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Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature
Hypertext has been promoted as a vehicle that will change literary reading, especially through its recovery of images, supposed to be suppressed by print, and through the choice offered to the reader by links. Evidence from empirical studies of reading, however, suggests that these aspects of hypertext may disrupt reading. In a study of readers who read either a simulated literary hypertext or the same text in linear form, we found a range of significant differences: these suggest that hypertext discourages the absorbed and reflective mode that characterizes literary reading.
(Source: abstract.)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 10.05.2012 - 16:00
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Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
The concept of narrative has been widely invoked by theorists of digital textuality, but the promotion of what is described as the storytelling power of the computer has often relied on shallow metaphors, loose conceptions of narrative, and literary models that ignore the distinctive properties of the digital medium. Two myths have dominated this theorization. The myth of the Aleph (as I call it) presents the digital text as a finite text that contains an infinite number of stories. The myth of the Holodeck envisions digital narrative as a virtual environment in which the user becomes a character in a plot similar to those of Victorian novels or Shakespearean tragedies. Both of these myths rely on questionable assumptions: that any permutation of a collection of lexias results in a coherent story; that it is aesthetically desirable to be the hero of a story; and that digital narrativity should cover the same range of emotional experiences as literary narrative. Here I argue that digital narrative should emancipate itself from literary models. But I also view narrative as a universal structure that transcends media.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 15.05.2012 - 14:07
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What Hypertext Is
Over the past couple decades, as the term "hypertext" has gained a certain popular currency, a question has been raised repeatedly: "What is hypertext?" Our most respected scholars offer a range of different, at times incompatible, answers. This paper argues that our best response to this situation is to adopt the approach taken with other terms that are central to intellectual communities (such as "natural selection," "communism," and "psychoanalysis"), a historical approach. In the case of "hypertext" the term began with Theodor Holm ("Ted") Nelson, and in this paper two of his early publications of "hypertext" are used to determine its initial meaning: the 1965 "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" and the 1970 "No More Teachers' Dirty Looks." It is concluded that hypertext began as a term for forms of hypermedia (human-authored media that "branch or perform on request") that operate textually. This runs counter to definitions of hypertext in the literary community that focus solely on the link. It also runs counter to definitions in the research community that privilege tools for knowledge work over media.
Scott Rettberg - 25.05.2012 - 14:15
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Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: The Archival Text, Digital Narrative and The Limits of Memory
New technologies-- whether used for artistic or scientific ends--require new shapes to speak their attributes. Feminist writers too have long sought a narrative shape that can exist both inside and outside of patriarchal systems. Where like-minded theorists have tried to define a gender-specific dimension for art, Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics demonstrates that feminist artists have already built and are happily inhabiting this new technological room of their own. This dissertation is an exploration of the architectural shapes of mnemonic systems in women's narratives in the new media (focusing on Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, M.D. Coverley's Califia and Diana Reed Slattery's Glide and The Maze Game as exemplary models). Memory is key here, for, what gets stored or remembered has always been the domain of official histories, of the conqueror speaking his dominant cultural paradigm and body. I explore at length three spatial architectures of the new media: the matrix, the unfold and the knot.
Carolyn Guertin - 20.06.2012 - 19:00
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In the Event of Text
In the Event of Text
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.06.2012 - 12:39
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Marking Transition: the Work of Neal von Flue
For any regular Internet user, the hyperlink has become ubiquitous, almost rendered invisible
through the frequency of its use. Trails in hypertext are meticulously laid out through the
seemingly endless streams of data, connected by links imagined as points of intersection in the
web. Links are used for reference, for navigation but also extensively in creative production, to
fashion hypertextual narratives and images. It is in this realm of electronic literature, both visual
and textual, that the function of the link shifts from the commonplace to a carrier of aesthetic
potential.This presentation examines the aesthetic activation of the hyperlink as both an indicator of
transition and site of transformation. It is a brief exploration of the hyperlink as a signifier, a
mark both on and in the 'surface' of the digital text, through a close case study of two works by
hypercomic creator Neal von Flue.Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.06.2012 - 13:54
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Shakespeare in Simlish? Responsive Systems and Literary Language
There is a moment that can happen when reading/playing an interactive fiction. The system just presented some text, perhaps quite engaging or even beautiful. And then one tries to reply, using some of the same language, only to receive an error. The underlying system doesn't can't hear the language with which it speaks. The language it displays is written ahead of time, while the language it receives must be parsed and acted upon at runtime.
There is something uneasy about this disjuncture, and one response is to try to avoid all such problems. Will Wright's Sims speak only in gibberish sounds and visual icons, so that the surface representation of language matches the very simple internal representation of what they can discuss. Chris Crawford currently plans for his new storytelling system to avoid the construction of English-like sentences found in Storytron — instead moving to an icon language intended to help players better understand the internal representations (much more complex than those in The Sims) on which his story system will operate.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 22.06.2012 - 16:55
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konkret digital: Interview with Johannes Auer about Concrete Poetry and Net Literature
Interview with Johannes Auer to be published in Concrete Poetry: An International Perspective. Edited by Claus Clüver and Marina Corrêa. (forthcoming)
Patricia Tomaszek - 19.07.2012 - 13:59
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Digital Media Poetics presents Patricia Tomaszek
Via skype, the author presents her work and gives a reading of two works "about nothing, places, memories, and thoughts: robert creeley (1926-2005) and patricia tomaszek in a cut and mixed poem-dialogue" and "Planting Trees Out of the Grief: In Memoriam Robert Creeley"
Patricia Tomaszek - 28.08.2012 - 13:27
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E-Learning and Literary Studies - Towards a New Culture of Teaching?
The introduction of digital technologies into the learning processes has meant the creation of new educational spaces that, when they take place on the Internet and are founded in non-presence and asynchrony, are known as “Virtual Learning Environ- ments” (VLE). VLE constitute new pedagogic realities that must answer to the users’ needs, their educational purposes, the curricula with which they work and, specifically, the formative needs for the people that integrate them. But the key to define “virtual” in terms of human experience and not in terms of technological hardware is the concept of “presence,” which is crucial in our pedagogical model and our way of being comparative literature lecturers in a virtual university. Technologies are tools capable of building a learning frame, although it is necessary to endow them with contents and humanity. Different voices have warned of the sterility of a technological environment that does not have any pedagogic or didactic specificity (different from the traditional models). After all, learning is learning whether it has an ex- tra “e” or not, and so VLE are only as good or as bad as the ways they are used.
Helene Helgeland - 06.09.2012 - 15:47
