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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. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. Do Games Really Ever End?

   During the 1990’s, reports of people dreaming about arranging geometric shapes became so widespread that newscasts worldwide dubbed the phenomena the “Tetriseffect.” In The Aesthetics of Play, Brian Upton posits that we play games by acting on internalized analogues of the game’s formal constraints. We need not understand the complexity of its code, so long as “we have constructed a set of internal constraints that correctly predict future evolutions of the game’s state, ... we can make meaningful decisions” (Upton 119). Between play sessions, these mental models of gameworlds allow players to continue playing the game by planning new strategies or considering difficult puzzles, thus never really ceasing to play the game. My proposed paper will build on Upton’s epistemological model of play to explore how we play our favorite games even after the computer has been shut down by looking at activities such as metagaming, coaching, and training in the competitive on-line shooter Overwatch.

   Stian Hansen - 03.09.2018 - 18:41

9. Hypertropic Story Spaces: Ambient Literature in Practice.

   The Ambient Literature project explores situated digital storytelling as it responds to the presence of a reader. Within an Ambient Literary work, urban space is reconfigured as a paratextual site to be ‘read’ just as we read the form of a book; becoming the site for story.

   The foundation of the study are three commissioned works, each exploring an approach to the design and delivery of a digitally-mediated experience of urban space. These works, successively released in 2017 and 2018, comprise a research- by-practice approach to developing forms for digital writing – ‘It Must Have Been Dark by Then’, ‘The Cartographer’s Confession’ and ‘Breathe’ - each employ different approaches to the positioning role of the reader; the manner in which their presence is implicated in the construction of story; and the specific qualities of that presence within (and around) the works.

   Akvile Sinkeviciute - 05.09.2018 - 15:47

10. Digital Deep-Sea Diving: navigating the narrative depths of E-lit and VR

    Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus. We enjoy the movement out of our familiar world, the feeling of alertness that comes from being in this new place, and the delight that comes from learning to move within it. 
    –Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck

    June Hovdenakk - 05.09.2018 - 15:52

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