versioning

A version of this illustrated article about creative process was given by J.R. Carpenter as a Keynote Address at the New Media Writing Prize Award Event at Bournemouth University in January 2017.

Print literature has a deep, theoretically-engaged history of scholarly editing practice which provides a powerful framework within which to understand different versions or editions of texts and the natures and sources of their differences. While scholarship on electronic literature has brought in forensic, bibliographic, and platform-related concepts in the last decade or so, only recently have original computational works been considered in this way. Much of the discourse around “digital editions” has focused on the creation of electronic versions of print works.

Computational works often look very different than the texts scholarly editors are used to considering. Even basic questions of nomenclature, although addressed in certain ways, are difficult to settle: How should we name, and therefore understand, the basic textual relationships for computational work? The traditional literary term, “edition,” does not always model the relationship between a creative computational work and its descendants, which may have resulted from something that, particularly in the case of games, is unlike “editing” in the textual sense. The broader term “version” seems too general to fully express the nature of the connections between different instances of a work. Taking into account Matthew Kirschenbaum's terms for applying textual studies to digital works -- including layers, releases, and objects -- we consider other terms that have been used, including “remake” and “reboot,” paying specific attention to their histories.

We examine these terms in the context of two different computational works and their follow-up versions. This includes the original "Karateka," the 1984 Apple II videogame by Jordan Mechner. and three groups of related work: numerous early ports to home computers, a 2012 “HD Remake,” and the 2013 "Karateka Classic" for mobile phones. We also consider the three editions/versions of "First Screening," which was first implemented by an individual developer (Canadian poet bpNichol) on the Apple II in 1984. "First Screening" was subsequently published in a HyperCard edition in 1993 and, in 2007, in a website with extensive apparatus, documentation, and different versions, including a new one in JavaScript.

We evaluate these two textual histories and how different types of porting, re-implementation, and re-publication brought about new types of computational artifacts. While those engaged exclusively in literary studies would not consider "Karateka," and those looking at games exclusively would not consider "First Screening," we choose to reunite these two 1984 Apple II programs, both of which have been carried into new versions with great care. We consider how scholars can study different versions of the same computational work side-by-side, and what the applicability or lack thereof of standard bibliographic terms means for the way computational works are re-issued. We argue that viewing the detailed textual histories of computational works helps to support a variety of critical perspectives on the social, technological, and economic forces involved in the production and re-production of electronic literature.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

If we are to follow Paul de Man’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Task of the Translator” , the translating process, far from being an attempt at totalization, further fragments the already fragmented pieces of a greater vessel, "die reine Sprache", or pure language, which remains inaccessible, and stands for a source of fragmentation itself. The work exists only through the multiple versions it comprises. As claimed by Walter Benjamin in « The Task of the Translator », a work always demands a translation which is both an alteration and a guarantee of its perpetuation : "(…) it can be demonstrated that no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife -- which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living -- the original undergoes a change."
Quite similarly, the hyperlinking process on which electronic hypertext relies defies totalization as it keeps fraying a textual fabric that is bursting at the seams and begging for an endless recomposition which points to the seriality inherent in the concept of translation. Each reading is akin to a versioning of a text that remains ungraspable as a whole.The cognitive overhead any attempt at holding all the threads in one hand would most certainly cause confusion for the translator/reader.
The inaccessibility of the work as a whole etches out a ghostly body of text, a blurry halo that haunts the margins of each lexia notwithstanding the underlying layers of code. I would like to contend that the translating process may be construed as a form of archiving as it involves a necessary selection which is also a destruction of “the original” text paradoxically meant to ensure its survival as the translated fragments migrate into a new spectral body of text spliced with updated strings of code enabling its performance, or becoming-text. Reading/translating afternoon, a story is akin to being caught within an infinite feedback loop which exacerbates the iterability of any textual form in its very performance. Each attempt at translation can be interpreted as a terminating condition which interrupts the potentially infinite loop on which afternoon’s performance is based and thereby offers transient islands of stability in a sea of proliferating and monstrously hybridized possibilities, each time begging anew for a redrawing of the limits of the wor(l)d.

Our poetry generator, Sea and Spar Between, was fashioned based on Emily Dickinson’s poems and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Both in its original edition and in the edition expanded with comments—cut to fit the toolspun course—it exemplifies seven different ways to seek and grasp text: 1) by porting code; 2) by translating text strings and processes; 3) by contrasting the page/canvas experience via a link or URL with the experience of reading code via “View Source”; 4) by harpooning a particular stanza and using the browser’s capability for bookmarking; 5) by creating human-readable glosses of code for readers who may not identify as programmers; 6) by relating its depthless virtual space to the import of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés as interpreted by Quentin Meillassoux; 7) by foregrounding non-translatability as a characterizing sieve for natural languages.

The majority of humanities computing projects within the discipline of literature have been conceived more as digital libraries than monographs which utilise the medium as a site of interpretation. The impetus to conceive electronic research in this way comes from the underlying philosophy of texts and textuality implicit in SGML and its instantiation for the humanities, the TEI, which was conceived as “a markup system intended for representing already existing literary texts”.
This article explores the most common theories used to conceive electronic research in literature, such as hypertext theory, OCHO (Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects), and Jerome J. McGann’s “noninformational” forms of textuality. It also argues that as our understanding of electronic texts and textuality deepens, and as advances in technology progresses, other theories, such as Reception Theory and Versioning, may well be adapted to serve as a theoretical basis for conceiving research more akin to an electronic monograph than a digital library.

Source: Author's Abstract

The collaborative development of text-based Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) has afforded writers an electronic medium for the discussion, production, and publication of e-literature. A MUD is designed to provide an immersive and interactive experience, and is achieved by the creation of a code-based structure that supports a literary text. However, when multiple contributors are involved there is a tension between the inherently fixed nature of literature and the more fluid versioning of software. In many software development environments, ownership over a work is considered to be counter-productive, whereas authorship of literature is assumed more freely and, as a means of contextual explication, is actively encouraged. MUDs must therefore function under colliding principles of authorship and ownership. The production of a large MUD’s literary text is conceived similar to the cinematic production of a film, with the lead designer of a MUD assuming the role of a ‘director’. The production and proliferation of electronic literature presents new and unique challenges to both the longitudinal administration of a MUD and to the coherence of the literary text. Cohesion of both work and text is hindered by the potentially out-dated, though still functioning, software code of earlier versions of the MUD. Further complications arise during the integration of a new literary text with the already established text of the MUD: style, grammar, language, and thematics, for example, must be uniform. A creative writer, whose intent is to produce a new literary text for a MUD, may be confronted by an already-established literature, into which his or her literary text must be incorporated. The limitations of the code base itself may likewise limit the creative scope for expression. A contributor is limited to only those interactive elements that are supported by the underlying coding architecture. Old versions of code must remain compatible with newer versions, and the opportunities for coherent revision of the entirety of creative output are limited by available developer expertise and the scope of the exercise. A MUD is structurally and creatively dynamic, yet all elements must cohere. We discuss the collaborative development of creative works within the context of software communities, and how systems such as auteur theory have difficulty in providing a theoretical framework for multi-author software projects that have creative outputs, even in those hierarchical projects where they would seem most appropriate. We outline how players in these environments encounter a rich and varied literary experience that is an amalgamation of multiple authors and styles of writing. We discuss relevant models for analysing and understanding this type of e-literature, and provide guidelines for how they can be altered to allow for a more effective application.