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1. Because It's Not There: Ekphrasis and the Threat of Graphics in Interactive Fiction

   Existing scholarship on interactive fiction (IF, also known as the text adventure) tends to treat it as a video game genre and/or as a category of electronic literature. In this essay I argue that IF can be understood as participating in traditions of visual prose and ekphrastic textuality, insofar as IF consists of room and object descriptions which direct the player to visualize the things they describe. Unlike traditional ekphrastic literature, however, IF also asks the player to take practical actions in response to the images he or she visualizes. During the commercial era of IF, ekphrasis was the most effective means available of providing players with immersive visual experiences. However, graphical video games have now surpassed IF in this area. Therefore, in order to justify the continued existence of IF, contemporary IF authors have been forced to conceive of the visuality of IF otherwise than in terms of the logic of transparency. One strategy for doing this, exemplified by Nick Montfort's game, Ad Verbum, is to abandon visuality almost entirely and emphasize IF's linguistic and textual qualities.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 13.09.2011 - 12:20

2. New Media in the Academy: Labor and the Production of Knowledge in Scholarly Multimedia

   Despite a general interest in exploring the possibilities of multimedia and web-based research, the humanities profession has been slow to accept digital scholarship as a valid form of intellectual endeavor. Questions about labor, peer-review, and co-authorship often arise in academic departments’ attempts to evaluate digital research in the tenure and promotion process. In this essay, we argue that these tensions stem from a general misunderstanding of the kinds of "work" that goes into producing scholarship in multimedia form. Multimedia work, we suggest, places scholars in an extended network that combines minds, bodies, machines, and institutional practices, and lays bare the fiction that scholars are disembodied intellectuals who labor only with the mind. We argue that while traditional ideas of what "counts" as scholarship continue to privilege content over form, intellectual labor over physical labor, and print over digital media, new media’s functional (and in some cases even biological) difference from old media contributes to a double erasure, for scholars working in multimedia, of both their intellectual contributions and their material labor.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 29.09.2011 - 08:31

3. Sensing Exigence: A Rhetoric for Smart Objects

   This essay argues that the sensing activities of smart objects and infrastructures for device-to-device communication need to be understood as a fundamental aspect of the rhetorical situation, even in the absence of human agents. Using the concept of exigence, most famously developed by Lloyd Bitzer, this essay analyzes the asymmetrical rhetorical dynamics of human-computer interaction and suggests new rhetorical roles for reading machines. It asserts that rhetorical studies has yet to catch up with electronic literature and other digital art forms when it comes to matters of the interface and the sensorium of the machine. It also claims that the work of Carolyn Miller epitomizes the conservative tendencies of rhetorical study when it comes to ubiquitous computing, even as she acknowledges a desire among some parties to grant smart objects rhetorical agency. Furthermore, when traditionally trained rhetoricians undertake the analysis of new media objects of study, far too much attention is devoted to the screen. In the logic of rhetorical theory, cameras are privileged over scanners, optics are privileged over sensors, and representation is privileged over registration.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 19.04.2016 - 13:40