Conference

In a world of global networks and transnational information flows, electronic literature (“born digital” literature or e-lit) is a site for new forms of communication, creation, and community. This conference recognizes a growing network of e-lit scholars and digital artists in the Arab world, and encourages a conversation between those scholars and artists and their peers in Europe and North America.

On Thursday, 10 November 2016, the 8th International ITIS Information and Information Technology Conference was held at the Hotel Šmarjeta in Šmarješke Toplice, which is organized every year in November by the Faculty of Information Studies in Novo mesto (FIS).

A number of interesting topics of rapidly developing interdisciplinary sciences in the field of computer science and social sciences were presented to the gathered audience, experts from the academy and entrepreneurship, who in one way or another deal with information and communication technologies (ICT).

The conference was attended by four keynote speakers: Prof. dr. Marko Bohanec from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana lectured on the topic of data mining for decision support, doc. dr. Luka Kronegger from the Ljubljana Faculty of Social Sciences presented a sociological analysis of Slovenian science. Doc. dr. Lovro Šubelj from the Faculty of Computer and Information Science of Ljubljana spoke about the analysis of scientific databases, doc. dr. Robert Kopal from the College of Algebra in Zagreb presented the analysis of social networks to the gathered people in order to ensure state security.

In addition to the above mentioned, a number of interesting guests were presented at the conference, which was held in the English and Slovenian languages, among which is prof. dr. Borut Rončević (FIS) presented the InnoHPC project, the Vice-rector for Informatization of the University of Rijeka, prof. dr. Zlatan Car, a supercomputer Bura, this year's important acquisition of the university's university. Prof. dr. Andreas Hinz from LMU Munich lectured on the interweaving of mathematics and psychology, dr. Ciril Petr (IMFM Ljubljana) on computer experiments with hanoi graphs.

There were also current contributions. prof. dr. Blaž Rodič (FIS), who explained to the gathering about the modeling of international migrant flows, mag. Marko Potokar (Institute for Computer Forensics) talked about the use of ICT for supervision and employee safety, doc. dr. Tomaž Aljaž (FIS) presented the use of agile methodologies for greater efficiency in project implementation.

The 8th International Conference ITIS was officially concluded by the Dean of the FIS, prof. dr. Dejan Jelovac, followed by a relaxed gathering of participants at the dinner party.

The sponsors of the event were ITAD and In2data, which the organizer, the Faculty of Information Studies in Novo mesto, also sincerely thanks in this place.

The international conference on Arabic Electronic Literature: New Horizons and Global Perspectives, will be held in Dubai, UAE from February 25-27, 2018. The conference is organized by Rochester Institute of Technology and hosted at the RIT-Dubai campus.

In a world of global networks and transnational information flows, electronic literature (commonly defined as “born digital” literature or e-lit) is a site for new forms of communication, creation, and community. While much of the prominent current scholarly and artistic work in elit is based in the USA and Europe, e-lit is in fact a diverse global practice. In the Arab world,there is a growing network of e-lit scholars, many of whom are also practitioners or deeply connected to artistic practices. Interested authors and experts are invited to submit papers and creative works on topics including, but not limited to:

• scholarship on digital literature and digital criticism as a field and in a global context;• intercultural issues in literacy, expression, and difference;• communication and publishing in digital and social media environments;• histories, precursors, movements, and readings;• emulations, virtualizations, re-readings, and interpretations;• preservation, archiving, and access;• methods, tools, and best practices for creation and scholarship;• translations, including linguistic, intermedial and intersemiotic, code-text translation;• children’s electronic literature;• and other research topics related to the conference theme.

In the late 1990s, a unique piece of software was released for the Sony PlayStation by ASCII. Simply called RPG Maker, it was the English-language localization of the third entry in Japan’s RPG Tsukuru series. RPG Maker wasn’t a game so much as a platform for the creation of other games, specifically those in the vein of early 1990’s Japanese-style role-playing games. Due to the platform’s technical issues, mainly the lack of direct internet access and the storage limits of Sony’s proprietary memory cards, RPG Maker presented the amateur game developer with many hurdles to overcome in the creation of anything interesting and unique. Not long after its release, small communities of RPG Maker users sprung up around online forums such as GameFAQs or RPG Maker Pavilion. These communities gave budding developers an opportunity to share their work with each other. Using a third-party peripheral for the PlayStation called a “DexDrive,” creators could image their memory cards and share these files online, files that users (usually fellow creators) could download and flash onto memory cards of their own to play. Due to the limitations set by the PlayStation’s memory card format, games made with RPG Maker had to use the common elements: 68 character sprites each with four color palettes, 99 enemy battle sprites, 127 map objects, et cetera, were stored on the CD-ROM. Although custom graphics could be made using an included editor, only nine new character sprites could be imported per game. Likewise, interactivity was nearly identical among RPG Maker games. Because the battle system could not be customized, most games created on the platform played similarly to one another. The main thing that distinguished each creation was narrative: While RPG Maker games tended to look and play the same, each told a unique story, and some of them did this in surprising ways. This paper is intended to represent the preliminary steps towards a study of RPG Maker as a historical platform for amateur electronic literature. The platform’s technical affordances and limitations will be discussed, focusing on Sony’s memory card format and its odd method of data storage. The DexDrive, an unlicensed peripheral that allowed users to create and share images of these memory cards, will also be examined, as will a few of the communities that this technology helped foster. Several examples of works created with RPG Maker will be examined in detail: "SILENT VOICES" by David Vincent, an example of a work made entirely with default game elements; "Man Getting Hit in the Groin By a Football RPG featuring Ernest Borgnine" by MisledJeff, a short comedy piece that doesn’t feature any direct interactivity (but, as the name suggests, does feature Ernest Borgnine taking a football to the groin); and the presenter’s own RPG Maker e-lit piece, "The Days at Florbelle", a recreation of a lost work by the Marquis de Sade.

Two Round Table Discussions: 10am-12:30pm 

"Electronic Literature: History/ Archaeology/Artifacts" with Dene Grigar, Élika Ortega, and Roberto Cruz Arzabal 

"Transatlantic/ Transnational/ Translinguistic Perspectives on E-Lit" with Leonardo Flores, Sandy Baldwin, and Alex Saum