sign in sign up
<<
Home , Electronic literature, Hypertext fiction

: DOCUMENTING AND ARCHIVING MULTIMODAL COMPUTATIONAL WRITING

Scott Rettberg, University of Bergen

Leipzig, Sept 30th 2019 CLARIN Conference DURING THIS TALK, I HOPE TO

• Tell you about my new book Electronic Literature and provide some examples of works in different of electronic literature. • To describe some of the critical approaches taken by researchers in the field. • To describe some of the research hurdles that the field has faced due to the contingent nature of the born- digital cultural artefacts that are its primary concern. • To describe some of the research infrastructures developed by researchers in the field to begin to address these challenges. • To focus specifically on the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. • To point to some of the new kinds of research that this database has enabled, and its relation to CLARIN.

Polity Press Pub Date: Nov 16, 2018 (UK) Jan 4, 2019 (US) Hardcover, paperback, $24.95 US pb

Circa 240 pp 98K words, seven chapters

Imagine a book. That should be easy enough, you’re holding one now. The book is a particular reading technology, and it’s a good one. It took a long time to develop. The codex book is portable and can be easily lugged from place to place. It is addressable. It has page numbers so I can easily communicate with you exactly where any piece of information is within its volume: we can get on the same page and read the same words. The book has a complex and multifunctional navigational apparatus. There is a table of contents, there is an index, and so the book can be navigated non-linearly. The book is verifiable. It has a copyright page with a publisher and a place and a year and an author. The book is fixed. If I put it on the shelf now and come back and pull it out ten years later, the same words will be on the same pages as when I last opened the book. While the book could be destroyed in a fire or flood or might slowly decay, there is a sense of permanence to it. One of its main functionalities is to get thoughts down in print and carry them through time. Flanagan, Mary (2017) [The Mirror Book] Imagine that the book were different. Imagine it offered other affordances and material properties. Imagine that instead of turning pages you could make any word in the book a link to some other part of the book, or even some other book. Imagine it were bound on a spool, so that you could enter and exit anywhere; a book without beginning or end. Imagine what you would do with that as a storyteller. Imagine what it would mean if every time you put the book up on the shelf, the words in the book shifted order and rearranged themselves. Would it still be the same book? What would you do with that as a poet? Imagine if, when you pulled the book down from the shelf and opened up the first page, the book asked you in what direction you wanted to go, and would not begin to tell a story until you responded. Imagine if the book were a conversation, a that you had to talk to. Imagine that, as you read a poem on the page of the book, the words jumped off the page into three-dimensional space and began flying around the room, shifting form and regrouping in the physical environment. Imagine that when you opened the book, it was filled with threads connecting it to all of the other books in your library, which would make it possible to pull part of another book right into the text of the one you were reading. Imagine if the book could read the newspaper and change its content depending on the time of the day, or the weather, or the season. Imagine if you opened the book and found all those of your friends who were reading the book at the same time leaving their comments in the margins. Imagine that when you opened the book, those same friends were all writing the book simultaneously. Imagine the book as a network, always on, always connected, and always changing. Imagine what you could do as a reader. Imagine what you could do as a writer. Imagine the book as a networked . LITERATURE ELECTRONIC LITERATURE TECHNOLOGY ELECTRONIC LITERATURE CULTURE ELECTRONIC LITERATURE ? WHY GENRE? (so boring) RUPTURE is so exciting but CONTINUITY builds a field

GENRE IS A

& SO IS THIS BOOK

WHAT’S IN THE BOX? (unboxing Electronic Literature) Combinatory poetics

Hypertext

CORE GENRES / other game-like forms OF ELECTRONIC LITERATURE Kinetic and interactive Network writing

& Divergent forms DEFINING ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

RECONSIDERING GENRE IN ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

GENRE FROM A LITERARY STUDIES 1: GENRES OF PERSPECTIVE ELECTRONIC LITERATURE (1-19) GENRE FROM A MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY PERSPECTIVE

OVERVIEW OF KEY THEORETICAL, CRITICAL, AND ANALYTICAL WORK IN THE FIELD

WHY READ ELECTRONIC LITERATURE? ARTISTIC AND LITERARY CONTEXTS FOR COMBINATORY POETICS

THE EARLY HISTORY OF DIGITAL COMBINATORY WRITING

PROCEDURAL, SYNTACTIC POETRY GENERATION SYSTEMS 2: COMBINATORY CONTEMPORARY COMBINATORY DIGITAL POETICS POETICS (20-53)

REGENERATING AND MUTATING EXISTING TEXTS

BOTS

BIG DATA POETICS STRACHEY, CHRISTOPHER (1952): LOVE LETTERS. IMAGE: RHIZOME MONTFORT, NICK (2009): TAROKO GORGE HTTP://NICKM.COM/POEMS/TAROKO_GORGE.HTML MONTFORT, NICK (2009): TAROKO GORGE HTTP://NICKM.COM/POEMS/TAROKO_GORGE.HTML RETTBERG, SCOTT AND NICK MONTFORT (2009): TOKYO GARAGE HTTP://RETTS.NET/TOKYOGARAGE.HTML RETTBERG, SCOTT AND NICK MONTFORT (2009): TOKYO GARAGE HTTP://RETTS.NET/TOKYOGARAGE.HTML LITERARY ANTECEDENTS TO • Modernist influences • Postmodern multilinearity • Metafiction and reflexivity

3: HYPERTEXT HYPERTEXT IN FICTION (54-86) TECHNOLOGICAL CONTEXT EARLY

HYPERTEXT ON THE WEB

VANNEVAR BUSH “AS WE MAY THINK” TED NELSON:

”Well, by ”hypertext” I mean non-sequential writing – text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.”

Literary Machines (1980) JACKSON, SHELLEY (1995) PATCHWORK GIRL

GILLESPIE, W., MARQUARDT, F., RETTBERG, S., STRATTON, D. (1999). THE UNKNOWN

INTERACTIVE FICTION AND THE IF COMMUNITY

AN ADVENTURE BEGINS

ZORK AND THE COMPUTER GAME INDUSTRY IT SPAWNED 4: INTERACTIVE AN AMATEUR INTERACTIVE FICTION COMMUNITY TAKES SHAPE FICTION & LUDIC WORLDS, PUZZLES, CHARACTERS, AND WORDPLAY IN IF FORMS (87-117) MODELING ETHICAL CHOICE AND COMPLICITY HYPERTEXT + INTERACTIVE FICTION = TWINE

GAMES AS LITERARY PLATFORMS

GAMES AS DIGITAL VERNACULAR CROWTHER, W. & WOODS, D. (1976) COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE.

SHORT, E MILY (2 0 0 0 ) GALATEA. PORPENETINE (2 0 1 3 ) THE IR ANGELIC UNDERSTANDING. CHARACTERISTICS OF KINETIC AND INTERACTIVE POETRY • Time and movement • The materiality of language 5: KINETIC & IN RELATION TO INTERACTIVE LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TRADITIONS POETRY (118-151) • Concrete poetry • , Futurism, and Lettrism • Visual poetry • Sound poetry • Moving letters in film EARLY WORK IN DIGITAL POETRY

KINETIC AND INTERACTIVE POETRY IN TECHNOLOGICAL CONTEXT • BASIC 5: KINETIC & • HyperCard INTERACTIVE POETRY • Director, Shockwave and Flash CTD. (118-151) • Processing • HTML5, CSS, Canvas, JavaScript BALANCING MOVEMENT AND INTERACTIVITY IN DIGITAL POETRY

LETTERS MOVING IN SPACE AND TIME

First Screening: Computer Poems, bpnichol (1984) http://vispo.com/bp/index.htm Video excerpt from Unicode by Jörg Piringer (2003) https://joerg.piringer.net/index.php?href=unicode/unicode.xml ANTECEDENTS TO NETWORK WRITING

FORMS AND STYLES OF NETWORK WRITING • Codework 6: NETWORK • Flarf WRITING (152- • Home page 182) • Email • Fictional blogs • Twitter fiction • Online writing communities • Collective • Netprov • Network critique MORRISSEY, J. (2007) THE LAST PERFORMANCE.

NETPROVS BY ROB WITTIG AND MARK MARINO MARINO, M. AND WITTIG , R . OCCUPY MLA (2013) LOCATIVE

INTERACTIVE INSTALLATIONS 7: DIVERGENT EXPANDED CINEMA, VIRTUAL REALITY, AND STREAMS (183- AUGMENTED REALITY 204) FINDING AND KEEPING ELECTRONIC LITERATURE: COLLECTIONS, DATABASES, AND ARCHIVES

THE FUTURE OF ELECTRONIC LITERATURE: ENDINGS, EXPERIMENTS, OR TRANSITIONS?

HEARTS AND MINDS: THE INTERROGATIONS PROJECT (2016) VR theatre / documentary focused on prisoner torture in Iraq CRITICAL APPROACHES TO E-LIT QUESTIONS

• How can e-lit be read in the context of literary and art traditions? • How can e-lit be read in the context of critical theory? • How can e-lit be read in technological context? • How can e-lit be read in cultural contexts? • How can we understand e-lit in the context of the ?

THE CHALLENGES OF DOCUMENTING, DISSEMINATING, ARCHIVING AND PRESERVING E-LIT PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES

• The of Literary Culture vs. the Pace of Technological Change • The Many Modes of Disseminating E-Lit • The Challenge of Documenting E-Lit • The Challenge of Archiving and Preservation

ELECTRONIC LITERATURE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE Human networks: the ELO, Electronic conferences, Literature events, exhibitions, Collections online discourse networks INFRASTRUCTURES BUILT BY THE FIELD Research Electronic Databases and Literature CELL (Consortium Repository for Electronic Literature) ELECTRONIC LITERATURE COLLECTIONS

ELECTRONIC LITERATURE REPOSITORY

OPEN ACCESS RESEARCH DATABASES

ELMCIP ELECTRONIC LITERATURE KNOWLEDGE BASE

Basic premise of the Electronic Literature Knowledge Base: Consider creativity and field- consider a field as a network formation as emerging from all of composed of human and non- these networked interactions. human actors, objects, and events.

Document individual objects, but The literary artifact is inseparable even more importantly, develop a from the network in which it is knowledge model that accounts for produced, disseminated, and post- and makes available for study the processed. relations between them. 3287 Creative Works documented 4075 articles of Critical Writing documented 3771 authors referenced 754 publishers, journals, and organizations mapped 557 conferences, exhibitions, seminars documented Teaching resources made available on an open access basis Documenting relationships between 233 software / platform and creative works Video and multimedia documentation of works and events made accessible Extensive cross-referencing to show works in their critical contexts Archival attachments such as full text pdfs and source code Research collections – mini databases within the database Granular filtered search of creative works and critical writing Creative Commons licensed: feel free to share and reuse Expert level: open data exports of all data in content types or filtered search for data analysis and visualization Backend: Built in customized Drupal DB, all code now managed in a Github repository Backend: Issues? We got issues. Ongoing issue-tracking, bug squashing, feature development. Backend: Hosted on NIRD Norwegian E-Infrastructure CHALLENGES

• Resource needs: maintenance, development, editorial layer, design, hosting • Preservation: 100 year vs. few year perspective • Institutional investment / ownership of DH research infrastructure • Community involvement in content development • Communication with user base • Documentation / tutorials

• Internationally: key resource and a basis for an academic field • Expands • Connects E-Lit to broader DH • Value to students, authors, researchers • Locally: basis for research group international reputation BENEFITS • Locally: attracts visiting researchers, post-docs, leads to new projects and applications • Locally: Pedagogical resource for curricula • Locally: Strengthens grant project applications, bringing in new resources

NEW RESEARCH OUTCOMES: DATA HARVESTING & VISUALIZATION An Emerging Canon? A Preliminary Analysis of All References to Creative Works in Critical Writing Documented in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base How would we go about defining an e-lit canon? One approach – define rules. But whose rules? Whose canon?

Tags used in work records for the 46 most-cited works: hypertext (12), fiction (10), narrative (10), collaboration (9), animation (9), Flash (9), audio (7), generative (5), textual instrument (5), visual poetry (5), (4), appropriated texts (4), javascript (4), HTML/DHTML (4), music (4), remix (3), pastiche (3), embodiment (3), kinetic (3), poetry generator (3), QuickTime (3), poetry (3), translation (3), body (2), parody (2), 3D (2), games (2), interface (2), game (2), interactive (2), history (2), concrete poetry (2), ambient (2), push (2), interactive fiction (2), writing under constraint (2), hyperfiction (2), hypertext fiction (2), (2), digital poetry (2), sound (2), HTML (2), documentary (2), philosophy (2), Shockwave (2), video (2), memoir (2), tragedy (1), associative indexing (1), Eastgate (1), trauma (1), adaptation (1), postmodern fiction (1), gender (1), monster (1), war (1), politics (1), multilinear (1), authorship (1), performance (1), (1), comedy (1), picaresque (1), network fiction (1), pharmakon (1), drug literature (1), mockumentary (1), database (1), interactive drama (1), artificial intelligence (1), chatterbot/conversational (1), ergodic/interactivity/participation (1), textuality (1), cyborg (1), hci (1), consciousness (1), network phenomenology (1), philosophical (1), DHTML (1), Gilles Deleuze (1), neologism (1), CAVE (1), installation (1), text instrument (1), movement (1), image to text (1), novel (1), multimedia (1), California (1), character (1), multimodal (1), Toolbook (1), chatterbot (1), psychotherapy (1), natural language processing (1), feminism (1), recombination (1), recombinant (1), web (1), server-based (1), proxy (1), text adventure (1), 1970s (1), combinatory poetics (1), Oulipo (1), antecedents (1), generative text (1), intertexutality (1), single page (1), stretchtext (1), retro (1), parody/satire (1), aleatory (1), code (1), generative poetry (1), interactive poetry (1), intertextuality (1), literature (1), programming (1), refresh (1), cyberculture (1), found text (1), networked audiovisual installation (1), voice synthesizer (1), data sonification (1), web harvested work (1), text stream (1), language philosophy (1), Wittgenstein (1), locative narrative (1), GPS (1), Los Angeles (1), combinatorial (1), noise (1), sound poetry (1), animality (1), transcription (1), kinetic typography (1), representation (1), responsive (1), girl (1), coming of age (1), sexuality (1), (1), cruelty (1), collage (1), childhood (1), youth (1), memory (1), interactivity (1), webcam (1), control (1), loss (1), materiality (1), writing-materiality (1), text movie (1), gif (1), digital modernism (1), digital fiction (1), road narrative (1), autobiography (1), image and text (1), identity (1), illustration (1), text generator (1), nature (1), text generators (1), French (1), mapping (1), locative (1), geography (1), geocoding (1), Montreal (1), site-specific (1), constraint (1), procedural (1), transliteration (1), appropriation (1), time-based (1), time (1), (1), chronos (1), logos (1), text morphs (1), graphics (1), city (1), urbanity (1), metropolis (1), tokyo (1), homage (1), détournement (1), place (1), e-poetry (1), dynamic (1), multilingual (1), transcultural (1), poetry generation (1), text generation (1), codework (1), epoetry (1), electronic poetry (1), kinetic poetry (1), religion (1), faith (1), doubt (1), logic (1).

Full text: tiny.cc/q81jdz

collection.eliterature.org WHERE TO FIND E-LIT elmcip.net/knowledgebase THANKS!