interface design

Recent pandemic-imposed restrictions on face-to-face exchanges have required that we find new ways to connect, often through networked platforms. Without classrooms, labs, and conference environments, ELO has embraced platforms such as Discord and Zoom for communication, and has also looked to online platforms for collaborative writing.

As we contemplate how platforms can keep us connected with our work and with each other, as well as the ways they may limit our interactions and thus arguably “disconnect” us, this panel explores what happens when e-literature—as research, practice, and field—is bound to platforms. E-literature scholarship and creative works that do not have the opportunity for in-person exchange provoke re-examinations of platform affordances and limitations. We ask: how may platforms may shape e-literature through their pre-set parameters, interfaces, and infrastructures? What are the promises and perils of platform-specific e-literature? Can we bring attention to platform through works of e-literature? Led by Marjorie C. Luesebrink, five speakers will answer these questions.

Lai-Tze Fan will trace the platform of a work of e-literature to its infrastructural origins. Nick Montfort’s generative poem Round (2013) is accompanied by a Note that describes the computational processes behind the poem. Fan will trace the specific hardware components’ production, manufacturing, assembly, and natural resource origins that support Round; in so doing, she provides an ecological understanding of the physical platforms that support e-literature.

Will Luers will sketch out some principles for a theory of recombinant fiction by exploring algorithmic flux (scripted variability) as something experiential within the digital text itself. His question for authors and readers of platform-based fiction production is: why is this play of forces between chaos and order thematically and formally important? Luers argues that algorithmic flux in digital fiction has a history, but that it presently lacks a theory and poetics for contemporary practice.

Erik Loyer will examine Google Sheets for how it enables users to treat spreadsheets as databases which can drive whole applications, effectively turning documents into platforms. He asks: what happens when we apply the same approach to digital narrative, giving individual stories the potential to function as their own platforms? Drawing on his experience developing creative tools for the digital humanities, digital comics, and e-lit, Loyer will sketch out some of the potentials and pitfalls of this mode of creation, and how our practices might better encourage it.

Christy Sanford reflects upon the processes for combining images and texts in some of her creative works. Sanford finds herself prompted by various platforms and platform-based texts around her, noting that in order to combine images and text, she needs technology’s assistance and inspiration to let unique characteristics of programs and platforms contribute to the development of her work.

Finally, Caitlin Fisher will discuss the promises and perils of disconnection and connection inside VR platforms that support literary and artistic co-creation. As we consider the use of virtual environments and spaces in place of in-person meetings and engagements, Fisher explores the futures of these platforms as a novel means of creative exchange.

Responding to the conference theme of “peripheries,” user experience and interface design are frequently on the periphery of electronic literature. Attention to these details, however, can effectively immerse readers in sensory-rich literary aesthetics. User experience and interface design also prompts authors to consider differently-abled readers, viewers, and/or inter-actors, often themselves on the peripheries. This presentation proposes practices for embodying user experience and interface design in works of electronic literature. The desired end result is to enable creators of electronic literature to best utilize the features, affordances, and constraints offered by the digital context of their medium to promote affectively powerful literary experiences.

In this presentation, the author argues that we should “mind the gap” between screen and skin, especially where it eclipses the precarious identities vulnerable within our hegemonic cultures. The contact zone where users interface with electronic media is actually constructed out of far more political scaffolding than people often recognize. Though “user friendly” assumptions reinforce the invisible logic of idealized interfaces open to all, the realities of social conditions which contextualize those technologies should make us rethink who the “user” really is. How has the threshold of the interface become a barrier for them? The presentation investigates how precarious identities, such as the indigenous and the queer, must navigate the contested boundaries of language and embodiment through electronic literature as haptic media. Caleb Andrew Milligan begins by considering how Jason Edward Lewis plays out politics upon the surface of the touchscreen. With help from Lori Emerson’s critique of the iPad, he argues that Lewis’s Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media is furthermore Poetry for Ephemeral [Maintainable] Media, as it relies upon digital technology vulnerable to what Terry Harpold terms the “upgrade path” and its movements toward eventual inoperability. He argues that this feature is an intentional subversion on Lewis’s part (himself part Cherokee, Hawaiian, and Samoan) as an aboriginal design practice which explores through the medium’s ephemerality an aesthetic of materialized erasure—the erasure, that is, of aboriginal cultures in the face of forced assimilation into Canadian cultures. As Lewis poetically performs the precarity of identity-through-language upon precarious platforms that kill more electronic literature than they preserve now, we are left with only the fleeting sense of touch that connects (soon to be only connected) us to his appoems. He then considers the just as ephemeral haptics of Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive. As a beautifully brutal examination of escape from toxic cultures, Porpentine’s Twine game literally escapes the confines of the screen as it encourages players to draw symbols upon their skin that correspond with the narrative beats. Beyond just the quick clicks of hypertextual interaction, players actually have to feel the physical prick of inscripting themselves, and join in the game’s cycle of pain. Combining the work of Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett on toxic geekdom with Jaishree K. Odin’s on feminist hypertext, he considers Porpentine’s precarious identity as a trans woman game developer in artistic opposition to a digital climate of “Gamergaters.” Her work reaches outside of norms and touches where other texts flatly cannot go. He draw in Diogo Marques’s claim that our skin is just as much interface as screen to finally consider the ephemerality of Porpentine’s text as well, once the hand-drawn markings are washed away. The embodied art fades, and the Twine game’s intoxicatingly violent world of language remains. The presentation ends to question how we are similarly just as ephemeral as the gestures and drawings of these electronic literary texts. The “touchy” subjects between screen and skin that these works explore highlight the precarious identities that cultures often aim to erase. Electronic literature as haptic media helps us to get in touch with these overlooked lives, and to not only mind the gap, but to stick our fingers in it.

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1124/Betw…

Ted Warnell’s 2005 digital code portrait project CODE STORY generates its material from a play of interface design and operational opacity. Beginning with digital photos of various friends and fellow writers, Warnell opens these photos in a text editor, generating non-semantic UTF-8 encoded text via the editor’s misinterpretation of the data in the image file. Warnell shapes this error text into new concrete poetic forms, inserting the name of the portrait’s subject throughout the redesigned text, and uses it as the base for two different types of code portraits: the first a dynamic Web page scripted to produce new versions of a portrait with each successive refresh; and the second a static GIF image of the first used to advertise prints of the code portraits sold through the project website. In effect, the operations which generate the poetic interface are made visible as interface through their engineered failure. In a perfect world, a UTF-8 encoding operation would simply result in clear semantic text, carrying no trace of the process by which said text is generated.

Essay describing the conceptualization and development process of the Dynabook, often cited as crucial to development of contemporary laptop computers and tablet devices.

Hypermedia designers have tried to move beyond the directed graph concept, which defines hypermedia structures as aggregations of nodes and links. A substantial body of work attempts to describe hypertexts in terms of extended or global spaces. According to this approach, nodes and links acquire meaning in relation to the space in which they are deployed. Some theory of space thus becomes essential for any advance in hypermedia design; but the type of space implied by electronic information systems, from hyperdocuments to “consensual hallucinations,” requires careful analysis. Familiar metaphors drawn from physics, architecture, and everyday experience have only limited descriptive or explanatory value for this type of space. As theorists of virtual reality point out, new information systems demand an internal rather than an external perspective. This shift demands a more sophisticated approach to hypermedia space, one that accounts both for stable design properties (architectonic space) and for unforseen outcomes, or what Winograd and Flores call “breakdowns.” Following Wexelblat in cyberspace theory and Dillon, McKnight, and Richardson in hypermedia theory, we call the domain of these outcomes semantic space. In two thought experiments, or brief exercises in interface design, we attempt to reconcile these divergent notions of space within the conceptual system of hypermedia.

(Source: Author's abstract, ACM Digital Library)