History of T&T

Thanks, Visitors Please Read the Entire Blog

2008-12-14T19:20:00.002-05:00

Dear Visitors,

You have landed here either by chance or by suggested link. In either case, please contact me with your reactions and additions. We will not add anything more to the blog, but it does represent a history of texts in relation to media technologies. These last posts -- that appear first -- focus on the book as it changes.

Craig Saper

History of T and T, condensed

2008-12-12T21:48:00.003-05:00

Hi all,

Here are some photos of the book I made. It's a condensed version of the course, broken down into four main sections ala Walter Ong.

The cover opens up two vertical French doors that contain information on the two earliest eras of human communication and graphic design: oral culture and chirographic/ manuscript culture.

Then, in order to allow space for the major areas we addressed, the next two sections open in a dos-a-dos fashion to provide information on print culture compared to digital culture.

The book's wallpaper is made from the condensed print of words and ideas found on our blog, the strips are glued one on top of the other to represent an immersion into the conversation.

The book's cover is decorated with a title: History of T & T. Running down the left side is the list of dates of publications on our blog. Across the bottom is the url for our blog.

My plan was to make a neatly folded souvenir from our time spent together in the course -- sort of a party favor. Thanks for coming to the party.

book11 book2 book3 book4 book5

Maggie's Essay on A Book of the Book

2008-12-12T21:29:00.001-05:00

Thanks to CS and all for a great class! Here is my Module 4 essay. I will post photos of my "artist's" book separately.

Best wishes for the holidays and the upcoming break,

Maggie

eng-6801bookmodule4_cotto

John Bork's Module IV Assignment

2008-12-12T18:27:00.006-05:00

Considering the Fate of the Book .. or, a Readie through The Book of the Book

The book is a technology that appears in various configurations. For example, Keith A. Smith reasons that “the 'print' comes together only in the viewer's mind. This is the manner in which any codex is read. Unlike the fan, blind and fold book, in the codex the total is seen after the fact” (69). His own experimental books include a design that unfolds in a snake-like fashion. Few will argue that the book can be divorced from the range of physical activities called reading, which are not merely motions of the eyes but involve the whole body (Rothenberg; McCaffery and bpNichol; Young). The danger is to reduce the psychological, psychosemantic, and physical characteristics of the page to a calculus of efficiency, what Johanna Drucker describes as the market oriented vision of editors “whose aesthetics are meant to guarantee the value of the product, not necessarily realize an original work “(379). Using the language of late capitalist consumption, Steve McCaffery and bpNichol proclaim that “plot is product within linguistic wrapping” and books, therefore, can be viewed as machines for delivering plot, just as cigarettes are considered drug delivery devices for nicotine. This suggests two directions narrative may take and with it the fate of the book: “one rooted in oral tradition and the typographic 'freezing' of speech; the other set in an awareness of the page as a visual, tactile unit with its own very separate potential” (20). While the codex form of the book has changed little in Western societies since the invention of letterpress printing apart from technical advances improving its function of delivering content, anthropological and ethnopoetic investigations have revealed a variety of ways the page has been experienced throughout the centuries. Jerome Rothenberg comments, “there is a primal book as there is a primal voice, and it is the task of our poetry and art to recover it - in our minds and in the world at large” (11). The Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov sings of “The One, the Only Book”: “whose pages are enormous oceans/ flickering like the wings of a blue butterfly,/ and the silk thread marking the place/ where the reader rests his gaze; is all the great rivers in a dark-blue flood” (201). Karl Young describes the curious, iconographic book form of the Aztecs in Mexico prior to the Spanish conquest that “was not a set of symbols telling readers what to say, but a tool that allowed them to see what they heard” (30). Screenfold format books collected in the Codex Borgia and Codex Vienna were components in the Aztec cultural and religious practices, but not as mnemonic devices for retrieving encoded speech, but more like accompaniments to it. Henry Munn credits the “unique power of activating the configurative activity of human signification” of psilocybin use by the ancient Mexicans for creating this type of writing, noting the similarly to Freud's notion that dreams are structured like hieroglyphs (253). Nor was the written Chinese of the eighth century merely a representation of sound. Each character in this mixed system of pictograms, phonograms and ideograms had a history behind it, and that was the most important characteristic, Young writes, according to Arthur Cooper, “a mind trained to read interwoven pictograms, graphs of gestures, phonograms, and ideograms can be expected to feel a continuity between sight, sound, gesture, and intellection” (33).

Deliberate experiments of poets and book artists continue to explore the varieties of reading. F. T. Marinetti wrote a “Techinal Manifesto of Futurist Literature” in 1912 that focused on the lack of awareness of that the “various means of communication, transportation and information have a decisive influence on [people's] psyches” (178), a theme that would be taken up much later by Marshall McLuhan. Literary historians identify the Futurist, Cubist, Dadaist movements in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century as highly influential to poets like Ezra pound, who saw, according to Michael Davidson, “the page could become more than an occasion for decorative printing but rather a generative element of meaning“ (71). The poetry of Gertrude Stein, such as her 1914 “Book” from Tender Buttons; objects, food, rooms, while often described as “stream of consciousness,” is better understood as an awareness of the page as such; in Jerome McGann's words, “the composition of the page is its explanation” (244). Her work is said to have transformed Robert Carlton Brown's approach to the page. His 'optical poems', such as “Eyes on the Half-Shell,” are designed, McGann argues, “immerse the reader in the print medium, much as the viewer is immersed in images at the cinema” (237), culminating in his “Readies” project that was a hypothetical machine delivering text in a mechanically controllable fashion forwards, backwards, at variable speeds. Like Charles Babbages' Analytical Engine, Brown's Readies, while not implemented until the age of electronic media - similar to Vannevar Bush's famous Memex idea - inspired new ways of presenting and organizing texts, such as Brown's own anthology Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. As the twentieth century progressed, many very creative works combining poetry and other arts emerged, including Concrete Poetry, which Davidson describes as “a more directly visual poetry that stressed the physical properties of letters and the technologies of printing” that “explores not only the iconic and spatial features of letters but also their capacity for semantic indeterminacy“ (75-76). A piece such as Bob Cobbing's Worm is a typographic collage of fuzzy, barely legible squiggles resembling worms composed by overstriking typewriter characters. William Everson has complained that the typewriter, while it empowered the poet to be his own typesetter, also led to chaos. “Everything goes the way of the eye and the contact with the ear is lost. But, poetry begins with the ear, the tongue and the ear. The eye is for the printer.” (52). But the connection to song is still present, remediated by these typographically inspired visual forms. Mac Low's hand-written “Vocabulary Gatha for Pete Rose” is a gridded composition that includes detailed instructions for performance by a singers or musicians.

Returning from the materiality of the page to the book as a whole, and the art of printing, critics often differentiate novelty books, book art, illustrated books and fine print editions, and finally artists' books. Martha L. Carothers surveys the history of “pages or pictures that fold out, revolve, slide, move, slat-dissolve, pop up, or are die-cut in special shapes” that characterize novelty books, pointing out their long history (319). An early example is Jacob Leupold's Theatrum Arithmetico Geometricum (Leipzig, 1727), which includes a volvelle (movable disc) for aiding the reader in making calculations. She also notes that children's books were originally novelty books that slowly became more acceptable as attitudes toward education shifted. Some novelty books include very complex mechanisms and effects, although the division of labor between writing, illustration, and book design by publishers yields an “assembly-line system of trade publishing runs counter to the creativity and unity of idea and form that occur when artists work together” (328). Johanna Drucker takes pains to differentiate what she calls artists' from fine print, deluxe editions, and the illustrated books created by famous artists, the livre d'artiste of Bonnard, Matisse, Ernst, etc. The defining characteristic of artists' books, for which Ed Ruscha's Twenty-six Gasoline Stations is often used as an exemplar of the form, is that “it is a book which integrates the formal means of its realization and production with its thematic or aesthetic issues” (376). She argues that this self-reflexive awareness that pervades the entire work is a unique innovation to the twentieth century, like Freudian psychoanalysis. Jerome McGann gives a detailed analysis of how Ezra Pound integrated narrative and the material form of the book in his Cantos project: “the voyage of Odysseus is a matter of linguistic translation and book production” (231). The quintessential artist's book of the recent times is Tom Phillips' Humument, a curious work that overlays the text of W. H. Mallock's A Human Document with solid colors and artwork to reveal a new text in the words remaining visible, a process he describes as “a book exhumed from, rather than born out of, another .. [with] deliberate parallels with the Hypnerotomachia Polophili, the most beautiful of printed books, published in Venice in 1499” (425-426). A curious example of book art that was designed, according to John Cayley, to “subvert all lexical meaning” while otherwise embodying all the other trademarks of the book's cultural authority in its manufacture and presentation is Xu Bing's Tianshu. He author carved a set of thousands of characters that appear to be Chinese, but really are meaningless, and then carefully printed and bound many volumes of feigned compositions. Cayley claims that Xu Bing “intended to expose the meaninglessness, the bankruptcy and boredom of traditional Chinese culture,” although to “when displayed in the West, his work reads as an exhibition of the traditional Chinese book” (500). Considering the fate of the book, we have traversed a space from the intense desire of Futurists like Marinetti approach “the sonorous but abstract expression of an emotion or a pure thought” (185) to the complete evacuation of meaning in the symbols, as in Tianshu, to demonstrate “how the extralexical serves to create undeniable and absorbing meanings” (501).

Note: all citation page references refer to Rothenberg, Jerome and Clay, Steven. 2000. A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections about the Book and Writing. New York City: Granary Books.

An Experimental Book: “Huge Books that are Underwater Read by Divers”

It is a giant underwater ribbon of recycled garbage arranged to be read by divers over many years using flashlights that project three dimensionally on the surrounding particles suspended in the water (BS&W is the technical term from petroleum engineering, not sure what the oceanographic term is even though I had an oceanography course in college). You can read what is woven and otherwise inscribed onto the fabric of the huge text itself, or view the image shimmering around you.

This book is like a Moebius strip or a continuous sheet like the old cloth towels wound like typewriter ribbon you used to find in restrooms to dry your hands. Floating, suspended in the water both sides are legible. Out of habit I divided it into a sequence of pages, like large computer display screens or an infinite Escher-like Turing Machine tape. Consider the clustering concept that Michael Heim describes in Electric Language: a four foot by five foot paper sheet that is beyond the scale of any imaginable computer display in the 1980s - the 'pages' of this book are larger still. That is why one of the divers exclaims, It's going to take me 10 years to read this!

Reading tied to swimming underwater instead of playing dead on dry land. At first it seems very unnatural, but once staying still to read seemed odd, too. Marcel O'Gorman plays on this idea with his Dreadmill.

Blocks out sound and other visual distractions. The aural effect of submersion reflects on Walter Ong's distinction between the all-aboutness of sound for speaking versus the singular locus of vision for reading.

Just as the Kindle is being promoted as a 'green' environmentally sound reading device, this huge underwater ribbon will be woven from garbage floating in the oceans today, by robots or specially trained sea creatures. Over many decades as the books are slowly 'written', trash will turn into treasure. It is the reversal of the destruction of nature by the side effects of literacy, if you are like Ong and credit the rise of modern science and industry to literacy and print.

Adam Fields' Module 4 Assignment

2008-12-12T12:45:00.002-05:00

Hi everybody:

The work is scattered about the internet, but here are links to my essay for module 4, as well as to the photos and a short video of my experimental book:

Fields - Module 4 Essay

Experimental Book Photoset on Flickr

Experimental Book Video on Youtube

I think it speaks for itself, but I wanted the book to capture the idea of diachronic versus synchronic analysis; the narrative part of the book (which can be expanded indefinitely) points to the chronology of the events, but at any point within the "story" you can reference "synchronic" data from the other sections of the book, via the map on the right and the 'encyclopedia' on the left, which are both expandable as well. Additionally, the form breaks down the idea of traditional codex, and as I was "building" it I began to think of it as a non-digital PDA (it's a map, a wiki, and a blog, and each "opens" in its own window).

This assignment (and the class as a whole) has been a lot of fun. Enjoy your break, and good luck on all your dissertations!

-Adam

John Lamothe's Mod 4

2008-12-12T12:07:00.001-05:00

Here is the link to my Response and book experiment. Enjoy. Happy Holidays everyone. See you in the spring.

Stacey's Assignment 4

2008-12-12T09:13:00.002-05:00

Hi Everyone:

Sorry I missed you last night. Hope all went well. Follow the link below to view my assignment 4 and experimental book description.

http://tandtwork.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/assignment-4-a-book-of-the-book/

Have a happy and restful break! See you next semester! :)

Stacey

Sonia's post

2008-12-12T00:29:00.001-05:00

My paper and artifact photos are here: http://physics.ucf.edu/~yfernandez/shs/

Have a great break & see you next semester!

Meghan's Module Four

2008-12-11T21:26:00.002-05:00

What a great semester it has been. I hope you all have a restful break before we're back at it in the spring!

Here is my Module 4 Assignment.

Enjoy!

--Meghan

2008-12-03T11:03:00.000-05:00

Here is a book review of A Book of the Book.
http://www.samizdateditions.com/issue7/review-bookofbook.html

2008-11-21T09:31:00.004-05:00

In our last section, we turn to the Rothenberg and Clay anthology and read selections from among the articles. Part of the research here is to think about the history of writing and textual systems including books, reading, and writing. Another seemingly mundane aspect is to build-up a contextual interpretive web of associations for future reference. This contextual grid consists of scholars names, artworks, details, and other information. Although the official module asks that you insert some of this information into the time-line, I think it is adequate to simply insert it in your concept of the diachronic changes to the history of texts and writing. With the building of a foundation, we might also read this book about books to think about seemingly unrelated studies of the history of graphic design, tech comm, or new media studies. Those general research goals will benefit from a engagement with specific ideas and book-experiments described in the anthology, but that engagement with the most specific will ultimately lead back to a deeper appreciation of the general concepts of reading, technology, composition, communication, etc. Now those familiar terms appear strange or de-familiar viewed through the experiments described in this anthology. It might also change our thinking about books. Besides a short essay on this anthology, the module asks for a description [or for those that like to build stuff -- and there are more than a few in T&T] or an actual object -- either digitally in the computer or as a 3D book -- that you photograph. This example would demonstrate the lessons learned in this history course. A summary of texts and technology in history in the form -- not the content -- of a book. What would that look like?

Please feel free to add comments.

Reading Reading Over Your Shoulders

2008-11-14T13:33:00.001-05:00

In her opening questions, Maggie Cotto, gets at what's at stake in Hayles' study of electronic literature as well as the key historically significant issues confronting our culture and our academic discipline. Cotto asks, "How does electronic literature differ from print literature? How do we read it? How do we write it? How do we criticize it? How do we preserve it? How does it affect culture and society?"
She goes on to answer these questions and to delineate the types of fiction -- something usually missing from those that would dismiss all electronic texts with one broad stroke. Cotto draws the following distinctions using Hayles's categories: hypertext fiction (mainly blocks of text with few graphics), network fiction (a hybrid of narrative, sound, graphics, video, etc.), interactive fiction (with stronger game elements), locative narratives (the reader uses GPS to track plot elements in the real-world), site-specific installations (interaction in a stationary locale such as CAVE[12]), generative art (using algorithms to generate or rearrange texts), and flash poetry (whereby sequential screens progress like a slideshow).

The importance for historians is that this type of text requires a new disciplinary formation. This discipline will combine the usual tasks of "designers, graphic artists, programmers, and other workers within the knowledge industry – and the traditional humanities” (Alan Liu 37). Cotto notes that "art, music, literature, math, science, history, politics and popular culture all intersect," and that is why texts and technology is both such a demanding doctoral program and the necessary combination to appreciate our transitional moment.

Computer science began as a hybrid discipline. This new emergent discipline, T&T, adds a cultural and historical feedback loop. Cotto notes that "humans are not the sole agents of machines, and machines do not practice complete control over humanity. Instead, the evolutions of both rely on one another." Cotto goes on to close readings that connect these (and other) major themes into the e-literature works.

Stacey DiLiberto argues persuasively that "In the past 50 years, we have seen a radical and rapid development of media and technology. This advancement has changed the way we think and view the world, as well as the way we read the world. Electronic literature is the perfect example of just how much literacy has and continues to change; how it is breaking down traditional literary boundaries and creating new ones."

DiLiberto notes that "when literature moves from one medium to another (from print to electronic in this case), the knowledge is, for Hayles, “carried forward into the new medium typically by trying the replicate the earlier medium’s effects within the new medium’s specificities” (58). Mencia’s work, Birds Singing Other Bird Songs, is the perfect example of this phenomenon. The text is a demonstration of how sounds can be transcribed into words and then translated into human sounds. It is a double translation across media. In this instance visual images, sound, and images of sounds (words/syllables) are used to create the text. When considering Hayles’ description of changes across media, it is important to remember that while the text might resemble the previous medium at first, its characteristics evolve and develop gaining effects that couldn’t be achieved in the old medium (digital texts can do what the printed page cannot) (59).

There is a historical shift, it has specific characteristics involving translation, and e-lit demonstrates a cultural and historical change. One aspect of that change is literacy. DiLiberto writes, "Hayles concludes that “illegibility is not simply a lack of meaning, then, but a signifier of distributed cognitive processes that construct reading as an active production of a cybernetic circuit and not merely an internal activity of the human mind” (51). Here, the definition of literacy (reading) has changed and is not based solely on human cognition, but the complexities of the electronic and cyber system." She continues later by explaining, thar "not only does language move from one rendition to another, but from one medium to another (print to electronic). At another moment in Translation, the text reads, “grâce a le rapport entre les langues…tous les langages sont traduisibles les uns dans les autres” [thanks to the relationship between languages…all languages are translatable one into another] (trans. mine). This is a poignant statement for me since it suggests that all texts are translatable and understandable. Benjamin would even suggest that “everything in the world has signifying powers” (Hayles 148)."

John Lamothe wonders about the possibility of writing the history of the future, and gives an extended complaint about the insufficiencies of e-lit mostly depending on Ong. He concludes that section by arguing, "I have a difficult time accepting them as [literature], at least not in any way reminiscent of what is commonly considered literature. Clearly, we’re at a transitional period, and experimentation is necessary in order to define the boundaries and characteristics of the new form. But electronic literature is a long way from reaching its peak (or even its foothills). Until electronic literature is able to be defined by other ways than subtraction from print text, it’ll remain a marginalized medium and its full capabilities won’t be realized."

Bravely, in spite of his skepticism, Lamothe soldiers on to look at how -- the imperfect e-lit -- functions in terms of Kittler and Hayles. Lamothe describes much of the historical shift in his unpacking of the portmanteau word intermacy. "As a conflation of internet and intimacy, “intertimacy” expresses the seemingly oxymoronic state of having intimate connections through a machine. The suffix interworks on two very evocative levels: 1) it represents such unifying ideas as mutuality and reciprocallity. Here the suffix works to demonstrate the cohesion of personal Man and impersonal Machine. But, as Kittler would point out, it is impossible for Man to form these intertimacy attachments without mechanical means; therefore, our personal relationships are dominated and informed by our current media situation. 2) inter as a verb instead of a suffix is the process of placing the dead body into a grave or tomb. Taken in this regard, our intimate relationships are formed through the burying (leaving behind) of the body. At the same time, it’s a body that’s deceased, and viewed from a Kittlearian vantage point, this makes sense since the body is only an organic vessel that houses media forces; existentially speaking, we are formed and informed by media and thus have lost any self interior to our body."

Lamothe is best when he does close readings. Here he explains one example of e-lit. "Reading the text one letter at a time destroys traditional expectations that meaning
resides within words and sentences, not individual letters. And yet, one letter at a time is
exactly how we all write, whether it’s printed, manually typed, or electronically typed.
Stefan’s choice of a text that is at the very least vaguely familiar to pretty much everyone
(who doesn’t at least recognize “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…”) problematizes the reading because it transforms what could be discarded as random letters/words without meaning into something that is culturally significant. At the same time, his use of the original manuscript, which few have actually read and are familiar with, instead of the more well‐known text from the movie sans perfunctory formatting forces the viewer to actually attempt a reading/interpretation of the presentation instead of simply relying on memory. The resultant disjuncture forces us to consider the encoding/decoding process in technology; the basic units of ones and zeros that underscore and control everything we do on a computer. Moreover, Hayles’s claims about a recursive loop were evident to me during my personal viewing experience of Stefan’s work. After the initial struggle for interpretation that the format forced upon me, I eventually settled into the text and start observing it in a different way." Here he is correctly noting a lapse in Hayles' close reading: "To me, the seemingly random “honks,” “bangs,” and “clangs” used in the soundtrack were aural representations of the computational “ones and zeros”—base units of sounds that can be combined together to form signified auditory works. Just as Cayley believes that underlying “higher‐level relationships” in all language are “lower‐level similarities that work not on the level of words, phrases, sentences but individual phonemes and morphemes,” the car horns, door slams, and miscellaneous other “noise” played in union with the notes from French horns, bass drums, and other musical instruments underscores the “phoneme and morpheme” equivalents in the musical world (146). The car horns are to the soundtrack what the ones and zeroes are to electronic texts and, if we’re to follow Cayley’s logic to its modern end, to the “heart of human inscription. If engagement with electronic literature is in fact a recursive loop that effects both the user and the used, then it’s crucial that we include computational practices in our analysis of modern social and cultural discourses. As technology becomes more and more a part of our society, and according to Hayles, our very way of thinking, then to leave out the code which technology is based off of would be tantamount to ignoring the language that a literary work is written in. Certainly, we can gain knowledge without that tool, but by including it we open up large worlds of signification possible from the text."

Meghan Griffin eloquently summarizes Hayles' take on the historical change underway -- where -- like it or not -- we are all post(e)-human. "When N. Katherine Hayles discusses computational practice, she points toward a reflexive, multidimensional relationship between the human and computer that conjures images of her posthuman. Computing is no longer simply punching on a keypad, but rather becomes “a powerful way to reveal to us the implications of our contemporary situation, creating revelations that both work within and beneath conscious thought” (Hayles 157). Particularly in the medium of electronic literature, computational practice “is revalued into a performance” drawing on “the full complexity our human natures require, including the
of the conscious mind, the embodied response that joins cognition and emotion, and the technological nonconscious that operates through sedimented routines of habitual actions, gestures, and postures” (Hayles 157)."

Further on, Griffin notes another part of the shift. "Cayley’s emphasis on the algorithm as opposed to literal reading represents a fundamental shift in computational practice as it relates to reading. Now non-linear and no longer reliant on a full working vocabulary, language is thought to be intuited rather than read letter-for-letter. "Cayley's transliteral morphs… reflect their phonemic and morphemic relations to one another," which privileges the relational aspect of language over that of precision and clearly defined meaning (Hayles 146).In the same way that print culture gave rise to expanding vocabularies and precise meaning through the creation of new words, electronic media appears to again rely on context, which includes the speed of the algorithm and the relation of phonemes and morphemes across language to convey meaning (Ong)."

To the frustrations and complaints voiced by most of the class, Griffin cites Hayles and writes, "Hayles explains, however, that the frustrations users experience while interacting with electronic literature serve an important purpose in relating technology with our everyday lives. She writes, "404 errors … are not simply irritations but rather flashes of revelation, … minute abysses puncturing … the illusion that the human life-world remains unchanged by its integration with intelligent machines" (Hayles 136-7)." You might not buy it, but somewhere you apprehend the fact that shift has occurred and it might not be a return to a Garden of Eden. That said, we can't simply pretend that the history of reading, literacy, identity, and culture has not changed. Texts and Technology as a discipline responds to the change with applications, syntheses, and analysis. Our program could just as easily be called Posthuman Studies as you will be called on to apprehend and respond to the changes upon us.

Griffin notes that " Central to the concept of the posthuman is the notion that consciousness no longer resides within the boundaries of human flesh. And once the body expands to include technological apparatuses, it becomes difficult to locate personal identity within a consciousness that has no clear bounds. The idea of a downloadable consciousness inevitably arises in discussions of the posthuman, and is exemplified in Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia where the machine speaks to the reader/player, as if another consciousness calls out from behind the screen."

Sonia Stephens, like many of the students involved in this course, has some very perceptive close readings, but I want to pick-up on the general theories as they involve these large historical questions. Stephens writes, " A question that has been asked as the dynamics of the relationship between humans and computers have grown more complex is: in this relationship, which is the dominant partner, human or machine? The answer will affect the context in which we describe the relationship; whether a humanistic study of digital technology, or a media-oriented study of the body. While Friedrich Kittler holds the latter view, N. Katherine Hayles advocates a third view, one focusing on “the dynamics entwining body and machine together” (EL, 88). In the historical context, Hayles sees in today’s human-computer interactions a new, closely interpenetrated relationship between human and machine, while Kittler sees a more radical subordination of the human to the omnipresent technological media. Kittler argues that even text alone acts upon the body, as when the reader subvocalizes as he or she is reading the text. This process changes the text into an internally-“heard” orality. Electronic media complete the process of externalizing the senses: “machines take over functions of the central nervous system” and now “understanding and interpretation are helpless before an unconscious writing that … makes the subject what it is” (Kittler in EL, 90). In other words, it is impossible to understand the environment created by electronic media because “whatever conclusions can be drawn from it are already predetermined by prevailing media conditions” (EL, 91). Our senses can no longer encompass the media because the media in fact are our senses."

Stephens concludes one part of her paper by noting that " For Hayles, electronic literature lets us examine our assumptions about text, embodiment, and computation alike. As electronic literature “join[s] technical practice with artistic creation, computation is revalued into a performance that addresses us with the full complexity that ourhuman natures require” (157). The act of computation is no longer merely the fulfillment of technical code, but has become the space in which the author’s desires, computer’s routines, and reader’s perceptions combine in dynamic interactions."

Adam Fields, like most of the class members, particularly liked Mencia's work. His comments about that work really capture its importance to our historical over-view. If it is difficult to revel in the initial impressions generated by Twelve Blue and The Jew’s
Daughter, the task is much easier when approaching Maria Mencia’s Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs. Unlike Joyce and Morrissey’s works, which resemble their print predecessors a good deal in form if not function, Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs turns its attention to the radical reconfigurations of literature made possible by technological advancement. From the sounds of thirteen species of birds, Mencia created morphemes of their “speech” and then animated the resulting graphemes, which appear on screen accompanied by a human recording of the corresponding morpheme. The result is rather spectacular: mediated by the computer code, the reader experiences the interaction between human and nonhuman, and between speech, sound, and sight. What I found most interesting about the work is the fact that although the computer performs nearly all of the work of interpretation – in terms of computing the translations for thereader to absorb – it is essentially invisible in the process, an idea that reaffirms Mark B. N. Hansen’s argument that technology is subordinated by the body (Hayles 110). This is not to say, however, that all electronic literature must privilege either the body or the machine in the course of intermediation, merely that it is possible to argue that certain works do so.

Again, like many of you, Fields appreciates the importance of describing in detail the process of reading. Here he is on Memmott's work: "I began reading Lexia to Perplexia slowly, cautious of Hayles’ warning that the work was
‘notoriously nervous,’ and that even a small movement of the mouse could send the window into a frenzy. I tried to take in everything before looking for the next link, noting both the clever neologisms and the numerous subtle allusions to computer code (.tmp, .exe, and the computational usage of punctuation). I particularly enjoyed Memmott’s networking analogy for the interaction, or “realtionship” between the individual, which she casts as the I.terminus, and society, the X.terminus – signifying “internal” and “external” respectively.
As the hyperlinked image of the eye was replaced by what seemed to be a hieroglyphic representation of man – now clearly identified as “the User”- Memmott continued to depict situations of “the user” being “processed” (an idea that ties in with Hayles’ comment on the lack of reader/user control when reading Lexia to Perplexia)."

John Bork, after expressing his skepticism about writing books about e-media-reading, jumps in and summarizes an important aspect of Hayles work: "In the second chapter of Electronic Literature, Hayles develops the concept of intermediation as a way to examine electronic texts without binding them to the traditional modes of interpretation that have been used for critical study of print literature. The mark of digital born works is the non-trivial role played by nonhuman, technological components in not only the preparation of the work, but its dynamic rendering to readers, viewers, listeners - many prefer the term 'interactors', since many senses may be elicited at once in activities that go beyond passive consumption - and how it abides and potentially mutates within information systems. Departing from the traditional model in which “it's all in the head of the reader,” meaning develops through the interaction of human and machine in ways that are often emergent, associative, layered, and adaptive through various levels iteratively feeding back into each other."

As scholars, we will need to adjust our approaches to texts. This is huge. It does not mean that what you do is vague or undefined, but that you will have to account for intermediation and emergent, associative, layered, and contingent feedback loops. That is the historical shift that we have set out to discover, and that is the foundation of all of your work from now on. You might have to educate or at least reinforce these messages as I, for one, might forget ... and certainly my colleagues began where you began ... dismissive, print-centric, eye-rolling at terms like intermediation, and unaware of emergent knowledge, associative and atmospheric meanings, and a shift away from traditional notions of interpretation.

Bork goes on to compare e-lit or EL to video games: New modes of analysis and criticism have arisen along with the new forms. For example, it is worthwhile to examine the similarities and differences between EL and computer games; in both, the user is required to invest substantial effort to engage in the computational mechanisms, but for different purposes: “[p]araphrasing Markku Eskelinen's elegant formulation, we may say that with games the user interprets in order to configure, wheres in works whose primary interest is narrative, the user configures in order to interpret” (8).

When Bork warms up, he starts moving on to a whole new plane: "For example, the region spanning the Cartesian grid beginning at the left-hand point 3 on the x-axis and 2 on the y-axis to 42 on the x-axis and 227 on the y-axis links to sl1.html. The region beginning at point 43 on the x-axis and 2 on the y-axis to 85 on the x-axis and 227 on the y-axis (coords="43,3,85,227") links to sl2.html, and so on. This means that while a horizontal sequence is established, the threads themselves are indistinct." There are other wonderful instances of this sort of emergent code writing -- a poetry of the coder?

Bork, as many of you, notes some important historical facts that are relevant to our studies -- like this one: "Kittler saw a great technological advance in Heinrich Stephanie's phonetic method of reading, which occurred around 1800 - something most readers of the 2000s do not realize, that there had ever been different ways of reading - “erasing the materiality of the grapheme and substituting instead a subvocalized voice” (89)."

Bork's table is useful and probably something like that should be expanded and linked to the examples on a blog or website.

I invite you to read these research papers -- all available here.

Module/Assignment 4

2008-11-12T09:52:00.000-05:00

Texts and Technology in History
ENC 6801-W61
Dr. Saper, Professor

Module 1: What Happens to the Book?
Included in this module: Goals; Assignment; Due Dates; Links to Web-site; Assessments; and Grading Rubric. Read this entire module before starting the assignment or asking any questions about the assignment.
Goals:
Students learn about the history of books in relation to technological change. They learn about not what will replace the book, but how the book, as a form, has a rich potential. Finally, they speculate on how this alternative book tradition might impact the production of scholarship, dissertations, technical communications, and more.
These goals correspond to the overall goals of the course: to learn about the history of texts and technology.
Assignment:
Students will learn about the major historical modes of communication and cultural memory:
1. Read the anthology edited by Rothenberg and Clay. The following pages: 7-50; 54-80; 103; 178-186; 201-203; 217-222; 228-249; 251-257; 319-334; 375-389; 423-431; 497-519.
2. Take notes [self-consciously thinking about note taking in terms of the experiments described in the anthology].
3. Make lists of names, artworks, details, and other information. Create an addendum to your existing time-line. Insert examples drawn from the anthology on the book form.
4. Speculate on how these experiments might impact scholarship or technical communications. Think about the requirements for a dissertation. Think of advantages to these experimental forms [even for technical manuals]. Describe a few of the experiments that you liked for whatever reasons. Think about issues like reading, machines, composition, etc. – discussed in the anthology – and describe how these books de-familiarize our thinking about these terms. Describe how these aspects of books might also change our thinking about books.
5. Look at your notes, find patterns, and add your own speculations and thoughts.
6. Write a 1250 word essay that summarizes arguments. Please include at least one detail, argument, or book discussed from each chapter assigned from the anthology.
7. Finally, either describe or actually build [digitally in the computer or built material that you photograph] an example of an experimental book of your own – that expresses the lessons learned in this texts in history course.
Due Dates:
Post your essay by Thursday, December 4, 2008. This will give you an opportunity to ask questions about the assignment and make revisions. No late projects accepted, no exceptions.

Where: Post the finished assignment to the blog, but post a draft to a discussion on the course site. Since everyone gets credit for helping (and you can help more than one of your peers each assignment) you will find someone to give you suggestions for improvement. If you cannot offer any suggestions, then you might want to consider an alternative to academia.
.
Assessments:
Content: Do the materials include the following:
A. full name of author and helper(s)
C. at least 1 definition, argument, or story from each chapter assigned from the Rothenberg & Clay anthology (please do not plagiarize).
D. use Rothenberg & Clay anthology to design your own alternative book.
Form: Did the student include the following technical aspects?
A. correct grammar, style, and typographical care
B. student’s name
C. a good faith attempt at designing [or actually building] an alternative book-form that relates in some way to this course.
Grader will study the materials (including the design).
1. Does this material present a clear representation of the student's thinking about each of the chapters assigned in Rothenberg and Clay?
2. Did the student have interesting insights about these books, examples, and chapter arguments?
3. Were the insights illuminated in the essay, addendum to the time-line, and the description/building of the alternative book?
4. Are the materials interesting, unique, expressive, and informative?

Grading Rubric:
Passing Grade (in the D range): fulfilled number one in the assessment.
Adequate Grade (in the C range): fulfilled one and two in the assessment.
Good Grade (in the B range): fulfilled numbers one through three in the assessment.
Excellent Grade (in the A range): fulfilled all of the four criteria in the assessment.

Maggie Cotto: Hayles Module Three

2008-11-11T05:02:00.000-05:00

Sorry. Try this link.

http://macotto.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/cotto_hayles_electronic-literature_mod3/cotto_module3_electroniclit/

Maggie Cotto: Hayles Module Three

2008-11-11T04:57:00.001-05:00

My essay is linked below. Congratulations to everyone for making it over this hurdle. Phew!

http://macotto.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=20

John Bork's Module III

2008-11-10T22:28:00.006-05:00

Reading Electronic Literature

John Bork

Part I. Introduction: All Hail Electronic Literature!

The weakness of any survey of electronic literature published as a printed book is how quickly it becomes obsolete. So may become the case with N. Katherine Hayles' thoroughly researched and remarkably comprehensive Electronic Literature, which bearing the publication date of 2008 at least the carries the mark of the current year. The purpose of its first chapter - Electronic Literature: What is it? - is to define electronic literature (henceforth EL), survey its genres, expand on its differences with print literature, both in terms of composition and criticism, and provide some ideas on its preservation and dissemination, again emphasizing new challenges and opportunities provided by this medium. This introduction sets the stage for the remainder of the book. What EL is not, is the mere digitization of print literature; there must be important aspects of the work that make it “a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer“ (3). She gives some ground by including in the scope of “the literary” “creative artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts, and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper” (4). On this reading, EL may include digitizations of originally print literature, such as ancient Greek texts or the Star Wars screenplay, provided there is a creative element to them that is natively digital.

She offers a broad survey of genres of EL, beginning with familiar “first-generation” hypertext-oriented works that everyone knows such as Michael Joyce's afternoon: a story, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, and Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl, many of which were created my proprietary software such as Storyspace (6). Both the nature of their composition - blocks of text (lexia) energized primarily by hyperlinks - and their means of production have been eclipsed by new works leveraging a panoply of multimedia components and navigational mechanisms, as well as delivery over the Web via standard browser-based technologies instead of proprietary, stand-alone solutions. Her survey includes many recent examples of EL in genres including “[h]ypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, 'codework', generative art, and the Flash poem” (30).

New modes of analysis and criticism have arisen along with the new forms. For example, it is worthwhile to examine the similarities and differences between EL and computer games; in both, the user is required to invest substantial effort to engage in the computational mechanisms, but for different purposes: “[p]araphrasing Markku Eskelinen's elegant formulation, we may say that with games the user interprets in order to configure, wheres in works whose primary interest is narrative, the user configures in order to interpret” (8). In many cases it is appropriate to describe EL as instruments that users can learn to play in order to fully appreciate their nuances. Furthermore, the program source code and operating environment supporting EL must be accounted in their analysis, since, as Hayles quotes Alexander Galloway, “Code is the only language that is executable” (35). Widening the scope to include code and operating environments reflects the fact that EL engages many skills beyond literary composition, and point made many times by Drucker and McVarish in Graphic Design History, which Hayles refers to as “a site for negotiations between diverse constituencies and different kinds of expertise”(38). Indeed, the appreciation of the collaborative design and production processes of most complex works of EL contacts the discipline with wider social practices, such as “the development of commercial software, the competing philosophies of open source freeware and shareware, the economics and geopolitical terrain of the internet and World Wide Web, and a host of other factors that directly influence how electronic literature is created and stored, sold or given away, preserved or allowed to decline into obsolescence” (39).

Critical engagement with the social practices surrounding EL foreground the importance of the means by which works are disseminated and preserved, not merely because electronic formats have historically enjoyed much shorter lifespans than printed books, which last for centuries rather than decades, but also because electronic formats involve a host of design decisions that are intimately tied to the early stages of their creation, not merely the publication of the finished product. Thus recommendations are offered concerning the choice of open versus closed systems, community direction versus corporate, plain-text versus binary data formats, and so on. In the sections that follow, three major themes - intermediation, the historical context of EL, and computational practice - will be explored using the examples Halyes provides. In the concluding section, a summary table orienting these works upon a number of dimensions will be presented, including these social and technological concerns that are not necessarily unique to EL but whose implications are clearly significant for its creators and consumers.

Part II. Intermediation: Interpreting Electronic Literature

In the second chapter of Electronic Literature, Hayles develops the concept of intermediation as a way to examine electronic texts without binding them to the traditional modes of interpretation that have been used for critical study of print literature. The mark of digital born works is the non-trivial role played by nonhuman, technological components in not only the preparation of the work, but its dynamic rendering to readers, viewers, listeners - many prefer the term 'interactors', since many senses may be elicited at once in activities that go beyond passive consumption - and how it abides and potentially mutates within information systems. Departing from the traditional model in which “it's all in the head of the reader,” meaning develops through the interaction of human and machine in ways that are often emergent, associative, layered, and adaptive through various levels iteratively feeding back into each other. Through process of intermediation, a term Hayles adapts from Nicholas Gessler, as it is often employed in the context of computer software simulating artificial life,

whereby a first-level emergent pattern is captured in another medium and re-represented with the primitives of the new medium, which leads to an emergent result captured in turn by yet another medium, and so forth. The result is what researchers in artificial life call a “dynamic hierarchy,” a multi-tiered system in which feedback and feedforward loops tie the system together through continuing interactions circulating throughout the hierarchy (45).

Such systems typically employ multiple, intermediating levels of processes that may be digital, analog, or a combination of both, so that their overall effect resembles a self-emerging, living system. Hayles' maneuver is to “make a speculative leap and consider the human and the digital computer as partners in a dynamic heterarchy bound together by intermediating dynamics” (47). To support her position, she invokes computational models of consciousness that counter the Cartesian model of an irreducible rationality by theorists including Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett, and Edward Fredkin. Hofstadter emphasizes the importance of pattern recognition and extrapolation from analogy as playing roles as important as literal, logical deduction in rounding out models of cognition. Dennett uses thought experiments to demonstrate how human intentionality may emerge as an artifact from subcognitive processes. Fredkin contributes the concept of “aboutness,” to align the meaning of information with the process that interprets it, whether it is a music player generating sound from digital files or a human appreciating the details of the musical work reproduced (52-53).

Taking something of a leap, Hayles joins these theories together to posit intermediation as a symbiosis of human and computer, with each partaking in the layered processing of emergent, high-level responses from lower-level operations in both the reading and writing of EL, making the claim that cognition occurs in both. “The result is a meta-analogy: as human cognition is to the creation and consumption of the work, so computer cognition is to its execution and performance” (57). How meaning evolves through the interplay between human and nonhuman cognition will be examined in three works: Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce, The Jew's Daughter by Jud Morissey, and Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs by Marcia Mencia.

Intermediation explains that cognition arising from iterative associations occurs in both human and nonhuman systems. The uninformed reader will bounce around the space of possible hyperlinks and absorb, through repetition, what we might otherwise explain through associations. Jill Walker, in her interpretation of Joyce's earlier Storyspace output afternoon, relays J. Hills Miller's 'Nietzschean repetition' in “[r]e-reading nodes in new surroundings is a form of repetition typical of hypertext. Often, re-reading a node invests it with new meaning.” The work is a series of lexia, generally a page or less, some containing hyperlinks, or images, which are also hyperlinks. The oft-repeat quote from William Gass describes this gentle type of intermediation - many of the other works to be reviewed forcefully jar the interactor from one component of the text to another - "So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that."

Users interact with Twelve Blue via generic HTML browser parsing 208 text, image, and image map source files; the only session information that is intentionally part of literary work as planned by the author is the effect visiting links has on making parts of certain files disappear from the client display because the link visited color is identical to the background blue color. Here is how it works: Two HTML frames separate the view into a navigation area on the far left of 85 columns, and a viewing area on the right that is the rest of the screen. In the starting page (Twelve_Blue.html) the two frames contain 'subtexts' (identified via SRC tags) titlepage.html and twelvepic.html, respectively, that are displayed, and offer the initial user interface of navigation choices. The left (title) frame offers a single hyperlink called “BEGIN” that points to sl1.html. The main frame contains a large image of twelve colored 'threads' (twelvepic1.gif), eight hyperlinks for the “BARS” referred to in the title frame, and the quote from William Gass. Each of the numbered “BARS” 1-8 below the image point to sl1.html, sl2.html, etc. The image itself is defined with a map of hyperlinks so that various rectangular regions of the image point to the same eight destinations as the “BARS”. For example, the region spanning the Cartesian grid beginning at the left-hand point 3 on the x-axis and 2 on the y-axis to 42 on the x-axis and 227 on the y-axis links to sl1.html. The region beginning at point 43 on the x-axis and 2 on the y-axis to 85 on the x-axis and 227 on the y-axis (coords="43,3,85,227") links to sl2.html, and so on. This means that while a horizontal sequence is established, the threads themselves are indistinct. Subsequent pages will allow offer different destinations depending on the thread. Using the available navigation links, therefore, the user has seventeen entry points into the work, although there are only eight different destinations. This mobility invites playing the work like a musical instrument, rather than passively reading pages.

The literary technique of flash-forward and flash-back includes post-mortem awareness resembling conscious reflection; the narratives of the drowning deaf boy and Ed Stanko continue into a dreamy state as they die. Moreover, there is no clear ending to the work, although the disappearing links do provide a sense of temporality. Hayles describes this break from the traditional plot as “one in which life and death exist on a continuum with flowing and indeterminate boundaries” (69). The overall effect is coming to know the story from multiple perspectives, from different characters at different points in time, piecemeal, so that eventually through associations the intertwined bars come together, collecting like lint or snowflakes.

Interacting with Twelve Blue retains much of the control enjoyed by readers of printed pages, whereas Jud Morissey's Mac or Windows binary executable The Jew's Daughter (TJD.exe) subverts the interactor's control. At one point it reads, “The broken sum of its parts is a great agonist.” The entire work is 22 lines of black text on a white background with blue text that behaves like a mouse-over hyperlink, instantly changing some of the text, forcing you to re-read and try to remember what you just read, slowly building the narrative in a more broken manner than Twelve Blue's clean transitions. You learn to read it after a few mouse-overs of the blue text, when “It is an ultimatum, one that” ends the page and continues at the top. The text pretends to be intelligent. Some thoughts finish before they are started. At one point the letters appear one by one; “In Java she had seen a woman decapitated.” Like Twelve Blue, this counts as literature because it tells a story. At some points new words appear one by one. Hayles views the work as a very rich but complicated reinterpretation of consciousness as an epiphenomenon in which there is no self, only an illusion of one. The focalized reader consciousness gets fragmented into strong memories of persistent text on the 22 lines and into weak memories from associations. It can be the reverse mirror image of the unintelligent machine fomenting consciousness as the closed-loop feedback, dynamically self-reprogrammable control system symbiosis with humans known as cyberspace, the internet, the WWW, and so on. Like Twelve Blue, it takes a while reading the disjointed pages before the story coalesces, although this experience is no different than reading the first hundred pages of a very long novel before grasping the story lines and identity of the various characters. “Are you going to risk the night?” seems to begin a dream sequence. The whole work now seems like a dream, the piecing together that is a dream to the semi-conscious dreamer, then trying to remember the pieces while awakening. By focusing on a word, mousing over the blue words, like the semi-conscious dreamer trying too hard to focus on something in the dream, the scene is distorted as more connections are made with the other world.

“And now for something completely different,” as the Monty Python meta-narrator used to say. At the far pole of intermediation is the destruction of narrative into the experimental, such as the investigation of basic aural and visual phenomena in Marcia Mencia's Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs. Moreover, like TJD.exe, this work is delivered as binary data in Macromedia Flash format, offering no plain-text, prima facie clues to the underlying source code. skymove.swf plays via Flash plugin for a generic browser such as Mozilla Firefox. Clouds drift by horizontally, and at the bottom of the screen are 13 numbered sets of buttons using the common symbols for PLAY and STOP. Each button seems to run a program displaying a bird-like silhouette, and letters, and accompanying sound is produced from a generic audio subsystem. The letters are sometimes the edge of the bird's outline, inside it, pushed in front of it, and so on. Activating the first bird brings forth a silhouette of a bird flying left to right across the screen whose outline is composed of the letters of its song, which is heard on the computer speakers. The second button elicits the formation of a large, single bird image from dispersed symbols that immediately flies off the screen once assembled. By the sixth button, the characters of this large, single, immobile bird are much more difficult to discern, moving around overlapping each other within the confines of the bird's silhouette. Rather than spelling out the song, one letter at a time shifts into visibility and then back into obscurity. In the seventh, the letters circulate around the form like a serpentine belt, with no spaces in between to suggest distinct words. The twelfth button invokes a single large, white semi-transparent silhouette whose song emerges one letter at a time coming forward overlaying the other letters, “see see” and then there are too many letters piled up to make sense of it. Activating all the birds at once - the first thing a child would be likely to do - creates a cacophony that eventually regulates itself. The author describes the works as an exploration of “kinetic typography, the animation of images and sound.” She noted similarities between the phonemes of the transcript of birds' songs in The Thinking Ear and phonemes used in her other works. So these are translations of birds songs into written human language, interpreted back into human voice. Hayles interprets this work as intermediating the habitual, automatic cognitive decoding of print as subvocalization, for here the vocalized sounds dominate and are only suggested by the display of characters.

Part III. Historical Context

To describe a historical context for EL reflects a particular ontology; Hayles places it within the perspective of Friedrich Kittler's media theory, for which the essence of literature is in its material medium, or media, if multiple, such as visual and aural media, pictures and sounds, and therefore, Hayles argues, “[l]iterature acts on the body but only within the horizon of the medium's technical capabilities” (89). Kittler saw a great technological advance in Heinrich Stephanie's phonetic method of reading, which occurred around 1800 - something most readers of the 2000s do not realize, that there had ever been different ways of reading - “erasing the materiality of the grapheme and substituting instead a subvocalized voice” (89). Other great innovations include the gramophone, film, and typewriter, if this can be intuited from the title of one of his most famous books. Kittler's theory reflects a deterministic approach to the philosophy of technology; it ignores the deep interaction between technical processes and human societies and cultures. Hayles points to multiple critics who argue that Kittler focuses on war as the primary influence determining the course of technological change for media precisely because military exigencies seem to offer the only compelling reason to advance the state of the art. No doubt he would say the same for the Internet, as do most networking textbooks when they trace its origins back to the need of the US military to develop inter networking and electronic communications standards. Yet as Hayles is adamant, “media alone cannot possibly account for all the complex factors that go into creating national military conflicts. .. media transformations alone are not sufficient” (93). Her counterexample describing the combination of technological and cultural conditions that shape the fascinating lifeworld of global currency traders reveals both a media specific component, the different sense of time created by their monitors displaying global, real-time market conditions, and social formations such as male aggression, antagonism, and warfare that are common to the high stakes, rapidly transforming trade floor arena.

The human components, especially physical attributes of human bodies, also play a role. Mark Hansen is a proponent of the position that embodiment - “proprioception, kinesthetic, and haptic capacities” - plays as important a role in experiencing media as the primary senses like vision and hearing, citing research in “virtual reality sickness” (106). Hayles is not satisfied with this reductive stance because, like Kittler's technological determinism, it fails to keep in view the materiality of the human/machine interface: “[i]t is as though the feedback loop between technical object and embodied human enactor has been cut off halfway through: potentiality flows from the object into the deep inner senses of the embodied human, but its flow back into the object has been short-circuited, leading to an impoverished account of the object's agential capacities to act outside the human's mobilization of its stimuli” (109). Hayles claims her own framework “entagles body and machine in open-ended recursivity” so as not to concretize the possibilities of electronic literature in particular technological or anthropological paradigms (130).

An exemplar of an electronic text that is open ended, entangling human and machine in recursive intermediation is Talon Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia, a Javascript enhanced HTML text that works in standard browsers by combining navigation via the webserver responding to hyperlinks executed by the interactor and the 'client side' dynamism offered by Javascript, albeit originally programmed using non-standard extensions only supported by current versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. The author's description notes that “[a]t times its interactive features override the source text, leading to a fragmentary reading experience. .. certain theoretical attributes are not displayed as text but are incorporated into the functionality of the work.” It develops its own terms and is “play between the rigorous and the frivolous.” Hayles write about “[t]he notorious 'nervousness' of this work, whereby a tiny twitch of the cursor can cause events to happen that the user did not intend and cannot completely control, conveys through its opaque functionality intuitions about dispersed subjectivities and screens with agential powers similar to those we saw with international currency traders” (120). Like Twelve Blue and many lexia-based EL, following the default entry into the work offers the interactor with a small number of selections akin to chapter headings. Once entered, navigation within one of the headings (“The Process of Attachment, “Double-Funnels,” “Metastrophe,” and “Exe.Termination”) is suggestive, experimental, often surprising, through the combination of traditional mouse click hyperlinks and Javascript code that activates features by mere mouse over. By “taking fingersteps into the apparatus” the materiality of the text is highlighted, although really mouse gestures more so than keyboarding. Images, diagrams, moving lines and pointers, as well as large and small blocks of text compete for the interactor's attention, often obscuring one another. This work is not narrative in the sense of Twelve Blue or The Jew's Daughter; it is more a quasi-academic exegesis of the four movements from “The Process of Attachment” to “Exe.Termination” that illustrates Hayle's interpretive framework.

The first part, “The Process of Attachment” seems to depict the human eye attaching itself to the nonhuman, machinic system, not as a proxy of the self but transformed, mediated: “It is never I that enters. .. The screen-bound avatar is a micromental reproduction of the trans|missive hero-agent. .. Though the delivery-machine feels no-thing, the mediation, all co-operation between the I and the apparatus is con.sensual.” Memmott's neologisms can be exasperating to the detail-oriented interactor, never sure when their temporary meanings will transform into something different, or whether their 'codework' genuinely reflects the design of the underlying source code or merely suggestive of imaginary operations. When the possibilities of this part seem to have been played out, the interactor must return to the “main menu” by clicking the ever-present “LEXIA to PERPLEXIA” in the upper left-hand corner.

Once attached to the system, intermediation occurs through a model of “Double Funnels,” the second main heading, symbolized by these expressions:

[local.{[*...(*] | )}(...^...){( | [*)...*]}.remote]

(s)T(ex)(T)(s)

The code-work attempts to encode a mechanisms for uniting local and remote (s)'s (eye icons). A way for the “analog and slippery digits of the real” to exit to the remote, distant other as if poured into the funnel. The screen briefly displays, in very large characters, EXIT, and below, (s)T(ex)T(s), in which texts unmistakenly appears although it is better understand as another representation of the code-work below it. Mousing around and clicking suggestive hyperlinks again produces a collage of images, diagrams, and lexia, all the while maintaining the auspices of an academic presentation. A lengthy commentary upon the communication process, 'exe.change', reminiscent of Shannon's theory, notes that because it is shared conduit, “[b]etween the local and the remote, the success and failure of communification in the middle, the mess in the middle is prone to various mechanoid intensities borne from the simultaneous passage of others through the general conduit.”

The third part, “Metashtrophe,” begins with “Minifestos,” complete with timestamps (in the future 2000), mouse-overs producing secondary pop ups giving definitions of certain words or adding more figures to the background diagram. The final part, “Exe.Termination,” presents two columns with a large white word changing to form different combinations, the lefthand side like minutes, the righthand side like hours, and the center large gray symbols like seconds. Images that look like pages of printed text, when mouse over, add a diagram or explanatory lexia for a few seconds. Some of the images resemble rough blackboard sketches of the design of L2P itself. (Following “TALAN MEMMOTT” from the main page to the “ABOUT” offers another glimpse into the behind-the-scenes perspective of the work, including a photographed image of a pile of books for the bibliography.)

Part IV. Computational Practice

When referring to computational practice, Hayles means the active role of “technological nonconscious” embodied in modern electronic computing systems, as opposed to the affordances provided by print technologies. Computational practice intermediate the experience of EL, in particular two ways: “verbal narratives are simultaneously conveyed and disrupted by code” and “distributed cognition implies distributed agency” (136). It is important to believe that knowledge can be transmitted through social practices and enactments, such as craft making, dance, and other demonstrative activities without consciously verbalizing it. Otherwise, it is hard to understand the epistemological function of most mixed media. Contemporary computational practices erode the privileged role of the coherent, well-formed lexia while offloading more and more cognition and agency from human to nonhuman mechanisms. The result is that “[e]lectronic literature can tap into highly charged differentials that are unusually heterogeneous, due in part to uneven developments of computational media and in part to unevenly distributed experiences among users” (138). This effect is a result of the combination of the 'ergodic' nature intrinsic to of much EL, inexperience with the new stylistic conventions that have been surveyed here, as well as the non-trivial art of literary interpretation that may not be shared by those who are highly skilled in the other areas. Thus the experience of EL will vary greatly from interactor to interactor, depending on their particular computing environments, their ability to use them, their experience with formal theories of print literature, and also their ability to peer into the creator's world if they choose to “hack” the work. While Hayles does not investigate this potential, it is certainly one of those “highly charged” zones that interest the technically savvy who want to know “how it works” or wish to rework or build off of the underlying programmatic aspects.

When it is impossible to peer into the inner workings of a literary work with a high degree of computational complexity, it is nonetheless possible to intuit the underlying algorithms. John Cayley's work is a prime example. In Translation, three blocks of symbols are in constant motion to the with the accompaniment of a soundtrack. In a computational procedure he calls “transliteral morphing,” a source text in one language is slowly translated into a target text in another language, letter-by-letter. Hayles explains:

Cayley conjectures that underlying these “higher-level” relationships are lower-level similarities that work not on the level of words, phrases, and sentences but individual phonemes and morphemes. .. Just as Mencia invokes the philological history of language as it moves from orality to writing to digital representation, so Cayley's transliteral morphs are underlain by an algorithm that reflects their phonemic and morpemic relations to one another. (146)

Like Mencia's Birds, visual language is disconnected from subvocalization and rendered letter by letter. However, Cayley's theory is that microstructures bind translations between different human language, and also within machines. His selection of Walter Benjamin's “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” positions this new possibility against a theological interpretation going back to Berkeley that it is God that ensures the possibility of translation from one language to another. Of course, viewing Translation renders the appearance of a complex, underlying algorithm, but it could be a trick. Something presented in a movie format offers little access to the means of production in a much more profound way than any plain-text format. While it was possible to delve into the inner workings of the hypertext works like Twelve Blue and Lexia to Perplexia, it is not part of the design for the interactor to actually see the source code of the translation algorithm. Moreover, this and all works encoded in Apple Quicktime format are difficult to view on generic x86 GNU/Linux systems. Choice of a commercial, proprietary, patented or copyrighted encoding format is a gamble that future interactors will incur the cost to compute it.

Brian K. Stefans work Star Wars, One Letter At A Time presents the entire printed screenplay of the 1977 movie Star Wars as typed one page at a time on an electric typewriter one key at a key at an average rate of about 10 characters per second. 10 Hertz is about the human limit of 'intelligibility' for discrete sound units as distinguished from very low frequency bass sounds. For each typed letter is the same sound; the space bar and carriage return keys have distinct sounds including a bell. The temptation is great to play the audio soundtrack along with it. There are two files, an HTML file starwars_one_letter.html that invokes the other one, starwars_one_letter.swf. Shockwave Flash movies play readily on generic x86 architecture GNU/Linux browsers with the appropriate Flash plugin. Running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 this was much more “working off the shelf” than the fussy-to-configure WINE software required to view the Apple Quicktime work Translation. A feature of this work is that it can be viewed in a very small window since only one character is ever displayed at a time. Like its two counterparts in Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs, there is nothing else to see on the screen but the rapid changes of this small field. It is difficult for an unfamiliar reader to make sense of it without access to a more familiar page version. The movie Star Wars captivated a generation, and combining replay of the original soundtrack, or even playing the movie itself, with executing starwars_one_letter.swf will be experienced differently by different age and social groups, attesting to an example in which there are few deep program secrets to learn about the work, as opposed to exploring the depths of the source code of Twelve Blue and Lexia to Perplexia.

Before digital computer screens, the tachistoscope was a high speed slide projector that could flash images at 'subliminal rates' in experiments that demonstrated that viewers picked up subconscious cues such as “buy popcorn” when suggestive text and images were delivered via the tachistoscope. William Poundstone notes in the one of the links encircling the START button on Project for Tachistoscope: Bottomless Pit that

The tachistoscope used in early perceptual experiments were slide projectors capable of flashing images as brief as 1 millisecond. This speed was overkill. No matter how brief the image, the retina's afterimage persists for c. 50 milliseconds .. The briefest full-screen image on a 75 Hz CRT lasts 13 milliseconds. .. A given phosphor, or a group of them forming a small image, remains illuminated for about 4 milliseconds. LCD monitors do not scan, but their pixels have a mechanical afterimage of up to 25 milliseconds. .. This site will run on an LCD monitor, but more of the flashed images are likely to be perceptible.

Ironically, most CRT monitors have been retired in favor of energy and space saving LCD units. If starwars_one_letter.swf modulated the 10 Hertz range of aural and visual human perception, William Poundstone's Tachistoscope.swf therefore modulates the up to the 20 Hertz range of visual perception while playing music modulating a much broader aural spectrum than the digital tones of Stephan's work using the same runtime environment (generic x86 architecture GNU/Linux browsers with the appropriate Flash plugin and audio subsystem).

The work presents one word at a time at a quick rate, in the center of the screen, with a pulsating, colorful background and a set of repeating images vaguely related to the story or the current word. Occasionally a second word or additional images or pictures will flash by in very rapid succession, bordering on the subliminal. Meanwhile a minimalist, hypnotic musical accompaniment plays reminiscent of Phillip Glass composition. It takes a number of viewings to grasp the overall narrative, which is about a large pit, bottomless pit that has opened near the town Carbondale during road construction activities. The fictional narrative is often injected with subliminal words such as “Heidelberg”, “Chinatown”, “Chomsky”, “Kuwait” and sometimes what may be complete sentences but are impossible to discern because the only control operation is to EXIT and start the work over. Rather than interpreting itself like Lexia to Perplexia, the outer band of the START screen provides seven lexia that explain the tachistoscope principle, the historic controversy surrounding subliminal messages, system requirements for viewing, and the concept of “semantic priming” that is the key feature of the work.

Summary Table for Reading Electronic Literature

Text	Year	Author	Source Media	Run-time Requirements	Why it's Literature
Twelve Blue	1996	Michael Joyce	HTML	Generic browser	narrative
The Jew's Daughter	2000	Jud Morissey	unknown	Windows binary executable	narrative
Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs	2001	Maria Mencia	Shockwave Flash	Generic browser Shockwave Flash plug-in Audio subsystem	interpretive art
Lexia to Perplexia	2000	Talon Memmott	HTML Javascript IE extensions	Internet Explorer browser	philosophical essay; narrative
Translation	2004	John Cayley	Quicktime movie	Apple Quicktime Player	theoretical demonstration
Star Wars, One Letter At a Time	2005	Brian K. Stefans	Shockwave Flash	Generic browser Audio subsystem	interpretive art
Project for Tachistoscope	2005	William Poundstone	Shockwave Flash	Generic browser Shockwave Flash plug-in Audio subsystem	narrative

These contemporary examples illustrate the electronic computer playing a much more engaged and dynamic role that the hypertext viewer characteristic of EL the 1990s. To Hayles, the unique possibilities the computational practices bring to literary creation invite a revaluation: the technoculture should no longer be seen as an unimaginative outsider, providing merely an updated support mechanism or prop to the codex book, but instead an integral component of creative endeavor, “a performance that addresses us with the full complexity our human natures require, including the rationality of the conscious mind, the embodied response that joins cognition and emotions, and the technological nonconscious that operates through sedimented routines of habitual actions, gestures, and postures” (157).

References

Hayles, N. Katherine. (2008). Electronic Literature. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Walker, Jill. (1999). “Piecing together and tearing apart: finding the story in afternoon.” Retrieved 10/10/2008 from http://jilltxt.net/txt/afternoon.html.

Note: all of the electronic texts discussed in this essay were included on the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 CDROM provided with Electronic Literature.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sonia Stephens for editorial suggestions.

Adam Fields' Module 3 Assignment

2008-11-10T19:47:00.002-05:00

Hi all,

My essay for module three can be found here. All four parts are included in the single pdf link.

-Adam

(Everybody take a deep breath, the hardest part is over...)

John Lamothe's Modular 3 Assignment

2008-11-10T13:35:00.002-05:00

Here is the link to view all four parts of Modular 3. I decided to use a WordPress account since I could upload PDFs and since everyone else seems to use it as well (I'm such a follower when it comes to technology). Enjoy.

-John L.

Stacey's Hayle's Assignment (Parts I through IV)

2008-11-10T08:42:00.002-05:00

Attached please find the link to view my work for Assignment 3, Hayles' Electronic Literature Parts I through IV. Many thanks to Sonia Stephens and Meghan Griffin for their help and feedback.

Here goes nothing...

http://tandtwork.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/assignment-3-hayles-electronic-literature-parts-i-through-iv/

Best,

Stacey

Meghan's Hayles Assignments

2008-11-10T08:22:00.001-05:00

Links to my Hayles assignments are as follows:

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Thanks to Stacey DiLiberto, Sonia Stephens, and Maggie Cotto for your help!

Sonia's Module 3

2008-11-09T20:23:00.002-05:00

You can find my four parts to Module 3: Electronic Literature here.

Thanks to Stacie and Meghan, who both gave me comments.

How to Read Interactive Fiction

2008-11-05T12:26:00.000-05:00

Hypertext Literature 101
(as if)

#!/usr/bin/perl

APPEAL:
listen (please, please);
open yourself, wide;
join (you, me),
connect (us, together),

tell me.
do something if distressed;
@dawn, dance;
@evening, sing;
read (books, $poems, stories) until peaceful;
study if able;
write me if-you-please;

sort your feelings, reset goals, (friends, family, anyone);
do * not * die (like this)
if sin abounds;

keys (hidden), open (locks, doors), tell secrets;
do not, I-bet-you, close them, yet.
accept (yourself, changes),
bind (grief, despair);

require truth, goodness if-you-will, each moment;
select (always), length (of-days)
-- Sharon Hopkins

I. Before You Begin
You are about to begin reading "How You Read Interactive Fiction." Dispel every other thought. Turn off your cell phone. Block the instant messages. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the crowd playing the PlayStation or X-Box in the other room seems to have moved-in permanently. Tell them right away, “No, I don’t want to play Grand Theft Auto!” Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read "How You Read Interactive Fiction!" Or, if you prefer don’t say anything; just hope some ring, bing, or buzz won’t distract you. You have to read this article in preparation for a class (or randomly happen upon it). Your mind has already wandered. You start over.
Maybe you already flipped through the pages of this journal while standing in line at the bookstore. In that case, you already know that jumping ahead, making your own links, and considering yourself as a character in the story are essential aspects of reading interactive fiction. You consider yourself a first person reader and the book seems to unfold from your personal vantage point. You start to consider not just the meaning of the words, but how the author has constructed the story – its style and organization. You start to think about your responses. Is this a puzzle, a clever game, a mystery, or a scholarly treatise on interactive fiction as a form of literary Modernism? You get to the cashier and forget your line of thought.
Maybe, and more likely, you start reading this journal in the library or online (via a library's subscription). You collect your thoughts on index cards. Maybe each card examines one topic essential to reading interactive fiction (as literary modernism).

II. Reading Narrative Confetti
You already know that rereading segments (by jumping ahead and back again) constructs the story of a hypertext fiction. Now, tracking a reading functions like "breadcrumbs marking, electronically, a path." Usually, in electronic fiction there are no page numbers to create linear bearings; so, navigation depends on the reader creating a mental map of the fictional space and constantly looping back. This type of navigation does not create a single path, but instead explores a space. In that story world, enigmas remain, but without single answers or closure. Without one path toward an unfolding story, the fictional space consists of readings and world building rather than a traditional story. Re-reading, in hypertext, means literally re-printing electronically hyper-text-marked up pages. Narrative, even if in a non-linear form, can still exist in a reading that jumps around. In that scenario, the reader, not the author, determines narrative time: the time it takes to unfold the story. Given the importance of the links that jump some place else in a story, the process of reading hypertext parallels re-reading print; so, maybe you re-read those lines at another time. In that process of flashback, ricorso, and renewal a new type of storytelling appears. Stringing together the "narrative confetti" creates the impression of an infinite database of stories. Once one allows, and encourages, interruptions of a linear story, then the first principle of interactive fiction, its foundation, removes linearity and fixed sequence as the premise of storytelling. In rhetorical terms, interactive fiction leaves behind Aristotelian schemas of a good story. Instead of one grand narrative plot, the accretion of narrative confetti creates a circumstance well suited to create literary images. The epigraph of Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue (a story in eight bars)(1996) from William Gass’s On Being Blue becomes a coda for understanding interactive fiction: “So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that.”

III. Bricoleur
A bricoleur is a tinkerer (a "do-it-yourselfer”). A bricoleur creates things from scratch by organizing pieces of information in ways not necessarily intended. The result forms a new kind of narrative unity in a “rhapsodic stitching together.” The reader-as-bricoleur functions much like the “bard who constructed meaning and narrative from fragments provided by someone else, by another author or by many other authors.” If you decide to read like a bricoleur, then you build a narrative world, make meaningful connections, or find the hypertext fiction satisfying.

IV. From Public to Private to Intimate Interfaces
These momentous changes to reading reminds some scholars of the shift from public readings for courtly audiences to solitary readings of one’s private copy. In the latest shift to interactive reading, no longer does one study someone else’s subjective state; now, the text makes one self-aware of the reading experience. Because the processes of reading (and writing) become subjects in interactive fiction, these processes replace writing (and readings) as finished products. The question becomes whether author or reader have ultimate control of the branching narrative or if the reader constructs the shape and substance. In the early examples of interactive fiction, readers chose branches, but the reader did not modify the text. Although those earlier interactive fictions allowed authors to set the level of control, even these examples demanded the reader’s intervention to make meaning; this demand for intervention and interaction creates an intimacy between reader and text. In that scenario, interactive fiction may give away the clear window into the soul of characters, but it gains intimate access to the process of constructing meanings, images, and narratives.

V. Formulae and Plots
Maybe you start reading other texts on the (valiant/irrelevant) attempts at theorizing the literariness of interactive fiction. You rethink the (insightful/naïve) conclusions described above. Instead of re-reading and discontinuity, you realize that interactive fiction often encourages one to avoid re-reading. In fact, some might point out that one can only skip and skim a linear text. The author, not the reader, carefully controls the text’s fragmentation and punishes random skipping; choosing the correct path creates the story that the author intended. Instead of a new form of storytelling, interactive fiction can depend on formulaic and traditional plots like escape adventures, revenge, sacrifice, love, forbidden love, and a limited number of other major plot lines. Interactive forms that satisfy readers, rather than defamiliarize, include the following: Choose-your-Own-Adventure, play a fantasy role, or an electronic version of Dungeons and Dragons produced by Gygax in 1978. Instead of the reader jumping around a story space, some see the situation differently as interactive fiction extends the traditional functions of satisfying stories. Instead of studying hypertext as a new form, it may prove more important to study it as a narrative literary genre. Reading hypertext as a literary technique, rather than something more akin to a game, focuses on the differences with other types of fiction rather than a new form of communication. Perhaps you should avoid all general theories of hyper-literature as it tends to reinforce presuppositions whether correct or simply cultural myths. For example, scholars mistakenly categorize hypertext as both different and better than print/book instead of finding the obvious continuities; the extension of media technologies does not necessarily suggest that the new replaces the codex (the bound and printed book).

VI. Images of an Emerging Discipline?
You might notice the fierce debates among the literary critics involved in considering how you read interactive fiction. The heated rhetoric includes claims by one scholar that another, cited in this essay, works on an “imperialist pretext,” a second for making a faulty analogy, and a third for making her interpretation more “important” than the text studied. One scholar worries that other scholars, cited in this essay, have invested too much faith in the deconstructive or avant-garde power of hypertext. So, rather than this essay simply presenting the terrain as a given, you, dear reader, recognize the field as an ongoing, and sometimes contentious, debate. It suggests that the field is vibrant rather than moribund (and you feel momentarily optimistic). The debates surrounding e-media or i-media studies in general demonstrate the efforts to map out a new object of study: what is interactive fiction and what are its essential qualities or forms? The debates also concern formulating corresponding and apt methods and theories: what are the cultural implications; how do those implications change reading, the study of literature, and even the sociopolitical foundations of culture?

VII. Spectrum of Readings
You flip through the pages of this essay again. You try to reconcile these disagreements. Perhaps you read how interactive fiction creates a tension “between anarchic readings (polysequentiality) and authorial control (conjuror’s trick).” Neither a radical avant-garde break-with-the-past, nor a system perfectly suited for military war simulations, interactive fiction exists on a spectrum. There is a spectrum of types of interactive fiction from the ability of the reader to add texts and links to the more typical make believe. In either case, it demands the responsibility of the reader to make links to undermine any “singular fatalism, fostering instead an ethos of responsiveness and engagement.” Given these demands on you, dear reader, you recognize a “paradigm shift in the way we read.” Although the reader can now respond in idiosyncratic or bizarre ways, the reader must take some action (typing, clicking, navigating) or the story will not continue. Instead of the grand narrative, the singular story, the reader collects “pieces of story.” Literary scholars soon realize that their raison d’être, establishing the singular authoritative text, has given way to interactive texts with no fixed pieces. Perhaps, you worry that studying interactive fiction will open a Pandora’s box: if this type of fiction undermines definitive critical editions, then readers will be able to combine, tinker with, and invent the boundaries of the text. It almost seemed that modernist literary style inf(l)ected the essay that unfolds in front of you.

VIII. First-Person Reader
You imagine yourself as a character in the story: a first-person reader. You have the ability to change the plot, the characters, the setting, or the language used by the author. You now create the narrative structure in your effort to find a story. Perhaps, you resign yourself to a significantly different first principle of interactive fiction: the author or designer carefully structures your actions and experience of interactivity. The issue of control highlights a foundational distinction between defined narrative scripts and open-ended hypertext fiction.
Defined scripts, like those in flight simulators and sports games, do achieve the most complete fusion of immersion and interactivity, but producers that seek to create these directed scripts fail to understand narrative and storytelling even as they seek it as their Holy Grail because they “flatten motivation,” create “sledgehammer causality,” and simplistic goals. Because military and entertainment necessities – winning – prevent aesthetic issues to enter into the discussions, the absolutely particular details get pushed aside. But, in interactive narrative, details and alternative worlds play a key role. In game making, visual design, and engineering of software, solutions supercedes discussions or studies of expressive storytelling. Corporate interests, rather than literary or artistic concerns, need an industry of workers implementing pre-determined paths; those interests do not want independent producers/readers making compelling stories. The future Homer of interactive fiction will combine literary ambition and computational expertise with a connection to a wide audience. Currently, those with computational expertise work on games and simulations that have definite paths, goals, and life-or-death comprehension. The experimental forms of Modernism may offer an alternative to the dreary (and treacherous) actual results of digital fiction (especially games, simulations, and VR), but those experiments in interactive fiction may have to take place in print forms and in unlikely places (outside of traditional venues for interactive fiction).
Goals, clear paths, and efficient interface design are advantages for immersion and military necessity, but those advantages also create limits and impasses. Military necessity demands that simulation experts, like spies, suppress “any alternative path, the fullness of multiple outcomes, for the one best suited.” Flight simulators, video games, and military scenarios share that problem: military necessity forces one conclusion, one right answer, and returns the possibilities of e-media to a training manual. You fidget nervously on re-reading this section since you had almost completed your degree in digital design, simulation and training, or game development. You recognize these issues. Perhaps, you decided to major in Literature, and consider hypertext fiction a way of “thinking opposition-ally about situations of fatality and hierarchal discipline.” You want to learn how to seize the “responsibility of the reader” to “undermine any singular fatalism, fostering instead an ethos of responsiveness and engagement.” You want to discover how hypertext fictions present more than their narrative or discursive elements; you start searching for something beyond the “functional elements concerned with specificity, regularity, and constraint,” something “outside the military-entertainment complex.” Avoiding the science of control, you wonder about a “mutant machine” that would offer a “reflexive critique of war machines.” You realize that hypertext and computer viruses suggest “two faces of this mutant machine.” To make interactive fiction serve as a tool for controlling games and military simulations may interest you or you may seek an alternative.

IX. Precursors
Maybe you wondered about a reference to a group of experimental novels. These novels represent, at least to some in the lineage of literary criticism about interactive fiction, the precursors to electronic hypertext fiction. You realize that you must read modern and postmodern novels, especially Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler . . . , to appreciate electronic interactive fiction as a kind of reading of Modernist literature. You notice that the first word of the title, "If," could be read as an acronym for Interactive Fiction. You imagine re-writing the novel as if it was about interactive fiction on a winter's night a traveler. You imagine reading this very article. You laugh and dismiss the conceit as s/he leads you to the Fiction & Literature section and pulls a group of books off the shelves.
Robert Coover’s collection of his stories that includes “The Babysitter;”
Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch;
works by Paul Auster and Robbe-Grillet;
stories by Jorge Luis Borges including “Garden of the Forking Path;”
William Gass’s On Being Blue;
Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet;
Roland Barthes’ S/Z;
Italo Calvino’s stories and novels;
Dictionary of the Khazars;
and, a collection of OULIPO poems and novels.

This is a nice start. S/he also mentions that one can apply interactive fiction’s solutions back to literature of the past especially those works that reached impasses in literary history (Ziegfeld). S/he mentions Faulkner’s desire for different colors as a way to distinguish different sections of the text, Melville’s need to include more information about a ship’s operation, or Flaubert’s potential use of the “changing pace of reading ... to capture the change in Emma’s activity from paralysis to frenzied activity.” If great writers of the past had interactive fiction, readers could tell authors about their preferences, new ideas, etc., and authors could respond directly to readers and make changes to the fiction. In fact, many authors now respond to precisely these types of requests on their blogs (web logs or diaries). One could re-write the entire canon of literature (under the guise of e-books).

X. Canon
Perhaps later, when you are sitting down to play an online game, you consider the possibility of an electronic literature; not just interactive fiction, but a canon of great works. You go online and buy copies of what many consider the canonical works: Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling (1993); Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991); Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995); Judy Malloy’s and Cathy Marshall’s Forward Anywhere (1993); Adriene Jenik’s Mauve Desert; Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987). Earlier critics, before Joyce’s works appeared, might have included Rob Swigart’s Portal (1986) and later critics would include a large and growing array of works listed in part on eliterature.org and many published by eastgate.com. Of course, then you may think of those texts as separate from a literary lineage.
Before one can generate a list of works of interactive literature, one must construct a list of criteria for the literariness of hypertext. The list would include de-familiarization or making new the familiar; interactive literature makes the process of reading strange through non-linear, discontinuous, and associative combinations. Although these structures were once rare in print-based fiction, except in Modernist avant-garde or experimental literature, in hypertext they become the key literary values.

XI. Cognitive Mappings and Navigation
You think visually and construct a table outlining various elements found in interactive fiction. You divide the elements into two categories of the goal of any literature: satisfaction or defamiliarization. You cite a few authors for each element as it relates to the over-arching goals for interactive fiction. The references to the writers simply suggest who writes about each element in particularly apt ways or with heightened focus; sometimes they advocate a position, and sometimes they describe it only. Others, not cited, sometimes discuss, or even advocate, these topics. Your table makes a useful cognitive map to understand how the various issues examined in this essay line-up under satisfaction or defamiliarization -- the twin towers of literary criticism. It also demonstrates how these scholars examine different goals, or outcomes, for successful interactive fiction. Focusing simply on one set of outcomes, like many misguided literacy and educational programs, dismisses alternative forms of texts, and the corresponding reading practices, without investigating those form’s and practice’s unique advantages.

Essentials Aspects of Interactive Fiction SATISFACTION
(Modernism as rational) DEFAMILIARIZATION
(Vanguardist Modernism)
Reader’s self-awareness of reading process and re-reading determine navigation: Game of Narration. Or, Reader moves plot forward. Read discussion in Douglas, Niez & Holland, Randall, Sloane, Ziegfeld Read discussion in Randall, Kelley, Aarseth, Gaggi, Moulthrop
Authorial control of maze-like puzzle manipulates navigation. Or, author’s revelation of character and enigmas lead readers through plot and narrative scripts. Read discussion in Niez & Holland, Randall, Sloane, Douglas Read discussion in Aarseth, Kelley, Douglas
Plot has no beginning or end; all middle. Or, plot can use interactivity in a quest and/or mystery in the style of a game and hypertext fiction has polysequence and ending(s). Read discussion in Douglas, Niez & Holland, Ziegfeld, Randall, Ryan, Aarseth, Sloane, Douglas, Read discussion in Landow, Ulmer, Moulthrop, Joyce, Case,
Compare: Digital Fiction reminiscent of literary experiments. Or, fictional world immersive and transparent like VR. Read discussions in Ryan, Kelley, Douglas, etc. Read discussions in Ulmer, Landow, Ziegfeld, etc.
Meaning, imagistic and thematic, created by contiguity, accretion, and aesthetic matches among segments and links. Or, meaning created by participating in fictional world without self-awareness. Ryan, Sloane, etc. Ulmer, Joyce, Case, Gaggi, Moulthrop, Sloane, etc.
Filled with hubris, you bring your visual table to class. Your peers, recognizing it as a useful “cheat” sheet on this essay and for a toolbox of literary strategies, celebrate your generosity. As your classmates pat you on the back, the professor notes how the chart does not discuss the many other topics included in the essay, and seems to flatten arguments to one-phrase high-concepts. Your chart ignores the subtle nuances of the individual citations to the (tired/significant) lineage of literary criticism's last gasp/insights/limit cases. Perhaps, you decide, before class, not to share your “cheat” sheet. In that situation, you never hear the objections that your table charts only one path among many. You use the chart on the exam. You’ll need to copy it on the palm of your hand. Try not to sweat or the text will run (and the categories and elements may blur together). You may fail, but at least you found a way to visually organize the information.
You probably rushed home without starting to take notes on index cards. You didn’t stop at the library or the quaint independent bookshop. If you did pop into the bookshop with the attractive and helpful assistant, s/he would have told you with a smirk and laugh that you must read modern and postmodern novels, especially Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler . . . , to appreciate electronic interactive fiction. S/he leads you to the Fiction & Literature section, pulls down a paperback, and looks at you (no, looks through you—reading you). Perhaps you quickly and shyly buy the book and leave; perhaps you strike up a conversation about electronic fiction. You say, “I’m reading "How You Read Interactive Fiction" and Calvino’s novel speaks to an important issue examined.” S/he seems interested. Perhaps hypertext fiction represents the beginning of a canon, or perhaps these experiments represent a small tangent (a difficult to understand tangent to boot) to the larger stream of e-books: mysteries, games, and educational puzzles. Texts like Afternoon or Victory Garden lack dramatic tension, have stories with weak plots, and fail to compel the reader to continue reading along a sequence (Sloane). Listening, you worry you may be out of your league.
While s/he rings you up, you glance down at the first page of the Calvino book you’re about to buy and you read the following.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

You laugh and realize that your digression actually seems to make perfectly coherent sense; you begin to see in the lists and details (and even in the stylistic quirks, literary games, and clever tricks) an argument. To some the self-reflexive fun and games, of interactive fiction, proves un-satisfying and a cloying annoyance; to others it makes the reading process strange, new, and invigorating. You decide.

XII. Virtual Worlds
Although 3-D immersive virtual reality will probably not appear in popular games or interactive fiction for some time, virtual worlds do exist in MUDs (text-based multi-user dungeons), RPGs (role-playing games), and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing game). The study of these different types of “twisty little passages” begins by distinguishing these genres of virtual world fictions from each other. Virtual reality makes the fiction immersive, it surrounds the participant, includes real-time interactivity, and makes the participant feel present in the virtual environment. In its vivid reproduction of 3-D space, “immediate mapping of gesture to result,” and invisibility of the system, VR extends the satisfaction of fiction that employs a transparent or invisible style. This move toward speech, physical movement, and non-linguistic commands and constraints, rather than text, makes fiction palpable despite its lack of materiality. Defined narrative scripts, like those used in flight simulators, sports games, and more, follow a narrative logic and include visuals, sound, movement all to achieve the most complete fusion of immersion and interactivity.
Unlike the de-familiarizing hyper-textual experiments, and the postmodern precursors, VR (and fiction that moves in that direction) considers immersion, rather than critical detachment, as the goal. VR’s immersion, not defamiliarization, heightened participation, and intimacy between reader and text, most closely resembles genre fiction, like romance. The aesthetics of immersion has now replaced the aesthetics of textuality especially in pop culture. Using VR as a goal and analogy, one should resist, not encourage the “metafictional gesture” that discourages immersive participation in fictional worlds. Given VR as a model, interactivity conflicts with either immersion, or aesthetic design, or both. Instead of interactive fiction, immersive fiction demands more constraints on reader choices and discourages authors exposing the processes of construction. Interactive fiction may attempt to both immerse the reader with narrative suspense, even as it exposes the fictional structure.

XIII. Problems with Writing About Evolving Fiction
Because interactive fiction has developed rapidly over a relatively short period of time (since the 1980s), some of the insights and descriptions have historical interest only. Some works, from the 1980s, are now difficult to access, because of changes in technology and forms. For example, comments about a game “on virtually every major computer installation in the country [...] every brand of microcomputer” seem dated not only in the jargon (i.e., PC not called a “microcomputer” anymore), but also in the details (e.g., a game by Don Woods and Willie Crowther called “Adventure” written with FORTRAN on the PDP-1 in 1972 exists on virtually no computer installations). The production process and aesthetics have also changed dramatically as well. Describing “high-resolution graphics” as “dot displays on the screen” has a new ironic retro-appeal only in the current climate of ever increasing HD resolution. Describing “drawing that outlines visual figures” or “selecting geometric shapes by touching screen” similarly seem dated. In 1984, most of the interactive fiction appeared in written form on a screen only, but more recent interactive games and fictions have limited written text, no plot, no dialogue (except that between the players), and a narration subsumed in setting and architectural spaces. In the 1970s and 80s one might say “finishing a work of interactive fiction can take as long as one hundred hours,” but today one does not finish but leaves the game world to return later, and many play for a hundred hours or more every month without ever finishing. The changes to technology also make the previous opposition between video versus branching choices now makes little sense. Because electronic interactive fiction began recently, and changed dramatically since its emergence, the issues and focus will continue to evolve.

XIV. Navigation With Inference
Just as literacy depends on print media, electronic literacy (or electracy) exploits features of the new apparatus: hypermedia is particularly good at expressing atmosphere, mood, and feeling all in the manner of a poem. An image, a figure (e.g., the experience of drowning), can take on an “allegorical effect” versus the reality effect. In hypertexts, neither revealing a character’s motivation, nor solving the enigmas of the plot’s action, work particularly well; the discontinuous segments instead make meaning through similarity, contiguity, and aesthetic matches. Reading proceeds by the reader’s inferences about the poetic connections among the pieces of story rather than by following one grand narrative. Electracy teaches how to read texts and pictures as poetic images and as the practice of reading. In a number of hypertext fictional works, fluidity and reflectivity of water functions as one of those key images. Small bits eventually create patterns (accretion) with a shifting, split focus, and figure becomes ground. One encounters this new type of story as a “body of water [...] sputtering and guttering our way through a narrative.”

XV. Feminine (hyper-)ecrituré
The interface of hypertext fiction, with its shifting stories and multiple lines of focus, described with the analogy of “women telling each other stories,” suggests it is not just that women writers are important in the production and the essential scholarship of hypertext interface and writing. The very interface design may demonstrate “women’s writing” as a form and process. When accretion replaces plot line, the new reading process may also suggest a new type of reader and subjectivity. In at least one hypertext novel, “composition style,” rather than the literal story alone, suggests a “lesbian desire.” Changes in compositional, or interface design, may have implications for the way the texts address the reader. There is not one correct way to couple and overlap segments of texts and images (no privileged order; meaning not made from one order). The dis-conjunctions focus less attention on the impossible duality of oppositions and more on the becomings between them.

XVI. Ergodic
The ergodic (derived from the Greek words ergon, meaning "work" and hodos, meaning "path") describes a chain, or play, of events (a path, sequence, etc.), produced by individuals choosing (e.g., clicking, navigating, typing) or working to follow a path. The ergodic requires special effort to navigate. For example, actions within a game have no narrative actions, but they are ergodic and require the player to actually input information. Narratives have two levels (description and narration), but a game has only one level (ergodic). A video game contains both description and ergodics but not narration. A hypertext has all three: description, narration, and ergodics. To make sense of a hypertext a reader must produce a narrative version of the construction of the text, but those texts are “limit cases.” Most ergodic works are either games, video games, or stories, not combinations.

XVII. Axes and Spectrums of Reading
Interactive fiction exists on a series of axes rather than oppositions. We have already discussed the issues involved, but it is worth repeating that these issues exist in a spectrum rather than mutually exclusive positions. The four major issues include the following:
reader choice;
inclusion of image, motion, sound;
complexity of network organization;
and, variation in literary elements.
One can modulate how much reader choice to include just as one can include more, or less, sound. The impact of these choices changes the reader’s perception of the text. So, for example, in Mark Bernstein’s and Erin Sweeney’s The Election of 1912 – interactive narrative nonfiction – the context and contiguity changes the bits of information presented. Depending on the reader’s sequencing choices, the database seems much larger than a normal book on the same subject. The perceived extent of the database, and corresponding choices available, can exceed the actual choices. A limited database of choices leads to a more immersive experience. If one seldom needs to “pause and think purposively or collect artifacts,” then one can become immersed in the story space. Too much participation leads to less immersion. In that sense, “the burden of interactivity and the continual necessity to choose directions for movement never allows us to forget we are reading.” You cannot forget you are reading.

XVIII. Implications for Literary Criticism and Rhetoric
Digital forms force literary critics to rethink what, and how, they read, but the process began less than 15 years ago. The first conference on cyberspace, staged in 1990, recognized that electronic cyberspace had not yet appeared. Literary criticism and rhetoric will change to meet the new demands of interactive fiction. Effective literary communication depends on “fixed sequence, definite beginning or end, definite magnitude, and the wholeness of all these.” The new digital forms, like interactive fiction flaunt the lack of all of these characteristics of literary communication. Unfortunately, traditional literary scholars used to study the art of effective communication (literary or otherwise), but now scholars must re-define rhetoric to respond to the changes in communication media (i.e., digital and online forms).
Further, the literary scholar must address the heightened importance of poetic image (over character or plot) produced by the juxtaposition of segments. Also, in this situation, the texts no longer anchor the meaning of graphic design, pictures, and illustrations. With the graphic element freed from text, communication and thinking change dramatically. Rhetoric, the study of the art of effective communication, can no longer privilege single denotative meanings and plots. In digital rhetoric, a literary critic studies suggestive moods, atmospheres, and poetic image.
The new digital forms have unique advantages; for example, they allow for a way to classify a great quantity of information, but the “problem of critical media literacy” is to “avoid translating back into old language” the new forms. A first impulse is to just put print-based forms, with the corresponding literacy, on computers. In that case, literary scholarship does not change, and the primary task of traditional humanities, to fix texts, remains un-disturbed. A more appropriate approach to literary study will use multimedia to produce “bricolage scholarship.” A new task of literary scholars, to recognize felt moods or atmospheres, depends on details, rather than any character’s motivation, that capture the specific reader’s attention. These shifts in literary criticism and rhetoric are contentious and controversial precisely because it forces a change in the established protocols.
The first step in this shift occurs with a shift from work to text. A text is a combination of elements such as a reader’s reaction, other comparable texts, the technologies that deliver the texts, and historical events, not just the physical entity of a work; hence literary critics already talk of a “text” in relation to the social practice and technology of reading rather than a physical work.
When literary studies allows an appreciation of texts, the next step in the shift demands “a new rhetoric and a change to fundamental poetics.” In traditional studies, the critic focused on the themes, plots, and character development expressed through a transparent, unobtrusive, and unselfconscious literary style. The purposefully obtrusive style of interactive fiction (i.e., it requires interactive effort) forces literary studies to seek a new way to read and behave. The humanities might return to a founding text, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, to find a practice appropriate to the new terrain of digital reading. In the practice of sprezzatura (rehearsed spontaneity), readings become performances instead of fixing on definitive documents. Critical editions no longer fix the text, THE “humanistic raison d’être since the Renaissance – it is what literary scholars do.” Instead, literary study functions more like an interactive fiction game in which a critic can add graffiti, graphics, and change past literary texts as well. If literary scholars used to “teach how to read books,” then now its task will include plotting “all the ranges of expressivity now possible without regard to high/low, visual/auditory, iconic or alphabetic.” Rather than eliminate the self-conscious and opaque, literary studies will “plot its prevalence on a continuum.” Using this new literary scholarship, one could read this essay on a self-reflexive continuum (i.e., in terms of sprezzatura), or add comments under each topic, or follows poetic figures that capture the reader’s attention. One could read this essay as an extension of contemporary scholarship employing sprezzatura, or on your own performances (readings).
Besides these new approaches to literary study, one could apply interactive fiction’s solutions back to potential solutions to impasses in literary history. For example, Faulkner’s desire for color to demarcate different sections of The Sound and the Fury, or Melville’s need to include more information about a ship’s operation. Flaubert, if we translated Madame Bovary into digital form, could indicate the changing pace of reading “to capture the change in Emma’s activity from paralysis to frenzied activity.” In these scenarios, the texts change according to readings, and the idea of text and textuality becomes more important. These elements change not only the future of literary criticism and all humanities scholarship, but also the history of literature and the actual literary works. The literary text has already changed and become changeable.

XIX. Mood & Style
Perhaps you choose to walk outside and sit by a fountain—one with those spouts that spray up at random or patterned intervals. You watch the kids stepping on and off the flows determining the course the water (and at least the perception of the fountain’s pattern and timing). The blue water and the workings of the fountain seem apt images for interactive fiction. You randomly choose a page from the lineage of literary criticism about interactive fiction. You feel blue (hasn't the interactive fiction marked the close of the literary). You realize that even the color blue has some metaphoric significance for appreciating the literariness of e-texts, at least in Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue,” and you’ve already read of water as a recurring metaphor for/in hypertext fiction.
You put down this essay; perhaps you’ve marked the pages with highlighter: blue for important phrases, to track down later online, and yellow, for the major issues and arguments. Did you mark the image of the interactive fountain? The image of blue as an argument highlighted in yellow? Perhaps you are reminded of Umberto Eco's "Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language," where he discusses the semiotic quagmire Adam and Eve find themselves confused by. You consider it, but on re-reading it decide making a blue fountain yellow would open too many paths, links, and flows. Frankly, you’ve had enough and consider dropping the course (or decide not to teach interactive fiction as a variant of literary Modernism) or, maybe you haven’t had enough: consider dropping into the bookshop again. You close the book, but keep your index finger stuck in the crease marking the page, while your thumb and ring finger keep the book closed around your improvisational book-marking finger, you run (or skip) toward your rendezvous—or a missed encounter—at the quaint bookshop. Such are the pleasures of reading interactive fiction.
You look again at the title of this article and notice it has changed:
Chapter I:
In Which
Fiction Changes When E-Media Visits

Along this path, dear reader, children’s literature has used stylistic strategies (e.g., asides, comic allusions) to make us aware of the process of reading planting the seeds of interactivity.
Similarly, the fast emerging epistolary genre (i.e., the spam letter begging for financial help or a get rich quick scheme) spreading through email begs for a response. If you got such a letter from this author, it might begin like this:

Dear Reader,
I write to you most-dearest friend, even though I have not made the acquaintance of you [sic – so a friendly editor does not change the style; the awkward phrases and grammar indicate the sincere and innocent tone], in this spam-letter, pleading you for kind assistance to me. Something in the electronic begs a response. In this new genre of electronic literature, the de-familiarizing of the processes of reading will include implicit, subtle, visceral, or explicit pleas for response. Literature always needs a response—you have to read the words for starters—but electronic literature will make that begging for a response strange and new as if learning to read all over again (as IF).

Endnotes

Maggie Cotto- Chapter 1 summary of Hayles

2008-10-18T18:17:00.003-04:00

Here is my summary of Hayles' Electronic Literature, chapter one.

http://macotto.wordpress.com/2008/10/18/cotto_hayleschapter1/cotto_chapter1hayles/

Adam's Post for Hayles Chapter 1

2008-10-13T22:39:00.002-04:00

Hi all,

My summary of Chapter one of Hayles can be found here.

-Adam

jbork Response to Hayles Chapter 1

2008-10-13T19:48:00.001-04:00

tatwork.blogspot.com/2008/10/response-to-chapter-1-of-hayles.html

Lamothe Response to Hayles Ch.1

2008-10-13T17:12:00.001-04:00

Here's my response. -John

Sonia's Hayles post

2008-10-13T14:56:00.002-04:00

Here is my Hayles summary: www.physics.ucf.edu/~yfernandez/shs

Meghan's Summary of Hayles Chapter One

2008-10-13T11:02:00.001-04:00

You can view my summary of Hayles' chapter one here.

--Meghan

Stacey's Hayles Assign III, Part 1

2008-10-13T08:22:00.001-04:00

Hi:

Please visit http://tandtwork.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/diliberto-assign-3-pt-1.pdf to read my outline of Hayles' Electronic Literature, chapter 1. This will fulfill part I of assignment III.

Thanks!

Stacey

e-media

2008-10-10T14:35:00.001-04:00

A former student -- now with a PhD -- Matt Williams -- made this video. He has also written a textbook about teaching media in inner-city LA -- and I have a blurb on the cover!

______________________________

Yo!

Week 3 is up! Check out ADBUSTER -- Illegal billboards serve as giant canvases for Southern California’s graffiti artists.

http://kcet.org/socal/2008/10/ad-busters.html

And feel free to comment on the site!

Matt

Maggie's revised timeline

2008-10-09T22:44:00.002-04:00

I didn't know if we were still expected to revise our timelines, but I did mine just to be safe.

It's here. To view: rotate clockwise, view at 250%.

I really enjoyed working on the Blituri project. Thanks everyone.

http://macotto.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/timeline-revised.pdf

"Blituri" is Now Live!

2008-10-09T12:35:00.001-04:00

To view our collaborative Drucker/McVarish project for Assignment #2, please visit:

http://www.paulczech.com/blituri/index.html

Enjoy!

Assignment Three, part IV

2008-10-07T09:28:00.000-04:00

Assignment Three, part IV [aka Module]
Electronic Literature
ENC 4420/5420-W61
Dr. Saper, Professor

Module 3, part IV: Computational Practice in The History of Texts
Included in this module: Goals; Assignment; Due Dates; Links to Web-site; Assessments; and Grading Rubric. Read this entire module before starting the assignment or asking any questions about the assignment.
Goals:
Students read three more hypertext novels. They also read about these works in terms of computational practice. They read about Kittler’s important historical work and use it to place electronic literature in a complicated historical context. They read John Cayley’s Translation, Brian K. Stefans’ Star Wars, One Letter at a Time. and William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope. And work in relation to that history and context.
These goals correspond to the overall goals of the course: to learn about electronic literature in both its forms and contexts.
Assignment:
Students will read John Cayley’s Translation (1 hour), Brian K. Stefans’ Star Wars, One Letter at a Time. and William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope (both up to 2 hours; reading only).
Students will examine both the novels and readings of the novels. The time commitment for the reading alone is 5+ hours for this assignment.
1. Read Hayles’ Electronic Literature, pp. 131-159.
2. Read John Cayley’s Translation (1 hour), Brian K. Stefans’ Star Wars, One Letter at a Time. and William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope (both up to 2 hours; reading only).
3. Please note: the hypertext works do not have page numbers; so, I have supplied you with an estimate of size and the approximate time needed to read these works.
4. Describe in your notes how you read these works, and relate how Hayles, in specific terms, read these works.
5. Write a clear and concise 1250 word essay on your conclusions – jam packed with information and avoiding wordiness. In your conclusions, specifically discuss how computational practice fits into the history of texts and literature. Discuss with very specific details from the hypertext works, Hayles’, and your own, reading experience. What is the historical context for this type of work in terms of changes to the importance of computational practice in literacy and text production?

Due Dates:
Include this part of the module in your overall Module and Assignment 3. Turn the entire project in by the due date. This will give you an opportunity to ask questions about the assignment and make revisions. No late projects accepted, no exceptions.

Where: Post the finished assignment to the blog, but post a draft to a discussion on the course site. Since everyone gets credit for helping (and you can help more than one of your peers each assignment) you will find someone to give you suggestions for improvement. If you cannot offer any suggestions, then you might want to consider an alternative to academia.

Assessments:
Content: Do the materials include the following elements:
A. full name of student and helper(s)
C. description of reading experience (yours and others).
D. description of details from lexias and general plot lines and themes. Also describe how the readings relate to historical change in texts and literacy. Relate everything to historical changes to the value of computational practice in text production.
Form: Did the student include the following technical aspects?
A. turned-in the project in electronic form on the blog
B. prose contains no grammatical, stylistic, or typographical errors
The grader [in this case Professor Saper] will study the essay (including the prose), and ask the following questions.
1. Does this material present a clear representation of the student's thinking about Hayles and the novels, the contexts for reading these works, and how these works fit in a larger history?
2. Did the student have interesting insights about these novels and Hayles’s description of historical changes especially in terms of computational practice?
3. Were the insights expressed clearly? Did the student modify their time-lines to reflect the new information?
4. Is the essay interesting, unique, expressive, and informative?

Grading Rubric:
Passing Grade (in the D range): fulfilled number one in the assessment.
Adequate Grade (in the C range): fulfilled one and two in the assessment.
Good Grade (in the B range): fulfilled numbers one through three in the assessment.
Excellent Grade (in the A range): fulfilled all of the four criteria in the assessment.

Assignment Three, part III

2008-10-06T09:13:00.000-04:00

Assignment Three, part III [aka Module]
Electronic Literature
ENC 4420/5420-W61
Dr. Saper, Professor

Module 3, part III: Historical Context for Electronic Literature
Included in this module: Goals; Assignment; Due Dates; Links to Web-site; Assessments; and Grading Rubric. Read this entire module before starting the assignment or asking any questions about the assignment.
Goals:
Students read hypertext novels. They also read about the historical contexts of these works. They read about Kittler’s important historical work and use it to place electronic literature in a complicated historical context. They read Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia (2+ hours) work in relation to that history and context.
These goals correspond to the overall goals of the course: to learn about electronic literature in both its forms and contexts.
Assignment:
Students will read Hayles paying close attention to her explication of Kittler’s work. They will read the large and demanding work by Talan Memmott, Lexia to Perplexia (2+ hours).
Students will examine both Memmott’s novel and a reading of the novel. The time commitment for the reading alone is 3+ hours for this assignment.
1. Read Hayles’ Electronic Literature, pp. 87-131.
2. Read Talan Memmott, Lexia to Perplexia (2+ hours).
3. Please note: the hypertext works do not have page numbers; so, I have supplied you with an estimate of size and the approximate time needed to read Memmott’s work.
4. Describe in your notes how you read Memmott, and relate how Kittler, in general terms, and Hayles, in specific terms, read this work.
5. Write a clear and concise 1250 word essay on your conclusions – jam packed with information and avoiding wordiness. In your conclusions, specifically discuss how Kittler’s history might place electronic literature in the history of texts and technological change. Discuss with very specific details from the hypertext work, Hayles’, and your own, reading experience. What is the historical context for this type of work?

Due Dates:
Include this part of the module in your overall Module and Assignment 3. Turn the entire project in by the due date. This will give you an opportunity to ask questions about the assignment and make revisions. No late projects accepted, no exceptions.

Where: Post the finished assignment to the blog, but post a draft to a discussion on the course site. Since everyone gets credit for helping (and you can help more than one of your peers each assignment) you will find someone to give you suggestions for improvement. If you cannot offer any suggestions, then you might want to consider an alternative to academia.

Assessments:
Content: Do the materials include the following elements:
A. full name of student and helper(s)
C. description of reading experience (yours and others).
D. description of details from lexias and general plot lines and themes. Also describe how the readings relate to historical change in texts and literacy. Relate everything to Kittler’s historical studies.
Form: Did the student include the following technical aspects?
A. turned-in the project in electronic form on the blog
B. prose contains no grammatical, stylistic, or typographical errors
The grader [in this case Professor Saper] will study the essay (including the prose), and ask the following questions.
1. Does this material present a clear representation of the student's thinking about Memmott, Kittler, and Hayles, the contexts for reading these works, and how these works fit in a larger history?
2. Did the student have interesting insights about Memmott’s work and Kittler’s description of historical changes?
3. Were the insights expressed clearly? Did the student modify their time-lines to reflect the new information?
4. Is the essay interesting, unique, expressive, and informative?

Grading Rubric:
Passing Grade (in the D range): fulfilled number one in the assessment.
Adequate Grade (in the C range): fulfilled one and two in the assessment.
Good Grade (in the B range): fulfilled numbers one through three in the assessment.
Excellent Grade (in the A range): fulfilled all of the four criteria in the assessment.

Read and Respond to Chapter One of Hayles

2008-10-05T21:18:00.003-04:00

All you need to do by next Monday is read and respond to chapter one of Hayles. It will keep you engaged -- I know you probably will want to turn to other distractions -- I want to keep you focused on the most ambitious part of the course that will take all of October.

So for next Monday -- or perhaps next Thursday [since I think we pushed the dues date a bit -- am I correct?] ...

1. Read Hayles’ Electronic Literature, Chapter one [for part 1 of assignment].
2. Take notes.
3. Look at your notes, find patterns, and add your own research.
4. Outline Hayles’ argument.
5. Write a clear and concise 500 word essay on chapter one – jam packed with information and avoiding wordiness.
Due Dates:
Post the final project by week ten of the semester, but start reading chapter one, take notes, and post just the 500 word essay [1-2 pages] by next Monday October 13, 2008.

Correction to Due Date, Apologies

2008-10-05T20:51:00.002-04:00

Thanks to John B. for noticing the error in the due date. Obviously, that date is incorrect. I think you were to do some of the parts now and some later. I wanted to post the entire module now so that you would have about a month to work on it.

The work for module 3 is not due until the end of October or the beginning of November [I'll have to check my calendar to figure out when week ten falls].

Assignment Three, part II

2008-10-04T08:39:00.000-04:00

Here is the second part of assignment three.

Assignment Three, part II [aka Module]
Electronic Literature
ENC 4420/5420-W61
Dr. Saper, Professor

Module 3, part II: Intermediation
Included in this module: Goals; Assignment; Due Dates; Links to Web-site; Assessments; and Grading Rubric. Read this entire module before starting the assignment or asking any questions about the assignment.
Goals:
Students read a hypertext novel. They learn how to read this type of work, and they learn why this particular novel is significant in literary studies. The students learn why many consider Michael Joyce’s Afternoon a classic work in modernist or postmodernist literature, and why it was included in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Literature. Students also read important hypertext novels.
These goals correspond to the overall goals of the course: to learn about electronic literature in both its forms and contexts.
Assignment:
Students will read two works by Michael Joyce [or just Twelve Blue, if Afternoon not available]. They will also read Judd Morissey’s The Jew’s Daughter (2+ hours), Maria Mencia, Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs (1/2 to 1 hour). They will learn why these works count as literature. Students will examine both the novels and readings of the novels. The time commitment for the reading alone is 8 hours for this assignment.
1. Read Hayles’ Electronic Literature, pp. 43-87. Read a description and guide to reading Michael Joyce’s Afternoon by Jill Walker at http://jilltxt.net/txt/afternoon.html
2. Read Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue and Afternoon [if available]. [one to two hours and two hours respectively]. Read Judd Morissey’s The Jew’s Daughter (2+ hours), Maria Mencia, Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs (1/2 to 1 hour).
3. Please note: these works do not have page numbers; so, I have supplied you with an estimate of size and the approximate time needed to read these works.
4. Describe in your notes how you read these works, and relate how Walker and Hayles read these works.
5. Write a clear and concise 1250 word essay on your conclusions – jam packed with information and avoiding wordiness. In your conclusions, specifically discuss how this type of reading fits in the history of texts and technological change. Discuss with very specific details from the works, Hayles, Walker, and your own reading experience how literacy and reading have changed or might change in the future. Include, when these changes occurred in your overall diachronic analysis, and insert these changes and new hypertext and hypermedia novels in your time-line.
Due Dates:
Include this part of the module in your overall Module and Assignment 3. Turn the entire project in by the due date. This will give you an opportunity to ask questions about the assignment and make revisions. No late projects accepted, no exceptions.

Where: Post the finished assignment to the blog, but post a draft to a discussion on the course site. Since everyone gets credit for helping (and you can help more than one of your peers each assignment) you will find someone to give you suggestions for improvement. If you cannot offer any suggestions, then you might want to consider an alternative to academia.

Assessments:
Content: Do the materials include the following elements:
A. full name of student and helper(s)
C. description of reading experience (yours and others).
D. description of details from lexias and general plot lines and themes. Also describe how the readings relates to historical change in texts and literacy.
Form: Did the student include the following technical aspects?
A. turned-in the project in electronic form on the blog
B. prose contains no grammatical, stylistic, or typographical errors
The grader [in this case Professor Saper] will study the essay (including the prose), and ask the following questions.
1. Does this material present a clear representation of the student's thinking about Joyce’s works, the contexts for reading these works, and how these works fit in a larger history?
2. Did the student have interesting insights about the hypertext work and historical changes to literacy?
3. Were the insights expressed clearly? Did the student modify their time-lines to reflect the new information?
4. Is the essay interesting, unique, expressive, and informative?

Grading Rubric:
Passing Grade (in the D range): fulfilled number one in the assessment.
Adequate Grade (in the C range): fulfilled one and two in the assessment.
Good Grade (in the B range): fulfilled numbers one through three in the assessment.
Excellent Grade (in the A range): fulfilled all of the four criteria in the assessment.

2008-10-03T08:09:00.001-04:00

Assignment Three [aka Module], Part I
Texts and Technology in History
ENC 6801-W61
Dr. Saper, Professor

Module 3: Historical Context for Electronic Texts
Included in this module: Goals; Assignment; Due Dates; Links to Web-site; Assessments; and Grading Rubric. Read this entire module before starting the assignment or asking any questions about the assignment.
Goals:
Students learn how to place a survey of electronic literature in the historical context of diachronic changes to texts in relation to technology.
These goals correspond to the overall goals of the course: to learn about the history of texts and technology in history using digital modes of communication.
Assignment:
Students will learn about the major historical modes of communication and cultural memory relate to new electronic forms of literature:
1. Read Hayles’ Electronic Literature, Chapter one [for part 1 of assignment].
2. Take notes.
3. Look at your notes, find patterns, and add your own research.
4. Outline Hayles’ argument.
5. Write a clear and concise 500 word essay on chapter one – jam packed with information and avoiding wordiness.
Due Dates:
Post the final project by week ten of the semester, but start reading chapter one, take notes, and post just the 500 word essay [1-2 pages] by next Monday October 13, 2008. This will give you an opportunity to ask questions about the assignment and make revisions. No late projects accepted, no exceptions.

Where: Post the finished assignment to the blog, but post a draft to a discussion on the course site. Since everyone gets credit for helping (and you can help more than one of your peers each assignment) you will find someone to give you suggestions for improvement. If you cannot offer any suggestions, then you might want to consider an alternative to academia.

Assessments:
Content: Do the materials include the following:
A. full name of author and helper(s)
C. at least three definitions, arguments, and stories learned from chapter one of Hayles (please do not plagiarize).
Form: Did the student include the following technical aspects?
A. turned-in the project in electronic form
B. prose contains no grammatical, stylistic, or typographical errors
Grader will study the materials (including the design).
1. Does this material present a clear representation of the student's thinking about both Hayles argument and sense of history?
2. Did the student have interesting insights about Hayles especially in terms of Ong?
3. Were the insights expressed clearly?
4. Is the essay interesting, unique, expressive, and informative?

Grading Rubric:
Passing Grade (in the D range): fulfilled number one in the assessment.
Adequate Grade (in the C range): fulfilled one and two in the assessment.
Good Grade (in the B range): fulfilled numbers one through three in the assessment.
Excellent Grade (in the A range): fulfilled all of the four criteria in the assessment

Texts in e-Tech and e-crit

2008-09-22T10:31:00.005-04:00

Of course, the e-crit is a pun (see O'Gorman, E-Crit, U Toronto Press) on Derrida's ecriture [literally writing, but also that which mediates between message and reader, and how that ecrit has its own initiatives and visual non-phonetic non-logocentric paths] and on electronic critique. The question for us, how to appreciate the history of graphic design as a way to understand media-forms [oral, literate, electronic] historically and in terms of scholarly critical work. How will writing proceed as electronic forms now inflect even non-electronic forms? If scholarship must respond to, apprehend, and shape electronic forms, then what lessons does the history of graphic design offer us? What warnings? What clues? What paths to follow? Finally, if the issue is about the mediation [not some mistaken and over-simplified notion of sender/receiver], then how does design function over time, in the historical context, and with what specific elements? More importantly, Drucker/McVarish ask us to look in detail at concrete instances in an historical context -- it is that work that will make up the core of any study of texts and technology. Please comment and not sure where the conversation has shifted now -- to the webcourses site? offline? in person? or to other classes and concerns?

Drucker in context

2008-09-20T18:11:00.006-04:00

Good e-vening, whatever time it is, I wanted to give you a very brief context on Johanna Drucker and on why we might include this history of graphic design textbook in our T&T course. First, Drucker has taught at Yale, University of Virginia, and a few other Universities; and, she is about to start at UCLA. She was an endowed Chair at UVa and worked closely with Jerome McGann there McGann, as some of you know, is a leader in digital humanities as well as literary studies [not just in one period, but multiple], and one of his many books is on the required reading list for T&T's exam list. Drucker began her illustrious career as an artist's book printer and designer. Her work is considered important in that area, and then she went on to start publishing histories of artists' books and visual poetry. She became the most important scholar in that area, and then started working more generally on information arts, and started to make the connection between artists' books and experiments in printing to new media. Her Chair at UVa was in New Media Studies. Her new position at UCLA is in Library Science. This year she is at Stanford U. I suspect from her new position she will begin to publish about digital archiving and the connection with book arts.

Why include a book artist and art historian in our course? The reason should be clear. She makes the historical lineage from the artists books and graphic design through electronic design. We live in an era when information, knowledge, and even trivial communication depends on graphic design for its expressive meaning not merely as ornamentation.

When I first came to UCF to design the doctoral program, we really did not have the pieces of the puzzle because T&T is such a new field with an emerging set of concerns and a history that is unfolding as we try to write its history.

We had the history of T&T as it relates to modes of communication (Ong, Havelock, and others), but we did not have the specific critical history to place the text. So, one could become easily confused that there was an unproblematic and simple relationship between neutral design and textual message. One could imagine that a message should limit the design to a supposedly clear unobstructed view of a given-pre-designed message. We need to remind ourselves regularly that there are problems with that argument, and that we cannot step outside history to produce a pure undesigned message.

Drucker/McVarish present a specific and detailed description of how design is not simply ornamental to messages.

The best response will be equally specific, detailed, concrete, and aware of the design as an expressive message.

If the work is as strong as module 1's then we might want to talk about publishing the results.

A Student Project to Look over

2008-09-17T14:00:00.002-04:00

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~da344953/

This is a student website from my undergraduate course on Digital Rhetoric.

It is the undergraduate version of module 1, and also speaks to other issues.

Enjoy

Module 2

2008-09-11T20:40:00.005-04:00

All good suggestions.

Please modify the module. Make your presentation follow the design of a magazine/newsletter -- WIRED a fine model or a newsletter. If you are familiar with McLuhan, then you might want to take a look at some of his experimental works like The Medium is The Massage that borrows from print advertising to discuss the networked world and how it will change the sensorium as well as rhetoric [the art of effective communication]. I know at least one of you is familiar with McLuhan, but if you are not, then please take a look at his work.

Instead of focusing on one chapter, please focus on one issue that strikes you as significant in the social history of graphic design. It can be something concrete like the use of writing tools or mechanisms or something more abstract like identity or time or space/place.

You might focus more on some chapters than others, but it is the themes and details that run through the entire history that I am interested in examining.

OK?

[btw, I was waiting for everyone to respond with an email to me about module 1 before I started to respond back in a trickle ... but now I think I might have left a few hanging waiting for everyone. So, write me again [if I haven't talked w/ you on email about module 1] or write me for the first time.]

Module Two Proposal

2008-09-08T08:43:00.003-04:00

Please look at this sample of a potential way to post the work collaboratively, but with everyone doing their own work.

Paul Czech has suggested a newspaper format.

http://www.paulczech.com/t&tTimes/

What I would like now is to collect your ideas about what you can contribute (e.g., a 1250 word article on the ideas to focus on from module 2; an equivalent comic strip on the ideas to address in module 2; an equivalent advertisement; a video; or something else).

I would like to appoint Paul Czech as the technical editor, but we also need an editor and compiler of the issue -- looking for volunteers. Also, if you have some hidden talents, then let us know.

This is meant to be a way to graphically [or electronically] express complicated ideas about texts and technology in history.

OK, Go Slow Media

2008-09-06T19:57:00.005-04:00

I only heard comments from three of you about the video blog idea. Those three were thrilled, and recommended that the rest of the class do all the difficult technical work [hahaha -- just half-joking]. They were scared. So, we'll wait -- but I do want to investigate electronic forms of representation [electronic representation in terms of Ong's schema]. I'm less concerned with technical skills, but wonder if we can begin to think of the writing as analogous to this second-orality. To consider the presentation of your work in terms of a change in the way we communicate? We no longer live in a culture dominated by print-based sensorium [print used as Ong uses it].

Only one of you has sent me a brief line or two on your intention in assignment one and what you accomplished, but nothing fancy needed -- just a sense that you thought about presentation [in terms of Ong and grammatology] as much as the content.

What I looked for in the projects was three columns [or the mention of three systems]. Beyond that I looked for a level of detail and nuance that would quickly and easily give the user a sense of what each of those three systems entail in terms of production, consumtion, and even in terms of identity formation. What I looked for in the time-line was a sense that you fully and completely appreciated key moments in the development of these systems and in the overlap of the systems. So, even now we have many oral cultural traditions thriving: learning to cook, praying or talking-in-tongues, singing, and more. Obviously, the dominant forms inflect [infect] everything, and I wanted the time-lines to express this intermingling as well as the development of each of the three systems.

Beyond that I want you to express the information using aspects from each of the systems -- well, especially the electronic system.

As you can surely witness yourselves, your classmates have set the bar very high. We should collect this work in a public place and allow other T&T students to study it and cite it -- certainly it would be useful for undergraduates and even K-12 students.

More soon. Why is it that the blog, email, etc. leads back to the epistlery or e-pistle?

Thanks

2008-09-05T07:50:00.003-04:00

I've had a chance to look over all of the projects. I studied some of the projects during the day on Thursday multiple times. Amazing work. You should study each other's projects carefully. The level of design in some of the projects is remarkable, and the projects offer a copious summary of Ong's work and much more above and beyond the assignment's requirements. Individual evaluations will follow in email -- perhaps you can write to me with your self-evaluation -- not saying good or bad, but talking about what you intended and what you accomplished. In the meantime, please look through these remarkable projects. Thanks.

Those of you who are teaching now might think about how we could use these projects to appeal to students who very well might live most of the time in an electronic-orality. We might also think about how these projects could teach my colleagues who really have no idea of our doctoral program's focus, or why we should study technological change in terms of literacy, communication, or identity formation. You have gone far in answering that question in pithy and delightful ways. Congratulations.

Adam Fields - Assignment One (Ong)

2008-09-04T21:53:00.002-04:00

Hello all,

Here are the links to my timeline and charts. I've confirmed that everything works in both Firefox and Safari, but let me know if you have another browser and I'll make the necessary arrangements.

Adam Fields - Ong Timeline

Adam Fields - Ong Chart

I had loftier designs on the timeline (but couldn't learn the html to execute them), but I'm happy with how it turned out.

Maggie Cotto: Ong Module 1

2008-09-04T21:28:00.002-04:00

Hi everyone,

All files are in pdf format. To view the timeline: right click> rotate clockwise> view at 150%. The chart and works cited pages should be straightforward. Thanks to John B., Sonia and Paul.

http://macotto.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/ongtimeline.pdf

http://macotto.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/ongmodule1mc.pdf

http://macotto.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/ongworkscited2.pdf

John Lamothe's Module 1

2008-09-04T21:15:00.002-04:00

Here's my timeline and chart. Thanks to Paul and Sonia for the tremendous help.

The links should be live with the timeline. The video clips of McLuhan and Derrida are especially interesting in my opinion.

I posted the chart as both a Photoshop JPEG. Please let me know if there are problems viewing it in a larger format.

John L.

John Bork: Visual Translation Assignment

2008-09-04T19:31:00.003-04:00

Sonia's Ong assignment

2008-09-04T11:58:00.002-04:00

Here are my chart and timeline. Thanks to those who helped!

Chart: www.paulczech.com/Stephens/Sonia_Ong_chart.pdf

Timeline: www.paulczech.com/Stephens/Sonia_Ong_timeline.pdf

You'll probably have to view them online, rather than printing them, because of the page size.

Sonia

Paul Czech: Assignment 1

2008-09-04T11:21:00.002-04:00

Hi all,

Here are links to my work...I really enjoyed working on this project!

Paul's Timeline

Paul's Chart

Also, thanks to all those who helped...John, Stacey, Meghan and Sonia... :-)

Paul

Meghan's Ong Assignment

2008-09-04T10:07:00.003-04:00

Good morning! Please see the links below for my Ong project. Documents were created in Excel and Word and then converted to pdf's and uploaded to a Wordpress blog.

Meghan's Chart

Meghan's Timeline

Works Cited

Enjoy!

Stacey's Ong Assignment

2008-09-04T08:26:00.002-04:00

Hi Everyone:

Without further ado, here is my Ong project. I made the timeline using MS Excel and the flow chart was created with MS Word (then converted to PDF). I had a difficult time uploading my timeline into a blog, but thankfully Paul Czech uploaded my work onto his server. The links are below.

http://www.paulczech.com/DiLiberto/OngChart.pdf

http://www.paulczech.com/DiLiberto/OngTimeline.xls

http://www.paulczech.com/DiLiberto/OngWorksCited.pdf

Hope you enjoy what I have put together. I hope I did Ong's work a bit of justice. I enjoyed this assignment and learned several new "techy" skills that I will hold dear (one, making a timeline using Excel)!

Many thanks to Paul C. and Meghan G. for their comments and feedback over the week. I hope I returned the favor. Many thanks as well to Sonia for the PDF suggestion on our discussion forum. While I didn't get a chance to try your suggestion out, I'll keep it in mind for the next time.

Best,

Stacey

Blog, Webcourses Site, and E-Mail

2008-09-04T08:22:00.001-04:00

Please remember to check the blog regularly -- at least once a day. I change posts and assignments, add new posts with required or strongly suggested readings, and ask for feedback.

Your comments about module 1 in the discussions here are very impressive -- and I haven't even seen the time-lines and charts that you are discussing.

I am hesistant to set-up email here, and if you have a question just for me [e.g., you've won the lotto and want to share the funds with your teachers], then send those to my email. If you have a question that others would benefit from reading and answering, then post it to these discussions.

I think it is important that you start sharing your email addresses among yourselves -- that's how you will communicate with most of your colleagues for future publications -- not using webmail.

I am currently co-editing two volumes, and one co-editor lives in Kamloops British Columbia Canada, the other lives in NH and works in Boston. On another project, the co-editor lives in Barcelona and we are working with a Press in Copenhagen. Another project I'm working on the editors live in Milwaukee.

Once you all become professors or professionals, you will no doubt communicate with me online.

Will that change the sensorium, way we communicate, and our identity formation? What would Ong say? What would Drucker say about the graphic design as a medium -- neutral, natural, or no effect on the content?

I'll post this to the blog as well as to the course discussions inside webcourses.

Looking Forward to First Assignments

2008-09-03T23:59:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow our blog will be filled with time-lines (diachronic analysis) and charts (synchronic analysis) on Walter Ong.

Please also remember to include the name of the person(s) who gave you comments on your time-line and charts as a draft. About half of you used the webcourses, and the other half used some other means.

After you hand-in the assignments electronically on the blog, please scroll down to the last handful of blog entries if you have not already. Especially, comment on the entry below that asks for comments. I am strongly leaning toward having part of the next module or maybe a future module delivered as a blog-report in the style of rocketboom.com or another video-blog. I don't want to scare anyone; so, I am also thinking that perhaps you could collaborate? And, perhaps we could wait to module 3?

I've been re-reading McVarish/Drucker and enjoying it; I think it is a good model for a history of texts and technology. I am thinking that your blog reports would be as if you were teachers [and many -- perhaps most -- of you already are teachers] of this history of text design textbook. The goal here is to allow you to become teachers; my role is guide, quiet analyzer, and exemplar. You might want to search for my video experiments online ... Outside In ... at least one of you knows a quick-link to it.

Assignment 2

2008-09-01T14:38:00.000-04:00

Texts and Technology in History
ENC 6801-W61
Dr. Saper, Professor

Module 2: History of Text Design Systems
Included in this module: Goals; Assignment; Due Dates; Links to Web-site; Assessments; and Grading Rubric. Read this entire module before starting the assignment or asking any questions about the assignment.
Goals:
Students learn about the history of text design systems or graphemes. They learn about a critical scholarly approach to the topic.
These goals correspond to the overall goals of the course: to learn about the history of texts and technology in .
Assignment:
Students will learn about the major historical modes of communication and cultural memory:
1. Read Drucker & McVarish.
2. Take notes [self-consciously thinking about note taking in terms of the history described in the textbook].
3. Make lists of dates, names, place names, details, and other historical information to fill-in your existing time-lines.
4. Make a list of technologies and historical events that have actually impacted your experience of literacy and those tools, technologies, and approaches to text production and graphic design that do not have any impact on your textual-world.
5. Look at your notes, find patterns, and add your own research.
6. Write a 1250 word essay that summarizes Drucker & McVarish’s argument. Place the argument in the context of Ong’s work.
7. Use information from the Drucker & McVarish assignment to fill-in areas of your charts and time-lines.
Due Dates:
Post your essay by Thursday, October 9, 2008. This will give you an opportunity to ask questions about the assignment and make revisions. No late projects accepted, no exceptions.

Where: Post the finished assignment to the blog, but post a draft to a discussion on the course site. Since everyone gets credit for helping (and you can help more than one of your peers each assignment) you will find someone to give you suggestions for improvement. If you cannot offer any suggestions, then you might want to consider an alternative to academia.
.
Assessments:
Content: Do the materials include the following:
A. full name of author and helper(s)
C. at least 10 definitions, arguments, or stories learned from the Drucker & McVarish book (please do not plagiarize).
D. use Drucker & McVarish’s history to fill-in your charts and time-lines.
Form: Did the student include the following technical aspects?
A. correct grammar, style, and typographical care
B. student’s name
Grader will study the materials (including the design).
1. Does this material present a clear representation of the student's thinking about both Drucker & McVarish’s argument and sense of history?
2. Did the student have interesting insights about Drucker & McVarish?
3. Were the insights illuminated in the essay and visual charts and time-lines?
4. Are the materials interesting, unique, expressive, and informative?

Grading Rubric:
Passing Grade (in the D range): fulfilled number one in the assessment.
Adequate Grade (in the C range): fulfilled one and two in the assessment.
Good Grade (in the B range): fulfilled numbers one through three in the assessment.
Excellent Grade (in the A range): fulfilled all of the four criteria in the assessment.

Options for Module 2

2008-09-01T07:40:00.000-04:00

For the assignment on Drucker/McVarish [module 2], please consider delivering your work as a video-blog post. A potential model for this type of delivery is http://www.rocketboom.com

Of course, I have not [yet] included this possibility in the module 2. Let me know what you think in the comments section of this post.

Drucker, context

2008-09-01T07:20:00.000-04:00

Art Journal: Artists' Books: The Book As A Work of Art, 1963-1995. - book reviews 6/1/08 11:30 PM
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_n3_v56/ai_20377607/print Page 1 of 3
FindArticles > Art Journal > Fall, 1997 > Article > Print friendly
Artists' Books: The Book As A Work of Art, 1963-1995. - book reviews
Buzz Spector
The 1985 publication of Joan Lyons's Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook was the first in-depth compilation of
critical writings on the modern emergence of the book as work of art. That same year Anne Moeglin-Delcroix organized Livres
d'artistes at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, an equally comprehensive exhibition and catalogue of the form. It seemed then, to
artists working with the book as subject and object, that the genre had emerged as a legitimate field for serious critical and historical
assessment. The first large book and exhibition would surely be followed-and quickly - by others, marking the movement of the field
from the margins of the art world toward its center. Indeed, in his preface to the Lyons anthology, Dick Higgins claims that artists'
books are "a form which is not, per se, new, but whose 'time has come.'" The quotation marks in this appraisal are subtle evidence of
a doubt Higgins had about his pronouncement but couldn't discuss in such hortatory circumstances.
That cautionary skepticism appears to have been well-placed, if the subsequent bibliography of the history and criticism of artists'
books is a criterion. Ten years would pass before the publication of another substantial volume on the subject, Johanna Drucker's The
Century of Artists' Books, in 1995. A second book, Stephen Bury's Artists' Books: The Book as a Work of Art, 1963-1995, appeared a
year later. These two new studies offer histories of the genre and make critical distinctions between artists' books and such related
objects as livres d'artistes, volumes of concrete poetry, and artistically embellished found books.
In his preface, Bury wastes no time revealing the predilections he brings to artists' books: "I will simply admit my bias: that my
approach is an unhappy mixture of formalism (Shlovsky's as much as Greenberg's) and functionalism; I have a liking for minimalism
and conceptual art; I dislike artist's books that owe more to a cottage industry tradition than to a need for an artist to explore the
book form" (xv).
A librarian at Chelsea College of Art and Design, where he also teaches modern art history and theory, Bury reveals his experience in
collection cataloguing in his succinct introductory definition of artists' books: "Artists' books are books or book-like objects, over the
final appearance of which an artist has had a high degree of control; where the book is intended as a work of art in itself. They are not
books of reproductions of an artist's work, about an artist, or with just a text or illustrations by an artist" (1). While acknowledging
the practical breakdown of his definition in the face of challenges by individual artists, these prefatory affinities guide his choice of
significant artists' books for the chronology that occupies the greater part of this volume.
Following seven brief chapters elucidating an historical and critical compass for his selection, Bury offers some useful suggestions
about how to develop and manage a collection of artists' books. Here his librarianship comes forth, as in his discussion of cataloguing
as a means of identifying the work and its variations: "This can be schematized as a three-level hierarchy: at the top is the 'work,' in
the middle the edition, and at the bottom, the individual copy, although with some books all three stages are collapsed into one or the
middle or last stage might be missing" (26).
Bury makes no claims that his list, of around six hundred titles, is comprehensive. Even so, there are some surprising omissions here,
notably among French artists making books. One finds no mention of Martine Aballea, Sophie Calle, Claude Closky, Paul-Armand
Gette, Pascal Kem, or Francois Morellet (Moeglin-Delcroix's catalogue is also missing from the general bibliography). Despite Bury's
taste for the book as concept, the California branch of Conceptualism and Neo-Conceptualism has been trimmed, too. John
Baldessari and Douglas Huebler are present, as expected, but missing are Meg Cranston, John Knight, Stephen Prina, and
Christopher Williams; in addition, only a single work by Michael Asher, mentor to all four, is included. Keith Smith and Philip
Zimmerman, two of the most inventive makers of book structures, are absent as well, although Smith's several reference books are
included in the bibliography. The photographs of individual page-spreads or book covers don't add much information, either, though
Art Journal: Artists' Books: The Book As A Work of Art, 1963-1995. - book reviews 6/1/08 11:30 PM
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_n3_v56/ai_20377607/print Page 2 of 3
they are at least printed in larger size than the usual thumbnails in other references
In The Century of Artists' Books, Johanna Drucker hesitates to fix the status of her subject, offering this introductory demurral: "It's
easy enough to state that an artists' book is a book created as an original work of art rather than a reproduction of an existing work.
And also, that it is a book which integrates the formal means of its realization and production with its thematic or aesthetic issues
However, this definition raises more questions than it answers" (2). Drucker proposes instead "a zone of activity," within which a
broad range of creative work related to the book's forms, uses, and meanings can be understood by the term "artists' books" She
differentiates these activities from the tradition of the livre d'artiste, whose technical virtuosity and material opulence are armatures
within which the artist's work is isolated for specific delectation by the book's readers Drucker is more accepting of the relationship
between concrete poetry and artists' books, noting that the "ways in which concrete poets have been able to extend the parameters of
what a book does as a verbal field . . . also extends the [ways] an artists' book can function as a poetic text" (10). She also
distinguishes between artists' books and book objects - a distinction to which this reviewer paid special attention since a work of his
is assessed as an example of the latter - calling attention to how the character of a specific book's identity is understood separately
from the symbolically charged use of the book form. She places the "book-like object" within "the realm of sculpture, where [it] loses
its functional identity as a book and becomes a formal and metaphoric icon" (362).
If Drucker's taxonomy is less than rigorous, her history of the form is very thorough. She locates the artists' book, in all of its
multitudinous aspects, within every significant modern movement and draws on an extensive bibliography of scholarly references to
reveal the philosophical and artistic connections among the several emerging avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century.
As both an art historian and a book artist, Drucker brings a unique combination of historical knowledge and practical experience to
her writing. While her scholarship is certainly competent, her technical expertise serves her better in identifying the relationships
between various vanguardist ideologies and the physical characteristics of the books they produced She is a true enthusiast when she
discloses this understanding in analyzing a particular work's historical significance, as in her discussion of Gelett Burgess's 1896 Le
petit journal des refusees:
A small format work, about nine inches on its longest side, Le Petit Journal ... was printed on outmoded wallpaper, in a trapezoidal
format, with all the images and text produced through woodcuts. The cover of this journal displays the characteristic style of the work
(an inelegant imitation of Aubrey Beardsley) put at the service of broad satire.... The originality of the piece, a sixteen-page delirium,
filled with patterns of Burgess's "goops" as well as such inventions as plaid hippopotamuses and cubical suns, was evidence of its
rapid execution - done in a month of rapid work, in a single burst of energy.
... Even at the distance of a full century, the work is visually striking (the sinewy lines of its imitation Beardsley drawings combining
with innovative patterns - though the thrust of its literary labs may be blunted by time, their specific targets obscured, the volume
functions as a thing unto itself, replete and redolent with spirit, energy, and ideas. (32)
The first four chapters of The Century of Artists' Books are primarily concerned with charting a history of the form, as well as
identifying the social and philosophical issues with which it has been engaged The remaining ten chapters map Drucker's cosmos of
the contemporary artists' book. Her "dual-citizenship" as historian and practitioner emphatically enriches the analysis of the works in
these chapters, which deal with the book as both a physical structure and a mode of communication.
Drucker's criticism of a number of artists better known for work in other media, such as Marcel Broodthaers or Sol LeWitt,
emphasizes the importance of the book within their larger artistic interests. Her analyses of Broodthaers's Un coup de des (image)
(1969), or LeWitt's Autobiography (1980), offer unexpected insight into the importance of narrative and sequence to these seminal
Conceptualists. Drucker can also bring a wry and erotic wit to her discussion. Read her view of Ida Applebroog's But I Wasn't There,
an offset book of drawings from 1979:
[T]he image is of a woman sitting in her bed. Applebroog's graphic style is somewhere between a cartoon and a caricature, a biting
drawing and a bland one. The figure in the bed just sits. The single image does not change, but is repeated through one turn after
Art Journal: Artists' Books: The Book As A Work of Art, 1963-1995. - book reviews 6/1/08 11:30 PM
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_n3_v56/ai_20377607/print Page 3 of 3
drawing and a bland one. The figure in the bed just sits. The single image does not change, but is repeated through one turn after
another Then there is a blank spread and the comment, "But I wasn't there" This is followed by several more turns showing the
image, another blank spread, and a final restatement of "But I wasn't there." ... The repetition in this work makes the sequence a
rapid one - the pages can be turned quickly, in search of a resolution. But the resolution does not come, it is, in fact, embedded in the
very repetition which seems to move so rapidly towards an end. (260-61)
Describing, discussing, and analyzing almost three hundred contemporary artists' books, Drucker reveals the wealth of affective
characteristics within the field. Even so, some of the same omissions that Bury makes occur here. Again, many recent French and
Italian book artists are missing (although she does mention Paul-Armand Gette's work), as are the California Conceptualists besides
Baldessari and Huebler. Gerhard Richter is also absent, even though his 128 Details from a Picture (1980) is as meaningful a critique
of the limitations of photographic documentation, and of the exhibition catalogue, as any bookwork ever published. Although the
many reproductions in Drucker's book are quite small, her inclusion of multiple page-spreads from many works allows at least a
glimpse at how sequence functions in the books she discusses.
Drucker's work transcends its minor problems, though, through the expansiveness of its references and its deeply felt engagement
with its subject The book vastly expands our understanding of the interdependence of structure and meaning in artists' books, and
establishes a more rigorous standard of criticism and analysis for the genre For all her enthusiasm for books, Drucker's willingness to
assert the successes and failures within the form's various parameters may instigate a further flowering of the criticism so long
awaited by artists of the book.
BUZZ SPECTOR is an artist who works with the hook as subject and object. He is the author of The Bookmaker's Desire, published by
Umbrella Editions in 1995, and a professor in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
COPYRIGHT 1997 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

Print based means alphabetic based

2008-08-29T09:13:00.002-04:00

When I write, in the module, that your assignment should address both print-based and design-based forms of expression, I mean alphabetic-based and visually-based.

Looking forward to the posts. A few have dropped our course usually because the bureaucracy did not allow them to enroll.

Image/Chart on Online Reading

2008-08-26T12:23:00.000-04:00

Please mine this image for ideas, design, and as a foil for your ideas for your own charts, time-lines, and essays especially for the Ong and Hayles assignments.

Some additional readings

2008-08-25T14:18:00.000-04:00

In the lecture, I mentioned a few additional readings -- not required -- but that will give you a sense of how one might apply some of these ideas to your own projects and scholarship.

"Toward A Visceral Scholarship Online: Folkvine.org and
Hypermedia Ethnography," Journal of E-Media Studies (Spring
2008). Online at: http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/2/xmlpage/4/article/285

Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life (Princeton University Press, 2008).

Greg Ulmer, Applied Grammatology

Share drafts

2008-08-25T12:55:00.002-04:00

The only thing we need to figure out is how to share drafts among the students -- here is my latest idea:

1. you contact one individual and swap drafts at the same time -- so no one sits on a draft ... maybe set-up a chart -- when you are ready you click on ready -- and someone else matches your ready.

2. we avoid webcourses -- I am thinking students are not going there? -- and we make sure that everyone gets another student to review and reviews one ...

3. and we all figure out how to post the final product on the blog or linked to the blog -- I'm not sure I know how -- but I like the public quality of the blog for our assignments. So, comments on this query about how to proceed?

CS

read this article on new literacies

2008-08-25T12:04:00.000-04:00

Thank you for reading this NY Times article on new forms of reading online.

Incorporate your thoughts on this article in your time-lines, charts, and essays -- both with Ong and Hayles.

Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com 7/26/08 11:36 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print Page 1 of 9
July 27, 2008
Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?
By MOTOKO RICH
BEREA, Ohio — Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings
them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.
Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends
at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.
A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and
peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her
mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site
where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of
her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other
users and based on books, television shows or movies.
Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books
for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something
anymore.”
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the
digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts
around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the
International Reading Association.
As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the
hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking
attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of
books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should
not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her
leisure time watching television, to read and write.
Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability
to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online. Some
children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn.,
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children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn.,
have found it far more comfortable to search and read online.
At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy
reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web,
whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement
with text.
Setting Expectations
Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is
unrealistic to expect all children to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice” for fun.
And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can
still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading
skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.
Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as
they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will
participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will
not.
Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined
beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On
the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own
beginnings, middles and ends.
Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,”
said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is
studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a
line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”
Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories.
Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents.
Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more
than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing
games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.
Last fall the National Endowment for the Arts issued a sobering report linking flat or declining
national reading test scores among teenagers with the slump in the proportion of adolescents who
said they read for fun.
Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com 7/26/08 11:36 PM
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According to Department of Education data cited in the report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds
said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen
percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in
1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)
“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote
in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and
personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”
Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to
18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical
day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online
on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.
The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for
many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or
to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to
elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for
intellectual or emotional rewards.
It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize the most.
“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the
touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”
What’s Best for Nadia?
Deborah Konyk always believed it was essential for Nadia and her 8-year-old sister, Yashca, to
read books. She regularly read aloud to the girls and took them to library story hours.
“Reading opens up doors to places that you probably will never get to visit in your lifetime, to
cultures, to worlds, to people,” Ms. Konyk said.
Ms. Konyk, who took a part-time job at a dollar store chain a year and a half ago, said she did not
have much time to read books herself. There are few books in the house. But after Yashca was
born, Ms. Konyk spent the baby’s nap time reading the Harry Potter novels to Nadia, and she
regularly brought home new titles from the library.
Despite these efforts, Nadia never became a big reader. Instead, she became obsessed with
Japanese anime cartoons on television and comics like “Sailor Moon.” Then, when she was in the
sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net,
Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com 7/26/08 11:36 PM
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sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net,
she turned off the television and started reading online.
Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages. Many of them have elliptical
plots and are sprinkled with spelling and grammatical errors. One of her recent favorites was “My
absolutely, perfect normal life ... ARE YOU CRAZY? NOT!,” a story based on the anime series
“Beyblade.”
In one scene the narrator, Aries, hitches a ride with some masked men and one of them pulls a
knife on her. “Just then I notice (Like finally) something sharp right in front of me,” Aries writes.
“I gladly took it just like that until something terrible happen ....”
Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and
twist it the way you want it to be.”
“So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person
doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”
Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes
back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.
Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She
does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to
get into college,” she said.
The simplest argument for why children should read in their leisure time is that it makes them
better readers. According to federal statistics, students who say they read for fun once a day score
significantly higher on reading tests than those who say they never do.
Reading skills are also valued by employers. A 2006 survey by the Conference Board, which
conducts research for business leaders, found that nearly 90 percent of employers rated “reading
comprehension” as “very important” for workers with bachelor’s degrees. Department of
Education statistics also show that those who score higher on reading tests tend to earn higher
incomes.
Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves
reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the
sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would
believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal
decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”
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Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current issue of the
Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he
suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of
adolescence. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and
contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.
Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading
skills. A recent study of more than 700 low-income, mostly Hispanic and black sixth through 10th
graders in Detroit found that those students read more on the Web than in any other medium,
though they also read books. The only kind of reading that related to higher academic
performance was frequent novel reading, which predicted better grades in English class and
higher overall grade point averages.
Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel
reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are
developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.
One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to
improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically
not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State
who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”
Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate
that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from
book reading.
“The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?” said Guinevere F. Eden,
director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. “The brain is malleable
and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and
deal with it.”
Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing
readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences
and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the
short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a
cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.
But This Is Reading Too
Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on
books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more
enriching than reading one book.
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enriching than reading one book.
“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the
time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points
of view.”
Zachary Sims, the Old Greenwich, Conn., teenager, often stays awake until 2 or 3 in the morning
reading articles about technology or politics — his current passions — on up to 100 Web sites.
“On the Internet, you can hear from a bunch of people,” said Zachary, who will attend Columbia
University this fall. “They may not be pedigreed academics. They may be someone in their shed
with a conspiracy theory. But you would weigh that.”
Though he also likes to read books (earlier this year he finished, and loved, “The Fountainhead”
by Ayn Rand), Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more
about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”
The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately,
corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills
can be cognitively demanding.
Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study,
Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48
students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species
known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and
deemed the site a reliable source.
Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures,
they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.
“Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t
necessarily language oriented,” said Donna E. Alvermann, a professor of language and literacy
education at the University of Georgia. “Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of
experiencing information in the world today.”
A Lifelong Struggle
In the case of Hunter Gaudet, the Internet has helped him feel more comfortable with a new kind
of reading. A varsity lacrosse player in Somers, Conn., Hunter has struggled most of his life to
read. After learning he was dyslexic in the second grade, he was placed in special education classes
and a tutor came to his home three hours a week. When he entered high school, he dropped the
special education classes, but he still reads books only when forced, he said.
Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com 7/26/08 11:36 PM
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special education classes, but he still reads books only when forced, he said.
In a book, “they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed,” Hunter said. “Online just
gives you what you need, nothing more or less.”
When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s
name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites. Instead of
reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater,
assembling his information nugget by nugget.
Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to
glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the
author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I
hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”
Karen Gaudet, Hunter’s mother, a regional manager for a retail chain who said she read two or
three business books a week, hopes Hunter will eventually discover a love for books. But she is
confident that he has the reading skills he needs to succeed.
“Based on where technology is going and the world is going,” she said, “he’s going to be able to
leverage it.”
When he was in seventh grade, Hunter was one of 89 students who participated in a study
comparing performance on traditional state reading tests with a specially designed Internet
reading test. Hunter, who scored in the lowest 10 percent on the traditional test, spent 12 weeks
learning how to use the Web for a science class before taking the Internet test. It was composed of
three sets of directions asking the students to search for information online, determine which sites
were reliable and explain their reasoning.
Hunter scored in the top quartile. In fact, about a third of the students in the study, led by
Professor Leu, scored below average on traditional reading tests but did well on the Internet
assessment.
The Testing Debate
To date, there have been few large-scale appraisals of Web skills. The Educational Testing Service,
which administers the SAT, has developed a digital literacy test known as iSkills that requires
students to solve informational problems by searching for answers on the Web. About 80 colleges
and a handful of high schools have administered the test so far.
But according to Stephen Denis, product manager at ETS, of the more than 20,000 students who
have taken the iSkills test since 2006, only 39 percent of four-year college freshmen achieved a
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have taken the iSkills test since 2006, only 39 percent of four-year college freshmen achieved a
score that represented “core functional levels” in Internet literacy.
Now some literacy experts want the federal tests known as the nation’s report card to include a
digital reading component. So far, the traditionalists have held sway: The next round, to be
administered to fourth and eighth graders in 2009, will test only print reading comprehension.
Mary Crovo of the National Assessment Governing Board, which creates policies for the national
tests, said several members of a committee that sets guidelines for the reading tests believed large
numbers of low-income and rural students might not have regular Internet access, rendering
measurements of their online skills unfair.
Some simply argue that reading on the Internet is not something that needs to be tested — or
taught.
“Nobody has taught a single kid to text message,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of
Teachers of English and a member of the testing guidelines committee. “Kids are smart. When
they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.”
Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford who lobbied for an Internet component as
chairman of the reading test guidelines committee, disagreed. Students “are going to grow up
having to be highly competent on the Internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to make them discover
how to be highly competent if we can teach them.”
The United States is diverging from the policies of some other countries. Next year, for the first
time, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading,
math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an
electronic reading component. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. A
spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of
Education, said an additional test would overburden schools.
Even those who are most concerned about the preservation of books acknowledge that children
need a range of reading experiences. “Some of it is the informal reading they get in e-mails or on
Web sites,” said Gay Ivey, a professor at James Madison University who focuses on adolescent
literacy. “I think they need it all.”
Web junkies can occasionally be swept up in a book. After Nadia read Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust
memoir “Night” in her freshman English class, Ms. Konyk brought home another Holocaust
memoir, “I Have Lived a Thousand Years,” by Livia Bitton-Jackson.
Nadia was riveted by heartbreaking details of life in the concentration camps. “I was trying to
imagine this and I was like, I can’t do this,” she said. “It was just so — wow.”
Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com 7/26/08 11:36 PM
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imagine this and I was like, I can’t do this,” she said. “It was just so — wow.”
Hoping to keep up the momentum, Ms. Konyk brought home another book, “Silverboy,” a fantasy
novel. Nadia made it through one chapter before she got engrossed in the Internet fan fiction
again.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map

2008-08-25T09:00:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Paul Czech for preparing this guide. This version does not have the images he included, but perhaps he can post the one with images?

The “History of T&T” Blog: Basic Instructions

1. Open a web browser and log onto: www.blogger.com

2. Type your username and password to gain access to the Blog

3. Locate the "History of T&T" Blog and click "View Blog"

4. Locate a blog title that interests you and click on its title:

5. To make a comment, click on the "Post a Comment" hyperlink:

6. Fill in the Comment Form. When satisfied with your comment, click the “Publish Your Comment” button.

COMING SOON: Instructions on how to include a hyperlink and submit PDF files in your blog comments.

2008-08-20T22:28:00.000-04:00

Please read this article and include it in your work on Ong, Hayles, Drucker/McVarish, and the Rothenberg/Clay collection.

lecture one on Walter Ong and Grammatology

2008-08-20T08:16:00.000-04:00

http://www.paulczech.com/saper/

Start Now, Good Luck with Weather

2008-08-18T20:57:00.003-04:00

Everyone should have carefully read the entire syllabus, the first module, all the other materials, and, of course, Ong.

You should probably start a draft of the time-line and chart.

Please stay safe during the hurricane, Fay.

Please make sure you did not miss new materials added in August.

Infomation about your chart and time-line

2008-08-18T13:26:00.000-04:00

Just a footnote to the assignment and other information.

Your chart should simply summarize the information and major argument from Ong's book.

You should try to include some of the information from the articles I have also included if relevant to the charts and/or time-lines.

Also, I do not plan to visit our webcourses site; so either email me directly or simply post your work to the website as it becomes due -- not before and not after.

Assignment One [aka Module]

2008-08-17T14:17:00.000-04:00

Texts and Technology in History
ENC 6801-W61
Dr. Saper, Professor

Module 1: Visual Translation
Included in this module: Goals; Assignment; Due Dates; Links to Web-site; Assessments; and Grading Rubric. Read this entire module before starting the assignment or asking any questions about the assignment.
Goals:
Students learn how to translate and express ideas and diachronic analysis about the history of texts and technology in visual forms.
These goals correspond to the overall goals of the course: to learn about the history of texts and technology in history using digital modes of communication.
Assignment:
Students will learn about the major historical modes of communication and cultural memory:
1. Read Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy.
2. Take notes [self-consciously thinking about note taking in terms of the modes of communication and memory that Ong outlines].
3. Do some contextual research on Ong’s argument. Find dates, names, place names, and other historical information to fill-in Ong’s argument.
4. Do some speculative research on Ong’s argument. Make a list of technologies and historical events that occurred since Ong published his book that might reinforce his argument.
5. Look at your notes, find patterns, and add your own research.
6. Build a chart that summarizes Ong’s argument.
7. Build a time-line that summarizes Ong’s diachronic analysis. Use your own research too.
Due Dates:
Post your site by Thursday, September 4, 2008. This will give you an opportunity to ask questions about the assignment and make revisions. No late projects accepted, no exceptions.

Where: Post the finished assignment to the blog, but post a draft to a discussion on the course site. Since everyone gets credit for helping (and you can help more than one of your peers each assignment) you will find someone to give you suggestions for improvement. If you cannot offer any suggestions, then you might want to consider an alternative to academia.
.
Assessments:
Content: Do the materials include the following:
A. full name of author and helper(s)
C. at least three definitions, arguments, and stories learned from the Ong book (please do not plagiarize).
D. add five pieces of information from your own research that fit with Ong’s argument.
Form: Did the student include the following technical aspects?
A. visual representations of diachronic change and synchronic analysis (time-line and chart)
B. ideas expressed with print-based text, images, and design
Grader will study the materials (including the design).
1. Does this material present a clear representation of the student's thinking about both Ong’s argument and sense of history?
2. Did the student have interesting insights about Ong?
3. Were the insights illuminated in the designs?
4. Are the materials interesting, unique, expressive, and informative?

Grading Rubric:
Passing Grade (in the D range): fulfilled number one in the assessment.
Adequate Grade (in the C range): fulfilled one and two in the assessment.
Good Grade (in the B range): fulfilled numbers one through three in the assessment.
Excellent Grade (in the A range): fulfilled all of the four criteria in the assessment.

Syllabus

2008-08-15T14:12:00.000-04:00

Texts and Technology in History
ENC 6801-W61
Instructor: Dr. Saper, Professor of English
Fall 2008 (one semester course)
3 Credit Hours
Prereq.: enrolled students in T&T doctoral program (or permission of instructor)

Mediated Portions Online at both webcourses.ucf.edu and
http://historyoftextandtech.blogspot.com/

Office hours: online or by appointment
Professor Saper's direct email: csaper@mail.ucf.edu
Additional Office Hours: Additional office hours by appointment (I will do everything in my power to meet with you and also start conversations on email 24/7).
Please read the Protocols and Schedule sections of this syllabus too. This is a requirement of the course, and obviously the information in the Protocols and Schedule are essential to follow in order to get a passing grade. You should consider all the information in the protocols and schedule as part of the requirements for this course. Among the many protocols you must obey, please note the strict policy on plagiarism. If you plagiarize, then you will fail the assignment, the course, and have your name turned-in to the UCF Conduct Board for potential suspension from the University. The protocols also contain information about disabilities (if you need special accommodations, then you need to officially inform the Professor (or have an official inform).
Please read each module carefully. All the assignments are described, the criteria listed, and the grading rubric included. There are very specific quantifiable and qualitative requirements for each assignment. The modules are also part of the official syllabus for this course, and you must follow all of the grading requirements to receive a passing grade.
Course Overview, Description, and Objectives:
The course will mix historical discussions about texts and technology in history with practical considerations on the future of texts (using e-media technologies). We will read works by N. Katherine Hayles, Johanna Drucker, and Walter Ong as well as an anthology edited by Rothenberg and Clay.
Required Texts (available at the Campus Bookstore or elsewhere):
Johanna Drucker Graphic Design: A Critical History
Walter Ong Orality and Literacy
Rothenberg and Clay A Book About The Book
Hayles, N. Katherine Electronic Literature

Grades:
5% for the first assignment [Ong]
25% for the second major assignment [Drucker]
40% for the third major assignment [Hayles]
25% for the fourth major assignment [Rothenberg & Clay]
5% HELPING others in the class (you need to have one other student indicate that you discussed and helped with an assignment in some way). Obviously, each student will help with difficult issues or skills -- you simply have to have someone indicate that you did in fact help on each assignment. Don't forget -- you won't get credit unless the student you helped indicates that you did help somewhere on the assignment.
No Late Projects Accepted. No Exception.
No make-up assignments.
If you miss the deadline because of a personal, medical, or professional excuse, then you will not receive credit for the assignment, but can receive a medical Incomplete in the course. Medical Incompletes only with documented evidence.
Online Materials
Access to webcourse.ucf.edu and our blog required. You must have access to the internet, a computer that can read a CD-ROM, and some technical skills.
Attendance: Students must read/listen to the online lectures, readings, modules/assignments, and all other information, in any form.
Schedule:
Week 1: Introduction to Course Content and Assignments. Read Walter Ong on Orality and Literacy. Read module 1 and start the assignment.
Week 2: (Assignment 1 due) – please refer to the module on Ong. Share your charts, time-lines, and materials to express Ong’s argument in the electronic mode.

Week 3: Start Reading Drucker [look over Module 2]
Week 4: Continue to read Drucker and start the second assignment.

Week 5: Continue to read Drucker and start completing draft of assignment 2. Get help and comments from at least one other student.
Week 6: Assignment 2 due. Share with class. Share feedback.
Week 7: Start reading Hayles and start reading the hypertext works she examines. Read the module 3 for guidance on what pages to read each week.
Week 8: Continue to read Hayles and start assignment three.
Week 9: Continue to read Hayles and the texts she references
Week 10: Finish Hayles and the texts she references. Assignment three DUE.
Week 11: Start reading Rothenberg and Clay. Read the module for assignment four.
Week 12: Read the selections from the anthology.
Week 13: Thanksgiving Break
Week 14: Complete the readings.
Week 15: Assignment four Due.
Final Exam Week: We’ll meet online for a virtual party – perhaps in Second Life – where I have a nice old house [more of a shack].

Protocols
Classroom Expectations
Please review these expectations carefully.
You are a doctoral student. This course expects the highest level of professionalism from all the students. The minimum standards below explain the boundaries of those expectations.
Academic integrity will be appraised according to the student academic behavior standards outlined in The Golden Rule of the University of Central Florida's Student Handbook. See http://www.goldenrule.sdes.ucf.edu for further details. Plagiarism not tolerated even if inadvertent.
No late papers accepted. No exceptions.
Please keep up with the reading. The other students depend on everyone participating. I like to give quizzes because it rewards what we expect each other to do.
Please do not miss a quiz. Missed quizzes may not be retaken. This is how I will take attendance; so missing three quizzes will result in a failing grade.
Work with others. You are required to make every effort to work effectively and promptly with others. Fair criticism of your failure to work effectively with others will significantly affect your grade.
Respect, compassion, and humor necessary even as you learn to intelligently criticize others’ arguments (arguments made by your peers, in the readings, or by the Professor).
You cannot make inappropriate attacks or plead helplessness. You must think through the arguments, ideas, and comments (no matter how obscure, difficult, or surprising).

E-mail and Online
E-mail and Online Access will be an integral part of this course.
Keep in mind these protocols about email:
Check your e-mail at least twice per week (more often is better).
Include "Subject" headings: use something that is descriptive and refer to a particular assignment or topic. For example, a good subject heading might look like this: Grad Seminar map assign.
Begin your letters with a greeting like Dear Professor or Dear T&T students. Courteous and considerate emails appreciated.
Make every effort to be clear. Online communication lacks the nonverbal cues that fill in much of the meaning in face-to-face communication.
Check spelling, grammar, and punctuation (you may want to compose in a word processor, then cut and paste the message into the discussion or e-mail).
Break up large blocks of text into paragraphs and use a space between paragraphs.
Sign your e-mail messages with your name.
Note: Review the Netiquette and Viruses section below

Netiquette
"Netiquette" has evolved to aid us in infusing our electronic communications with some of these missing behavioral pieces.
The important thing to remember is that all of the "cute" symbols in the world cannot replace your careful choice of words and "tone" in your communication.
Irony, satire, and parody appreciated as long as the Professor or students in this class are not the targets.

Excuses (all these have happened to me)
Back up your files: "My hard drive crashed." "My modem doesn't work." "My printer is out of ink." These are today's equivalents of "My dog ate my homework." And these events really do occur and they are really inconvenient when they do. However, these are not valid excuses for failing to get your work in on time. I can tell you horror stories – I often forget to back-up; so, I’ve had to rewrite.
Technical Resources
For specific problems in any of the areas below or for further information go to the corresponding link for assistance.
UCF Home Page will help find UCF resources - http://www.ucf.edu
Pegasus - http://helpdesk.ucf.edu/ - You can also call the helpdesk at 407-823-5117.
Learning Online - http://reach.ucf.edu/~coursdev/learning This URL also includes access to information on study skills for distance learners, the library and the writing center.
Buying a new computer or upgrading your current equipment - http://www.cstoreucf.edu/
Virus information - http://learn.ucf.edu/virus.html
If your equipment problems prevent you from using e-mail from home, there are many computer labs on campus and virtually every public library offers Internet access.

How Scholars Talk
There are many styles, genres, or formats for conversations. One peculiar form, intellectual conversation among professionals, has specific constraints. A conversation with the UPS delivery person has constraints too. Knowing the constraints can not only get your message (or package) to the intended audience, but also save you from embarrassment. If you asked the UPS delivery person a question like, how do you think electronic communication has changed the role of the humanities in Universities? She may answer, but she may likely avoid your door, and you may not get packages intended for you.
Class conversations may mix language borrowed from other forms, but constraints make this type of conversation distinct: on topic, aware of the frame of the arguments (including your’s), informed and allusive to work in the field (especially the readings), and to see yourself in constant conversation with a field not just your immediate peers.
Eventually, even your casual chats and gossip will have the defamilarizing inflection of scholarly conversations.
Ask the inappropriate question as long as you can show how it leads to a novel approach.
After reading a version of the Three Pigs and the Wolf, one student asked, Why three? Inappropriate, but brilliant.
Another example, I once taught a group of 4th and 5th graders about the Death of Socrates (who he was, what he did, who his students were, and why he was sentenced to death). After my introduction, one student asked What Did Plato’s Parents Think? Brilliant, I exclaimed, and then said, I’m going to go home and write a play about that right now, and the student pretended to get up, and said, Oh no, not before me, I’m going to go home and write that play!

Protocols

2008-08-14T14:43:00.000-04:00

Dear Students,

Please post your assignments only on the day due neither before nor after.

Over the summer, I have added articles and refined the assignments. Although as co-authors of this blog, you can look ahead, I would suggest simply staying current (as we made make additions or modifications), and you can better focus on one assignment at a time.

This is a doctoral level course; so, I expect polished work; in the past almost all of the students in my graduate seminars have published worked produced in my course in peer reviewed scholarly journals.

You might familiarize yourself with the journals in your area of specialty, and we might talk about publishing our materials online.

Good luck with the course.

Sincerely,
Professor Saper

What we will post here

2008-07-30T15:34:00.000-04:00

You will post some of the work in our Texts and Technology in History course. Please do not post anything except specified assignments here; post all questions, comments, and other assignments elsewhere. I am looking forward to the course. I will start posting modules in the next few weeks, and will grant you access to the course materials.

Welcome to Texts and Technology in History

2008-07-17T13:07:00.000-04:00

Welcome to Texts and Technology in History, a graduate seminar in the doctoral program at the University of Central Florida.

The course -- or this version -- is taught by Dr. Craig Saper, Professor of English.

Some of the course materials are only available via webcourses.ucf.edu [you have to register for the course to gain access]

We will use this site for discussions, posting your work, and for some of my discussions and assignments.