human-computer interaction

This book challenges the ways we read, write, store, and retrieve information in the digital age. Computers—from electronic books to smart phones—play an active role in our social lives. Our technological choices thus entail theoretical and political commitments. Dennis Tenen takes up today's strange enmeshing of humans, texts, and machines to argue that our most ingrained intuitions about texts are profoundly alienated from the physical contexts of their intellectual production. Drawing on a range of primary sources from both literary theory and software engineering, he makes a case for a more transparent practice of human–computer interaction. Plain Text is thus a rallying call, a frame of mind as much as a file format. It reminds us, ultimately, that our devices also encode specific modes of governance and control that must remain available to interpretation.[Publisher's Website]

Learn a cutting-edge method of performative creative writing based on human-computer interaction.

You will learn to “write with your voices” (as opposed to typing on a keyboard) by using speech recognition software. We will take turns saying impromptu lines out loud into a microphone. The computer will recognize the lines with varying accuracy and turn the speech into text on the computer screen. We will develop a set of improvisational tools to enhance dramatic writing by utilizing the computer’s errors (misrecognitions) in collaboration with other participants. You will be confronted with situations requiring quick decision-making, because the computer does not reproduce your speech with hundred-percent accuracy – a fact that will challenge you to deal with technological dysfunction in the here-and-now of a performative writing situation. Also, you will be challenged to listen and respond to your human writing partners and their texts. Through guided practice, you will learn to take the writing process in unexpected directions, further into an improvisational realm.

While practicing this collaborative, performative live writing method with human and computer partners, we will work toward creating short fictional scenes. The scenes will be based on dramatic situations that we will come up with together through rehearsals and discussion. In addition to this practical work, we will spend time discussing readings of relevant texts (live writing, new technology, human-computer interfaces and drama).

At the end of the workshop, we will present a live, performative writing event, in which you will have the opportunity to perform those aspects of the writing method that you find most compelling. The showing will be planned and performed collaboratively. At the end of this workshop, you will have the tools to continue exploring the relationship between text, digital media, and performance in your own work.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

On the basis of electronic literary works, we can identify specific rhetorical figures in interactive writing: the figures of manipulation. It is a category on its own, along with figures of diction, construction, meaning and thought. For example, the figure of appearance/disappearance (responding to an action of the reader) is as a key figure among the figures of manipulation. What is emphasized in such figures is the coupling action/behavior, which could be considered as a basic unit in interactive writing. This coupling can be conceived independently from the medias (text, image, video) it relies on. Thus, it seems relevant to have an a-media approach when defining an art of rhetoric in interactive writing.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

Paper written for ISEA 2004 in Helsinki, on August 20, 2004 (Scott Rettberg presented). The investigation into early computer writing starts with the observation that "early interaction with computers happened largely on paper: on paper tape, on punchcards, and on print terminals and teletypewriters, with their scroll-like supplies of continuous paper for printing output and input both." Montfort traces back history and challenges the "screen essentialist" assumption about computing.