Module/Assignment 4

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

Sorry. Try this link.


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

Maggie Cotto: Hayles Module Three

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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