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Intergrams in My Pocket
Digital literature authors — particularly those of an experimental bent — are frequently obliged to use multimedia environments whose longevity is questionable at best. When support for such an environment on a new platform is not available, portation of the work may be the most direct strategy for making the work available. An excellent example of such a platform was Hypercard — only available on Macintosh MacOS Classic (and emulators). This paper discusses my experiences in porting Intergrams from Hypercard — first to Windows in 1996, and more recently to Squeak, where it will run on a wide range of platforms. Following on the pioneering recommendations of “Acid Free Bits”, the paper explores the following issues: (1) ability and desirability of digital literature authors to create their own file formats that are open, human-readable, and serve as “texts of description” (in the spirit of Bootz) whose preservation is assured by the simplicity and openness of the file format (as opposed to closed proprietary undocumented file formats often found with multimedia environments). (2) The importance and desirability of using multimedia environments which allow for self description.
Eivind Farestveit - 19.02.2015 - 14:47
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Unraveling Twine: Open Platforms and the Future of Hypertextual Literature
As the technical affordances that shaped early electronic literature’s frontiers have become commonplace, hypertextual structures abound in our experiences of online texts. Many tools make it easier than ever to generate these types of works, but one of the most interesting for its demonstrated literary potential is Twine: a platform for building choice-driven stories easily publishable on the web without relying heavily on code. In software studies, a platform is defined by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort as a hardware or software system that provides the “foundation of computational expression.” This definition can encompass any of the tools we use to develop procedural content, as Bogost noted on his blog: “a platform…is something that supports programming and programs, the creation and execution of computational media.” Examining Twine as a case-study among current open, non-coder friendly platforms probes the future of interactive narrative on the web—a future that, outside the traditional scope of the electronic literature community, is highly determined by the affordances of platforms and the desires of their user-developers.
Thor Baukhol Madsen - 19.02.2015 - 15:42
