Article in a print journal

The aim of this paper is to describe a genre that is gaining import ance  incontemporary humanities, and especially in its areas devoted to digital media – the technical report. Technical reports are discussed as part of the larger trend of open notebook science. This form of communication draws from experiences worked out in the field of technology, computer science and science. In this understanding technical reports are a genre of gray literature, a form dedicated to communicating results of research projects conducted by laboratories. The case study discussed in this text is devoted to a series of technical reports from the MIT Trope Tank lab, which are interpreted in the light of a manifesto­text for this form of com­munication, Beyond the Journal and the Blog. The Technical Report for Communication in the Humanities, published by Nick Montfort. One of the aims of the article is also to contextualize technical reports against the background of other forms and methods of communication in laboratories from the field of contemporary humanities (including blogs, brochures, lab notebooks).

(Source: Author's Abstract)

The point of departure for this article is the Renderings project (http://trope-tank.mit.edu/renderings/) established in 2014 and developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a laboratory called the Trope Tank. The goal of the project is to translate highly computational and otherwise unusual digital literature into English. Translating digital works that are implemented as computer programs presents new challenges that go beyond the already difficult ones tackled by translators of more typical forms of literature. It is a type of translation akin to the translation of experimental, conceptual, or constrained works. It is not unusual for this task to require the translator or translators to reinvent the work in a new linguistic and cultural context, and sometimes also to port the original program to another programming language. This article describes an undertaking related to the broadly understood discipline of creative computing and studies the work of the translator as taking place both in code and language, drawing from the methodologies developed by the fields of code studies, platform studies, and expressive processing.

(Source: Authors' Abstract)

Poets Take On Guess Inc.: Poets Win

On September 18, 1997, Guess Inc. filed a libel/slander suit against the literary reading I had organized in support of the garment workers’ union UNITE that was organizing this garment manufacturer. How did my literary reading wind up getting sued by this corporation?

My involvement started when my grandmother sewed shirts at the Bennett, Hollander, and Louis pants factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A Russian Jewish immigrant teenager in 1906, her family sent her into the garment shop; her wages supported the family, letting her younger brothers and sisters go to school. My grandmother read Yiddish writers such as Sholem Aleichem as well as Russians like Tolstoy - both were forces in their culture, and both had huge literary funerals in which 100,000 people showed up.

"The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine" is a review essay on Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (University of Notre Dame, 2008) by N. Katherine Hayles, and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008), by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Both works make remarkable contributions for the emerging field of literary studies and the theory of digital media. While Hayles analyses the interaction between humans and computing machines as embodied in electronic works, Kirschenbaum conceptualizes digitally at the level of inscription and establishes a social text rationale for electronic objects.