patterns

Classical rhetoricians have long known “style” as an integral component of Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric, where it refers to the application of compelling language patterns to achieve specific persuasive purposes: for example, the use of the chiasmus or “cross” (“ask not what your  country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”) as a tool that forces the reader to reflect on relationships between and reversals of concepts. From written style (what rhetoricians call elocutio) to "programming styles,” the application of technique/techne/craft to the expressive media we work in is evident, whether the medium is page, memory core, or cloth. Although we are more accustomed to viewing this process as “poetics,” reframing such activity as the application of style enables us to more fully see the suasive material dimensions of work in different media: asking not “what does this thing say” but “what does this thing do to us.” This paper explores some common stylistic elements that appear among writing, programming, and embroidery. While visual screen analogies are relatively easy to parse (for example, “resolution” in embroidery is a result of thread count--lower count, lower resolution— just as screen-based resolution is determined by pixel count), other stylistic features common to all three media occur more fully under the hood. In the course of the talk I will discuss stylistic activities that seek to optimize limited resources (fiber, memory, narrative), create patterns of expression (knots, loops, repetitions), and build networks and relations between ideas ("threads"). I'll use as my primary example the Knights Tour algorithm, used in electronic literature composition in such tools as Juan Gutierrez’ Literatronic engine, and present electronically embroidered reinterpretations of a Knights Tour storyline.

In my home discipline of 19th Century Literature, Franco Moretti pioneered the notion of “distant reading,” in contrast to the close reading beloved by New Critics and deconstructionists alike. While close reading’s value to student engagement with both literary texts and their own writing in both classroom and writing center contexts has been demonstrated in practice, what about the value of distant reading for these endeavors?

Distant reading is known for the “graphs, maps, trees” of Moretti’s work of the same name; the results of a textual encounter with the CATA software Voyant remind one very much of a perusal of one of his scholarly works. Engaging with a literary text with CATA software enables students not only to read digital texts but also to contextualize the work on a larger scale, noting patterns of language, structure, and so forth, thus creating material for an effective distant reading.

Distant reading also comes into play in the writing center. CATA software useful in assisting students with brainstorming and reading technique within the writing center, enabling them to approach texts in critical ways. In addition, writing center studies themselves form a suitable subject for distant reading. Just as Moretti’s distant reading helps us understand trends in cultural production by looking beyond a narrow range of canonical texts, distant reading in the writing center can help us to draw patterns in understanding the actual needs of student writers.

Loops are mostly patterns: patterns based on a predetermined set of repetitions, and that allows for a recognizable sense of progression and movement. It is used and perceived as a structure whose impact on interpretation can be considerable. This presentation focuses on how the loop defined as a shape, a process and a pattern becomes a figure in contemporary electronic literature works and practices. I will investigate this particularity of digital writing by examining how loops condition reading and writing practices. How do e-loops revisit interpretation processes? More specifically, does the loop’s reflexivity echoes the electronic text it produces?

The ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase) is a human-edited, open-access, contributory Drupal database consisting of cross-referenced entries describing creative works of and critical writing about electronic literature as well as entries on authors, events, exhibitions, publishers, teaching resources and archives. The project has been developed by the Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen as an outcome of the ELMCIP project. All nodes are cross-referenced so users can see at a glance which works were presented at an event, and follow links to see which articles have been written about any given work or which other events they were presented at. Most records provide simple bibliographic metadata about a work or event, but increasingly we are also gathering source code of works, PDFs of papers and dissertations, videos of talks and performances, and other forms of archival documentation. While our first priority in designing the Knowledge Base was to provide a basic open-access online research infrastructure for an emergent field of scholarly and creative practice, providing researchers, teachers, and students with easy access to works, critical writing, and the context of a field, we are increasingly realizing its value as a base for further research in its own right. The Knowledge Base provides us with a growing pool of data that we are beginning to analyze using visualisations, social network analysis and other digital methods. This panel will consist of presentations of research developed by using information in the Knowledge Base as the basis for what Franco Moretti refers to as “Distant Reading” to better understand the discourse of the field and the works it encompasses. In this approach, instead of analysing individual works, we search for patterns across the entire field of electronic literature. The panel will present four different approaches to using the Knowledge Base to collect specific types of information related to objects, networks and practices of electronic literature and use digital methods to reveal patterns and trends from within the collected data that will hopefully inform a better understanding of specific aspects of the field.

The apparent unruliness of contemporary hypertexts arises, in part, from our lack of a vocabulary to describe hypertext structures. From observation of a variety of actual hypertexts, we identify a variety of common structural patterns that may prove useful for description, analysis, and perhaps for design of complex hypertexts. These patterns include: Cycle Counterpoint Mirrorworld Tangle Sieve Montage Split/Join Missing Link Feint