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1. Algorithmic Invention

   In his 1966 essay “Rhétorique et enseignement,” Gérard Genette observes that literary studies did not always emphasize the reading of texts. Before the end of the nineteenth century, the study of literature revolved around the art of writing. Texts were not objects to interpret but models to imitate. The study of literature emphasized elocutio, or style and the arrangement of words. With the rise of literary history, academic reading approached texts as objects to be explained. Students learned to read in order to write essays (dissertations) where they analyzed texts according to prescribed methods. This new way of studying literature stressed dispositio, or the organization of ideas. Recent developments in information technology have further challenged paradigms for reading literature. Digital tools and resources allow for the study of large collections of texts using quantitative methods. Various computational methods of distant as well as close reading facilitate investigations into fundamental questions of the possibilities for literary creation. Technology has the potential for exploring inventio, or the finding of ideas that can be expressed through writing.

   Li Yi - 29.08.2018 - 15:27

2. e-Loops in e-Lit: Mechanical Reflexive Reading

   Loops are mostly patterns: patterns based on a predetermined set of repetitions, and that allows for a recognizable sense of progression and movement. It is used and perceived as a structure whose impact on interpretation can be considerable. This presentation focuses on how the loop defined as a shape, a process and a pattern becomes a figure in contemporary electronic literature works and practices. I will investigate this particularity of digital writing by examining how loops condition reading and writing practices. How do e-loops revisit interpretation processes? More specifically, does the loop’s reflexivity echoes the electronic text it produces?

   Li Yi - 29.08.2018 - 15:48

3. Literature Mods

   This paper presents a critical framework about literature mods—modifications of source code and surface of literary works—and a set of new empirical methods—modifying deformances—as a way of reading and analyzing the behavior of digital kinetic poems, since they move in time and space. How to simply read poems behaving as changing events? How to read poems that display at extremely high speed? How to critically analyze surfaces of inscription that may be impossible to be read? What methods of criticism can be set in practice in order to read kinetic poems? The problem of how to read digital poems, how to interpret them, and how to write criticism about them is closely tied to what kind of methods the reader and scholar use. Some of these methods can, and should require practical engagement with the creative works, a point that C. T. Funkhouser (2014) highlights. In fact, that is the type of “computational poetics” methodology that, in “operating” the code and interface, Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort (2013) call for.

   Li Yi - 29.08.2018 - 15:57

4. Hey Siri, Tell Me a Story: AI, Procedural Generation, and Digital Narratives

   This paper examines a selection of examples of AI storytelling from film, games, and interactive fiction to imagine the future of AI authorship and to question the impetus behind this trend of replacing human authors with algorithmically generated narrative. Increasingly, we’re becoming familiarized with AI agents as they are integrated into our daily lives in the form of personified virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Recently, director Oscar Sharp and artist Ross Goodwin generated significant media buzz about two short films that they produced which were written by their AI screenwriter, who named himself Benjamin. Both Sunspring (2016) and It’s No Game (2017) were created by Goodwin’s long short-term memory (LSTM) AI that was trained on media content that included science fiction scripts and dialogue delivered by actor David Hasselhoff. It’s No Game offers an especially apt metacommentary on AI storytelling as it addresses the possibility of a writers strike and imagines that entertainment corporations opt out of union negotiations and instead replace their writers with AI authors.

   Jane Lausten - 05.09.2018 - 14:57

5. Engineering Language: Electronic Literature, the “Value” of Words, and the Teaching of College Writing

   Since the widespread adoption of the printing press, we have been writing with and for machines. However, the ways in which and the extent to which machines could participate in acts of writing have changed over time. We have now reached a point where machines play an active role not only in the reproduction and distribution of writing, but in its production and, even, at times, in its creation and composition. As we find ourselves more and more writing with and for machines, there is the possibility that compositional functions once assigned uniquely to humans can be outsourced or automated.

   Li Yi - 05.09.2018 - 15:06

6. Is there a gap in the classroom? Inanimate Alice in Portuguese schools

   There is still a big gap between electronic literature for children and Portuguese schools. Actually, this situation is in contrast with the increasing interest the educational community and publishers show in print literature for children and young adults in Portugal.
   In this paper we aim to develop the steps that the team from the project Inanimate Alice: Translating Electronic Literature for an Educational Context (Centre of Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra) took in order to give Portuguese students the opportunity to experience e-lit.
   As our ultimate goal is to introduce e-lit in Portuguese schools, the team has translated the first five episodes of Inanimate Alice and is now working on the translation of the Pedagogical Guidance, created by Bill Boyd.
   To accomplish that, we needed to find financial support to publish the Portuguese version of the series. So we contacted the two biggest education-oriented Publishing Companies in Portugal, but they rely a lot on the ministerial documents and they barely dare to innovate, as it is safer to publish what the Ministry of Education (ME) recommends schools, teachers and students to buy.

   Li Yi - 05.09.2018 - 15:48

7. Pleasure and E-Lit: Looking at the Difficult and Unfamiliar in the Undergraduate Classroom

   In their 2001 book Art with a Difference: Looking at Difficult and Unfamiliar Art, Leonard Diepeeveen and Timothy Van Laar observe “Artwork is not just an object; it is an object (or event) that does something. The most basic thing an artwork does is give its viewers an implicit set of instructions for its use; it suggests ways in which it ought to be experienced” (95).

   While not written with electronic literature in mind, the book was designed as a supplementary text for beginning arts courses with an awareness of the difficulty that many beginning or non- specialist readers have in understanding contemporary art. The e-lit classroom can be beset by similar difficulties; even the most avid readers in a class can be puzzled by or resistant to the diverse cognitive and ergodic “reading” activities that accrue under the banner of electronic literature.

   Li Yi - 05.09.2018 - 16:01

8. Fight Like a Girl: Digital Storytelling For Self-Motivation Strategies Used By Women Athletes in Muay Thai

   This short paper is an excerpt from my major research project, a knowledge translation project which seeks to create an accessible interactive fiction piece to teach self-motivation strategies utilized by women athletes. This project consists of an interdisciplinary literature review and interviews focused on how women self-motivate as amateur athletes in Muay Thai. This data will then be used in a knowledge translation project involving a game creation, including writing a script for the game based on the interviews to encompass a "typical" woman fighter in Muay Thai, inputting this script into the Twine program to generate a playable game, and doing a quality assurance roll out to ensure the game works in its technical aspects. 

   This paper focuses on audience and accessibility, and how new media storytelling can be a pedagogical tool as well as entertainment. By using a narrative, arts-based approach as the framework, the goal of the project is to communicate with consumers on an emotional level in a meaningful way. 

   Amirah Mahomed - 19.09.2018 - 14:13

9. Literature after the Technological Singularity

   I consider an expanded version of the technological singularity, that moment at which humanity will be transformed in an unrecognizable way – the biggest gap in human history. As I see it, the singularity may result either from the superintelligence of bootstrapping AIs or from superstupidity as we, using technology, cause our own species to go extinct. What will literature be like after this event? It seems hard enough to write a poem that will be of interest to the next generation or to produce an electronic literature work that can be read and accessed in a practical way after a few decades. My argument, however, is that only literature deeply engaged with computation will have any chance to remain relevant after the extinction or radical transformation of all human life. This includes work done by Christian Bök in xenopoetics – but because of the compositional process of the core poem of The Xenotext Project, not because of the proposed genetic encoding of that text.

   Amirah Mahomed - 19.09.2018 - 14:37

10. PoéticaSonora: Prototyping in Montreal a Digital Audio Repository for Latin American Sound Art and Poetry

    This poster and lightning talk will introduce PoéticaSonora (http://poeticasonora.mx), an international research group developed by professors and students from Concordia University (Montreal) and UNAM (Mexico City) seeking to question the primacy of textual dimension in art and literature by addressing the legibility of sound, the nexus between sound and inscription, and the evasiveness of voice in print and other writing systems. It seeks to archive, preserve, and disseminate works by Latin American sound artists and poets in digital audio format (mainly in Spanish, but not limited to this language), as well as to facilitate the study of these authors and trends. Founded in 2016, it operates under two complementary axes, preservation and activation. While many academic and artistic events are hosted throughout the year, mainly in Mexico City, fieldwork and archival research is regularly conducted to gather audio files for our main project, the Digital Audio Repository for Sound Art and Sound Poetry (DARLA, work-in-progress name https://poeticasonora.me/searchhome).

    Amirah Mahomed - 19.09.2018 - 14:47

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