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1. An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing

   Turning to an entirely invisible process that we can only know by its product, Mark Sample considers the meaning of machine-generated randomness in electronic literature and videogames in his paper, “An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing.” While new media critics have looked at randomness as a narrative or literary device, Sample explores the nature of randomness at the machine level, exposing the process itself by which random numbers are generated. Sample shows how early attempts at mechanical random number generation grew out of the Cold War, and then how later writers and game designers relied on software commands like RND (in BASIC), which seemingly simplified the generation of random numbers, but which in fact were rooted in–and constrained by–the particular hardware of the machine itself.

   (Source: Loriemerson.net description of MLA 2013 Special Session: Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old & New Media)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 20:03

2. Building the Infrastructural Layer: Reading Data Visualization in the Digital Humanities

   Information visualization is a technique for organizing, representing, and interpreting information visually. Information visualizations can take the form of hand-drawn diagrams, popular “infographics,” or interactive, computer-based visualizations. We see examples of information visualizations produced and displayed in myriad contexts, including: the scientific modeling of the Higgs boson particle, the NY Times 2012 presidential election coverage, the popular infographics exhibited at Visual.ly, corporate PowerPoint presentations, public web galleries like Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data or Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity, Google’s Ngram Viewer, and finally, in humanities research and pedagogy. Examples in the digital humanities include the Stanford Literary Lab’s use of the Gephi visualization platform to map its own academic community, the Software Studies Initiative’s visualization of thousands of cultural media objects like magazines, manga pages, and paintings, as well as Alan Liu’s Research-oriented Social Environment (RoSE) project that incorporates visualization tools directly into the research process.

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 00:47

3. Thoughts on a Literary Lab

   For the “Theories and Practices of the Literary Lab” roundtable at MLA yesterday, panelists were asked to speak for 5 minutes about their vision of a literary lab. Matthew Jockers spoke on the conception and agenda of the Stanford Literary Lab, which he started with Franco Moretti.

   Scott Rettberg - 17.01.2013 - 21:04