on the web—a future that, outside the traditional scope of the electronic literature community, is highly determined by the affordances of platforms and the desires of their user-developers. Twine is an open source platform with an interface that resembles a network of index cards, “tied” together by threads of meaning as defined by the writer and embedded in text. Works built in Twine hearken back to early electronic literature, evoking Hypercard and Eastgate hypertext novels, but their relationship with these established digital forms is not straightforward. The reception and definition of Twine as a platform recalls the many debates of definition surrounding electronic literature: works in Twine have been included in interactive fiction competitions, displayed at independent games festivals, and built as part of interactive story jams. However, despite Twine’s link to the hypertext novel, it has not been as visible in the electronic literature community. In an interview in The Guardian, designer and writer Anna Anthropy has called attention to the works in Twine as part of a “revolution,” noting that they offer a solution to some of the dehumanizing aspects of mainstream games: “I think that what I want to see more of in games is the personal – games that speak to me as a human being, that are relatable, which is the opposite of the big publisher games that I see. People who are creating personal games aren't hundred-person teams, they are people working at home, making games with free software of their own experiences.” Key Twine works evoking this personal literary construct include Nora Last's "Here's Your Rape", Finny's "At the Bonfire", Anna Anthropy's "Escape from the lesbian gaze,” and Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, & Isaac Schankler's "Depression Quest." I will examine the structures of Twine and its role in shaping a new genre of hypertextual literature, and the potential implications of Twine for the broader future and definition of electronic literature itself.

(Source: Authors introduction)

In two essays, "Toward a Semantic Literary Web" (2006, ONLINE at http://eliterature.org/pad/slw.html) and "Electronic Literature as World Literature" (2010, Poetics Today), I set out a project for identifying literary qualities and marking literature's present transformations within new media. The idea in these essays was to discern aesthetic and communicative qualities that I felt could be carried over to the present (e.g., Goethe's and Marx's unrealized call for the formation of a world literature "transcending national limits"), and those that could easily go missing (e.g., the materially bounded object whose aesthetic can be recognized and repeated by a generation of authors in conversation with one another, and renewed, revised, or renounced by later generations).

Trying to hold onto both of these desirable literary qualities, the aesthetic as well as the communicative, I turn my attention in the present talk to the one place where such conversations are now being staged - not in stand-alone scholarly journals or social media (online or in print) but rather, in databases. Specifically, I consider the open source, open access literary database. I settle on database construction as a necessary scholarly and technical complement to the creation of works, not for wholly archival purposes, but as a condition or destination for present creativity. The electronic database, by granting authors (and their critics) access to present discourse networks and a means of identifying works,opens possibilities that appear unique to literary writing in new media.

One point of reference in my talk will be the Electronic Literature Organization's Electronic Literature Directory (ELD version 2.0). The ELMCIP Knowledge Base, developed in Scandinavia, the U.S., and Europe, offers another, complementary point of entry. Brief descriptions of other literary archives, developed or in development in Montreal, Providence, Siegen, Sydney, and elsewhere, will indicate how interoperability can work at the level of databases, and how literary collaboration might at last begin to work across disciplines and institutions. I argue that the current, wide-ranging database construction (already a trans-disciplinary collaboration among scholars and programmers), is the necessary precondition to the emergence of the electronic 'world literature' that I described some years previously.

Literary works by John Cayley, Jason Nelson, Simon Biggs and others (who turn, or detourne, informatic databases into literary works) will be accessed through the above databases and discussed during the course of the talk.

Libre Culture is the essential expression of the free culture/copyleft movement. This anthology, brought together here for the first time, represents the early groundwork of Libre Society thought. Referring to the development of creativity and ideas, capital works to hoard and privatize the knowledge and meaning of what is created. Expression becomes monopolized, secured within an artificial market-scarcity enclave and finally presented as a novelty on the culture industry in order to benefit cloistered profit motives. In the way that physical resources such as forests or public services are free, Libre Culture argues for the freeing up of human ideas and expression from copyright bulwarks in all forms.