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1. Three Entrances

   This talk will link a discussion of the interface to the representation of fictional entrances in narratives. In the effort to keep it within the time limit, it is build around three images of the entrance: the moment in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad when the fantastical, titular train first appears in the novel, Alexander Galloway’s treatment of our interface on the fictional world of Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait, and the opening few “rooms” of the 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure, a classical electronic narrative that pioneered the text-based interface on the textual world that defined interactive fiction.

   The goal of this talk will be to investigate the concept of the interface as a term that can travel between the design of the artifact (digital, written, or visual text) and the world represented. Galloway provides an account of the politics of the interface, and I will explore how that account explains these three very different texts.

   Daniel Punday - 13.08.2018 - 20:38

2. What Natural Language Generation Means for Authorship and Why We Should Care

   Natural language generation (NLG) – the process wherein computers translate data into readable human languages – has become increasingly present in our modern digital climate. In the last decade, numerous companies specialising in the mass-production of computer-generated news articles have emerged; National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo) has become a popular annual event; #botALLY is used to identify those in support of automated agents producing tweets. Yet NLG has not been subject to any systematic study within the humanities.

   leahhenrickson - 13.08.2018 - 21:09

3. Forms and Platforms

   Forms and Platforms

   Chiara Agostinelli - 29.08.2018 - 15:15

4. Engineered Opacity and Illegible Interfaces in Ted Warnell's CODE STORY

   Ted Warnell’s 2005 digital code portrait project CODE STORY generates its material from a play of interface design and operational opacity. Beginning with digital photos of various friends and fellow writers, Warnell opens these photos in a text editor, generating non-semantic UTF-8 encoded text via the editor’s misinterpretation of the data in the image file. Warnell shapes this error text into new concrete poetic forms, inserting the name of the portrait’s subject throughout the redesigned text, and uses it as the base for two different types of code portraits: the first a dynamic Web page scripted to produce new versions of a portrait with each successive refresh; and the second a static GIF image of the first used to advertise prints of the code portraits sold through the project website. In effect, the operations which generate the poetic interface are made visible as interface through their engineered failure. In a perfect world, a UTF-8 encoding operation would simply result in clear semantic text, carrying no trace of the process by which said text is generated.

   sondre rong davik - 29.08.2018 - 15:22

5. Mod Cyberspace, Mod the World!

   Skawennati and Jason Edward Lewis talk about their experience as co-directors of the Skins workshops in Indigenous Storytelling and Experimental New Media, through which Indigenous youth across Turtle Island have been taught how to make both video games and machinima. Skawennati explain how and why she adopted the internet as her homebase, touching upon early projects such as CyberPowWow and Imagining Indians in the 25th Century and showing excerpts from TimeTraveller™ and She Falls For Ages.

   Carlos Muñoz - 29.08.2018 - 15:25

6. Critical examination of concepts relating to canon, preservation, and access

   Astrid Ensslin (University of Alberta), offers a critical examination of concepts relating to canon, preservation, and access. Adopting an essentially critical outlook on canonization as a process of scholarly and social elitization, she argues that material (financial, geographic, and technological) access has always been a discriminating, regulatory factor in canon development, even if we assume a dynamic concept of canon (Ensslin 2007) or a crowdsourcing, emergent approach (Rettberg 2013) that align with contemporary, fast changing technological developments. Ensslin’s paper focuses on the ​Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext ​(​EQRH​), published in two volumes between 1994 and 1995, which has been largely neglected by digital fiction scholarship, mainly because of incompatibility and obsolescence issues.

   Akvile Sinkeviciute - 29.08.2018 - 15:25

7. Gestural Semiotics and App Fiction

   In his theory of gestural manipulations, Bouchardon (2014; see Ensslin 2014: 82-83) starts from the assumption that “all clicking is interpretive” (160). He proposes a refined view of how readers interact with digital media through a “repertoire of gestures” (161-162), the use of which depends on the physical device used to interact with a particular text. In his view, analyses of gestural manipulations happen at five distinct levels: (1) the gesteme, which is an individual move, such as a key stroke or a mouse click, linking haptic move and interactive interface item; (2) the acteme, which refers to a sequence of individual gestemes combining to form a larger unit of gestural meaning, such as drag-and-drop; (3) the semiotic unit of manipulation (“SUM”), which is the sum of identical or similar actemes and their semiotic function; (4) media coupling, which denotes specific functions and meanings of SUMs in their medial contexts; and (5) interactive discourse, which happens at the superordinate level of digital text in context, and relates to the meanings of gestural interactions against this larger backdrop. 

   Susanne Årflot Løtvedt - 29.08.2018 - 15:28

8. How Computers Read Computer Generated Novels

   In this paper, Whalen proposes a course of study into the textuality of computer-generated novels, specifically the corpus of work generated for NaNoGenMo. Given the scope of this corpus, Whalens' intention is to use text analysis techniques such as topic modeling, frequency analysis, stylometrics, and other varieties of machine reading to explore these questions about the textual characteristics of computer-generated fiction. 

   sondre rong davik - 29.08.2018 - 15:29

9. E-Lit in the Gutter: Applying McCloud's Transition Categories to Interactive Fiction

   Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics has been a staple text in digital media classes for decades. Chapters focusing on topics such as symbolic and iconic representation, relationships between word and image, and the illustration of time provide powerful insights into the creation and interpretation of digital works. McCloud’s analysis of the visual-centric comic medium bears obvious relevance to what we create and see on the screen. For those working in interactive fiction, however, the most useful chapter may be the one dedicated to what cannot be seen. Chapter 3, “Blood in the Gutter”, examines the physical and narrative gaps between frames in a comic strip or book. These gaps, or “gutters” are the visible whitespaces between inked panes and, simultaneously, the conceptual spaces between points in a narrative. McCloud’s examination of these spaces offers valuable insights for both authors and readers of the code-triggered gaps between hyperlinked elements of an interactive fiction. 

   June Hovdenakk - 29.08.2018 - 15:30

10. Scanbed Poetics

    This paper addresses poetry that has begun to probe the scanbed and its sense-making apparatus, optical character recognition (OCR). It surveys a growing list of texts operationalizing the semiotic architecture of digitization to both scrutinize the kinds of ‘reading’ that process performs and to reflect on our contemporary moment of machine generated language and distant, distracted, or otherwise disengaged reading.

    sondre rong davik - 29.08.2018 - 15:38

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