TOC

Steve Tomasula's work exists at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literary techniques. As such, it demands consideration from multiple perspectives and from critics who can guide the reader through the formal innovations and multimedia involutions while providing critical scientific, aesthetic, historical, and technical contexts. This book, the first of its kind, provides this framework, showing readers the richness and relevance of the worlds Tomasula constructs.Steve Tomasula's work is redefining the form of the novel, reinventing the practice of reading, and wrestling with the most urgent questions raised by massive transformations of media and biotechnologies. His work not only charts these changes, it formulates the problems that we have making meaning in our radically changing technological contexts. Vast in scope, inventive in form, and intimate in voice, his novels, short stories, and essays are read and taught by a surprisingly diverse array of scholars in fields ranging from contemporary experimental writing and literary criticism to the history of science, biotechnology and bioart, book studies, and digital humanities.

(source: bloomsbury's website)

TOC's promotional tease – “You’ve never experienced a novel like this” – became awkwardly literalized when, after a Mac OS update, I could no longer open the novel. The tease inadvertently highlights the obsolescence that locks away so many works of electronic literature from present day readers. Even an exceptional work like TOC – exhibited internationally, prize-winning, the subject of many scholarly articles, underwritten by a university press – is no less subject to the cycles of novelty and obsolescence that render many works of electronic literature only slightly more enduring than a hummingbird. “The accelerating pace of technological change,” N. Katherine Hayles observes, “may indicate that traditional criteria of literary excellence are very much tied to the print medium as a mature technology that produces objects with a large degree of concretization”.

TOC’s adaptation to Apple’s mobile operating system (iOS) in 2014 is an end-run around a “generation” that lasts “only two or three years.” It’s a preservation strategy that achieves its absolute goal of restoring this brilliant, canonical work to readers. But this novel that was once available to anyone running one of the two dominant operating systems (PC and Mac) is now accessible only to people who own or can borrow an iPad, an expensive device that commands less and less of the tablet market share. TOC is too large a file set to load on the more commonly purchased iPhone; Apple doesn’t offer that option. The glutted Apple App Store surpassed 1 million apps for sale in October 2013, which means TOC must vie for smaller slice of the already-niche iOS population alongside productivity apps and unironic variations on Cow Clicker. TOC on desktop possesses an ISBN, which aligns it with books and makes it eligible for sale on sites like Amazon. But only e-book apps are eligible for ISBNs in the App Store, and Apple has a lock on all iOS app distribution.

What does TOC gain and lose in adapting to the iPad? This is rare opportunity to examine a canonical work of electronic literature where the identical content has been ported from desktop to iPad. In doing so, TOC programmer and co-author Christian Jara transformed its reader interface from click to touch, which in the iOS environment is stylized into a lexicon of eight gestures. The reader’s touch is a performance not an “end-point,” as performance theorist Jerome Fletcher puts it; touch is an act of writing that “performs throughout the entire apparatus/device”: story, machine, code, human body and the physical setting in which the performance transpires. TOC on desktop (2009), iPad (2014), and printed short stories (1994, 1996) is a medial evolution that prompts me to propose a device-specific reception history examining what's at stake in porting desktop-born works into the touch-intensive mobile environment.

(soucr: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

How do we think? N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesis-the belief that humans and technics are coevolving-and advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa. mines the evolution of the field from the traditional humanities and how the digital humanities are changing academic scholarship, research, teaching, and publication. She goes on to depict the neurological consequences of working in digital media, where skimming and scanning, or "hyper reading," and analysis through machine algorithms are forms of reading as valid as close reading once was. Hayles contends that we must recognize all three types of reading and understand the limitations and possibilities of each. In addition to illustrating what a comparative media perspective entails, Hayles explores the technogenesis spiral in its full complexity. She considers the effects of early databases such as telegraph code books and confronts our changing perceptions of time and space in the digital age, illustrating this through three innovative digital productions - Steve Tomasula's electronic novel, "TOC"; Steven Hall's "The Raw Shark Texts"; and Mark Z. Danielewski's "Only Revolutions". Deepening our understanding of the extraordinary transformative powers digital technologies have placed in the hands of humanists, "How We Think" presents a cogent rationale for tackling the challenges facing the humanities today.

(Source: University of Chicago Press blurb)