writing under constraint

Overview and Instructions

Regardless of what opinions you hold about Wikipedia from a public information, crowd sourcing, labor, language, design, educational, disciplinary, organizational, or commercial perspective, we can all agree that the site and its rhetorical organization of knowledge have achieved wide global currency in the 21st c. Frequently cited to support the incredible power of networked based digital reference materials to improve or destroy society and its cultures as we know them, empower or exploit contributors, hasten or impede the distribution of common knowledge and globalization, or merely as one of the few wikis that ever fully realized the power of that medium on a planetary scale, the site and its many connotations have become a part of popular discourse and culture. Whether this networked public encyclopedia project harkens the realization or the death of 18th c. European rationalist projects to organize the world's knowledge is a topic for all of us to consider in the background as we engage with the generic and stylistic conventions of the site to create Wikipedia entries that take a speculative, as opposed to documentary, approach to depicting the facts of the world(s) we live in, have lived in, or may or could live in.  

What I will be asking you to do in this virtual ELO session is to invent some phenomenon, system, business, product, person, group, artifact, language, discipline, place, or event and to create a Wikipedia entry for it.  I invite you to use this exercise as a way to describe elements of fictional worlds the you have previously constructed or considered constructing, elements within or related to the fictional worlds constructed by others, or elements that are plausible extensions of the objective worlds we inhabit based on slight revisions of the historical and fact-based narratives that we generally rely on to understand them.  Using the constraints of Wikipedia and the creative possibilities in satire, we will imagine new social structures and technologies to comment on existing ones.  

An example of the first approach, which I refer to as "world building," would be naming and describing some physical location or space in a fictional world from a text or object that you have crafted, thought about crafting, or simply imagined.  An example of the second approach, which I refer to as "annexed world building" would be describing an element from a fictional world already created in existing fictions.  An example of the third approach, which I refer to as "subjunctive world building," would be to engage with the histories we generally take for granted or collectively acknowledge as factual as instead being contingent and to depict a something or someone (an object, person, phenomenon, place, system, etc.) that could exist if the current reality we live in, which is based to some extent on a specific sequence of events and their interpretations, had occurred or been received differently.  

Below, you will find some additional prompts and resources related to each of the three approaches.  If you would prefer to work in pairs or groups, please feel free to do so.  Please use this instapad space to record your notes and thoughts related to this exercise and this template to record your fictional Wikipedia entry.  At the end of 30 minutes, we will reconvene to share our entries and to discuss this exercise.  

(salon documentation)

Background

At a recent ELO meeting about options for increasing the accessibility of Deena Larsen’s work "Chronic", Deena mentioned us that the next ELO Virtual salon would be dedicated to the topic of accessibility. Since I am writing an essay about the accessibility of electronic literature, Deena invited me to share my work-in-process at the salon.

Presentation

My essay rewrites and overwrites, with all the political and creative connotations those terms contain, Joseph Tabbi’s essay "Electronic Literature as World Literature, or, the Universality of Writing under Constraint" through the lens of disability. Using three small case studies, I explore the concept of digital accessibility through the concepts of defamiliarization and writing under constraint.

Electronic literature uses defamiliarization to provide a powerful force against mainstream rhetoric surrounding digital media, considering reader engagement and reflection in its success rather than attention counted in time and size of the audience. Using Eugenio Tisselli's The Gate as a case study, I argue that for a work to defamiliarize, its authors need to consider what is familiar to a variety of audiences.

In electronic literature, the practice of writing under constraint is widely accepted as a creative catalyst; through self-imposed textual restraints, we find new meanings and forms. I argue that constraints can become meaningful through  the lens of disability because you have to interrogate your medium by making it more accessible. I use Franci Greyling's Byderhand as an example.

Not every work can be made accessible for everyone, but one must still think through which groups of people are systematically excluded. Through the case study of Lyle Skains' No World 4 Tomorrow, I argue that considering accessibility is key in successfully addressing the intended audience.

Discussion

During the long and engaged discussion that followed, we considered various elements of accessibility, including the overlap and difference between literary constraints and accessibility restraints, the necessity of identifying intended audiences, how to experience works created by disabled authors. More practically, we discussed various approaches that could help us improve the Accessible Bits document, including types of tagging and spider graphs.

In electronic literature, the practice of writing under constraint is widely accepted as a creative catalyst; through self-imposed textual restraints, we find new meanings and forms. At the same time, some of us are often reading and writing under constraint due to various disabilities. Yes, we can describe electronic literature as “formally inventive” in its wide use of multimedial writing, but no text or its reception is purely formal because it is always material, situational, and embodied as well.

Bringing up accessibility of these texts generally leads to a knee-jerk reaction: "I don’t want to be limited", "it would stifle my creative freedom", or, god forbid, "why does everything have to be so politically correct?" What if we move past this initial resistance not toward denial, rejection, or a resigned compliance, but with the same creative energy that we allow other forms of writing under constraint?

This essay rewrites Joe Tabbi’s essay “Electronic Literature as World Literature, or, the Universality of Writing under Constraint” through the lens of disability. I explore the concept of digital accessibility by speculating upon what accessible electronic literature can be.

(Conference abstract)

This chapter argues that an understanding of writing under constraint in the context of programmable networked media implies both an awareness of the productivity of constraints as means of literary production, and an understanding of the specific writing constraints inherent in algorithmic culture. It claims that the programmability of constraints and the programmability of human language define the situation of writing under constraint in networked digital media. The chapter is divided into four sections: “Constraints in Language, Discourse and Literary Form”; “Constraints as Means of Literary Production and Invention”; “Underwriting Constraints”; and “Overwriting Constraints”. An introductory reflection about the nature of literary constraints and a brief survey of constraint-based practices are followed by a description of the computability of language and the programmability of constraints. The essay concludes with a reference to works of electronic literature – such as Howe and Cayley’s The Readers Project and Jhave’s BDP: Big Data Poems – that use their writing constraints to interrogate the constraints of the computational regime of writing.

This is an amazing anthology of writings by members of the group known as Oulipo, including, among others, Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, and Raymond Queneau. Put simply, this group, which was founded in Paris in 1960, approaches creative writing in a way that still has yet to make its impact in the United States and its creative writing programs.

Rather than inspiration, rather than experience, rather than self-expression, the Oulipians viewed imaginative writing as an exercise dominated by what they called "constraints." Quite commonly, they would attempt to write stories, for instance, in which strict rules had to be imposed and followed (for example, Georges Perec's notorious novel A Void, which was written without the use of the letter "e").

 While a major contribution to literary theory, Oulipo is perhaps most distinguished as an indispensable guide to writers.

(Source: Dalkey Archive Press catalog.)

This scholarly blog was launched on December 19, 2011 as a constraint to read and critically reflect upon a work of e-poetry every day, leading me to revisit known works, discover new ones, and expand my knowledge of this emergent poetic genre. Its initial performance was a continuous run of 500 daily entries, completed on May 2, 2013.

It is also designed as quick reference for those unfamiliar with e-poetry, with concise entries that provide poetic, technological, and theoretical contexts, close readings of the poems, and some strategies for readers to approach the work. This last aspect is an important part of my current work as an academic: to broaden the audience base for e-literature, both within and outside of academia. In order to extend its potential audiences, the blog uses a social blogging platform, Tumblr, and it broadcasts its content on two social networks: Facebook and Twitter.

I ♥ E-Poetry is developing a worldwide audience, received over 16,045 visits and more than 9,898 unique visitors since its launch, according to Google Analytics data collected on May 4, 2013. It has been adopted in courses, used in comprehensive exam lists, reviewed in scholarly websites, and is currently being integrated with the ELMCIP Knowledge Base—a multinational research project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA). And it has been well received.

• 1st runner up in "Best Blog, Article or DH Publication" 2012 DH Awards.
• I ♥ E-Poetry is "a living, growing catalog of priceless short overviews and links to work that without it would slowly fall into oblivion." Mariusz Pisarski. Techsty.
• "a superheroic one-every-day series." Judy Malloy. "July 2012 Featured Link" on Authoring Software.

In support of its mission, it now has an advisory board.

Interested in exploring this knowledge base? Visit the Now Reading page for a list of publications & writers covered, browse the archive for a chronological overview, do a site search, use its tagging system, get a random entry, or read it as new material is posted.

Quoted from About page.

I discuss the four Perl poetry generators I have developed in the ppg256 series. My discussion of each program begins with the entire 256 characters of code and continues with an explication of this code, a description of aspects of my development process, and a discussion of how my thinking about computation and poetry developed during that process. In writing these programs, I came to understand more about the importance of framing to the reception of texts as poems, about how computational poetic concepts of part of speech might differ from established linguistic ones, about morphological and syntactical variability, and about how to usefully think about possible texts as being drawn from a probability distribution.

(Source: Author's abstract)