tools

A description of the general direction of Sondheim’s work in relation to

codework, the body, "semantic ghosting," and tools; Focusing on the last, we will be thinking about methods and meta-methods.

So irretrievably connected is the act of reading to works of print that any comparable digital engagement with a text often seems best considered as a unique activity of its own. Whatever we are doing with words viewed via electronic screens, doggedly poking at them with our fingers, moving them about from document to document with a simple double-click, or jumping erratically from one link to another in an ever-growing, highly fluid hypertext, we are not “reading” them. In her book, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke UP, 2014), Lisa Gitelman similarly adds, “[w]ritten genres in general are familiarly treated as if they were equal to or coextensive with the sorts of textual artifacts that habitually embody them. . . . Say the word ‘novel,’ for instance, and your auditors will likely imagine a printed book, even if novels also exist serialized in nineteenth century periodicals, published in triple-decker (multivolume) formats and loaded onto—and reimagined by the designee and users of—Kindles, Nook, and iPads” (3). The three latter devices she lists constitute together the most common tools currently available to distribute digital texts. At the same time, they remain strangely distant, perhaps even divided from traditional acts of reading, not to mention, as Gitelman notes, the very foundational genres of writing as a practice.

This paper looks theoretically at the digital text in relation to computational reason, reviewing its recent development as both a new technical object and disciplinary form, distinct from all prior modes of print. To engage with writing in any digital format, as I will argue, is to partake in a highly complex, multifaceted set of new media relationships derived in part from very specific coding protocols. In addition, key to a more substantial interpretation and assessment of all digital written works is the subsequent revision of many long serving, traditional reading competencies previously associated with academic writing and the literary arts. The printed word continues to offer modern culture an effective tool for developing a reflexive, dialectical approach to knowledge, using media to interpret and document how we observe the world around us. Digital, computational modes of writing by contrast emphasize a much more immanent technicity and structure in this very same world, relying on coding to assemble, synchronize, and ultimately predict real-time epistemological models for just about any phenomena. My own ongoing research into human-screen interactivity, much of it based on quantitative field studies conducted in the classroom, seeks to provide a more theoretically in- depth understanding of our current social, cultural and epistemological relationship to digital, screen-based writing. Driving this core analytical aim is the central premise that to work with language as a computational device is to see and use text as a means for directly executing semantic relationships rather than interpreting them self-reflectively, critically, and, to some extent, canon-based. In this way, digital texts in both theory and practice invite us to consider a revisionary mode of knowledge construction, where language combined with programming no longer serves to mediate our reality as we observe it, but instead generates it anew through the ongoing implementation of machine-readable commands. When the act of reading, however, literally originates within the machine itself, it seems useful to describe any texts generated in process as “self-reading,” or even “reader-less,” comparable perhaps to various parallel initiatives within the auto industry today to produce the first fully functional “self-driving” cars. As with this matching revolutionary moment in modern transportation, today’s “text users,”

along for the ride, so to speak, seem quite ready to assume a fundamentally less personal, less critically interactive relationship to the text as its own object and mode of production. Here, and again, distinct from print, the electronic text emerges as part of a much more complex, more intricately defined symbolic network of near-constant knowledge construction. To consume language in the digital era, whether by screen, goggles, or some other wearable device is to participate in an increasingly vast, yet dynamic computational system, while at the same transforming past analogue reading practices into more aesthetically poignant, often politically radical activities.

Scholars of electronic literature explore complex multimodal works. However, when they go to report their research, they face the confines of print-style documents that force them to reduce their discussion materials to written descriptions and select still images. ACLS Workbench is a new online tool developed for the analysis of electronic literature and other digital objects. Funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the tool was created by Jeremy Douglass, Jessica Pressman, and Mark Marino in collaboration with Lucas Miller, Craig Dietrich, and Erik Loyer, built upon the ANVC Scalar platform.

The tool was developed to promote collaborative scholarship of electronic literature, offering several key affordances. First, scholars can upload and organize assets (such as video, images, and source code) for use in arguments. Second, scholars can annotate all of these assets. Third, scholars can weave these assets into threads of scholarly argument. But perhaps the most significant innovation especially for the development of the field is the ability to “clone” books of assets, so that new scholars can clone existing books of resources in order to build on previous scholarship. We hope that these affordances will make scholarly work in electronic literature much less about one-offs or magic shows (arguments where only the author has all the resources) and more about sustained and expanding scholarly work.

In this presentation, I will demo the platform, first described at ELO 2013 in Paris, and demonstrate some of the early explorations of electronic literature that have been conducted on this platform.

(ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Card Shark and Thespis are two newly-implemented hypertext systems for creating hypertext narrative. Both systems depart dramatically from the tools currently popular for writing hypertext fiction, and these departures may help distinguish between the intrinsic nature of hypertext and the tendencies of particular software tools and formalisms. The implementation of these systems raises interesting questions about assumptions underlying recent discussion of immersive, interactive fictions, and suggests new opportunities for hypertext research.

The objective of this communication is the application of ideas and tools encountered in the field of study of narratology and its consideration as a narrative genre so that the chosen work, Fitting the Pattern, may be analysed and differences seen that may arise when approached from a different frame of the print. It is hoped to show with this approach, how in order to be studied, digital narrative works require new concepts and how more investigation is needed into how the reader receives the work. For example, after analyzing the work of Christine Wilks it was seen to be necessary to deepen the skills required by the reader in order to enter into the work, to establish functional guidelines for the reader, so as to remain within the orientation of the text, etc. It is not just a question concerning only in how the work is received, but also how space and the other approaches to the work need concepts and approaches which are more adequate for the reality presented by the digital narrative. As has been shown in the analysis of Fitting the Pattern, it has not been possible to capture all that is contained in the text using the type of analysis used up to now. The narrative digital work chosen for this analysis is Fitting the Pattern because it is a clear example of a literary digital work which does not only “play” or experiment with the tools used by the digital world, but also presents a rich literary piece, which like all ergodic texts is difficult to penetrate. The images and the sound are not mere esthetic or modern additions but are clearly narrative voices which tell the story. Furthermore, together with the semi-controlled distribution of the plot they add further complexity to the analysis of time and space. The difficulties and the complexity of the work however, far from discouraging the reader motivates and inspires them to reread the work.

This paper explores a range of issues related to the pedagogy and practice of generative writing in programmable media. We begin with a brief description of the RiTa toolkit – a set of computational tools designed to facilitate the practice of generative writing. We then describe our experiences using these tools in a series of digital writing workshops at Brown University in 2007-2008. We discuss and theoretically examine a set of core issues raised by workshop participants — distributed authorship, the aesthetics of surprise, materiality, push-back, layering, and others — and attempt to situate them within the larger discourse of generative art and writing practice.