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From page to screen: placing hypertext fiction in an historical and contemporary context of print and electronic literary experiments
Only recently has our perception of the computer, now a familiar and ubiquitous element of everyday life, changed from seeing it as a mere tool to regarding it as a medium for creative expression. Computer technologies such as multimedia and hypertext applications have sparked an active critical debate not only about the future of the book format, ("the late age of print" {Bolter} is only one term used to describe the shift away from traditional print media to new forms of electronic communication) but also about the future of literature. Hypertext Fiction is the most prominent of proposed electronic literary forms and strong claims have been made about it: it will radically alter concepts of text, author and reader, enable forms of non-linear writing closer to the associative working of the mind, and make possible reader interaction with the text on a level impossible in printed text. So far the debate that has attempted to put hypertext fiction into a historical perspective has linked it to two developments.
Scott Rettberg - 13.12.2012 - 23:40
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I, Chatbot: The Gender and Race Performativity of Conversational Agents
Amidst the various forms of electronic literature stands a class of interactive programs that simulates human conversation. A chatbot, or chatterbot, is a program with which users can “speak,” typically by exchanging text through an instant-messaging style interface. Chatbots have been therapists, Web site hosts, language instructors, and even performers in interactive narratives. Over the past ten years, they have proliferated across the Internet, despite being based on a technology that predates the Web by thirty years. In my readings, these chatbots are synedochic of the process by which networked identities form on the Internet within the power dynamics of hegemonic masculinity. Chatbots, in this light, model the collaborative performance humans enact on electronically-mediated networks.
Scott Rettberg - 14.12.2012 - 01:12
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Theory and technology for computational narrative: an approach to generative and interactive narrative with bases in algebraic semiotics and cognitive linguistics
This dissertation presents theoretical and technical support for, and implementations of, narrative computational media works with the following characteristics: generative content, semantics-based interaction, reconfigurable narrative structure, and strong cognitive and socio-cultural grounding. A system that can dynamically compose media elements (such as procedural computer graphics, digital video, or text) to result in new media elements can be said to generate content. The GRIOT system, a result of this dissertation, provides an example of this. It has been used to implement computational poetry that generates new narrative poems with varying particular concepts, but fixed themes, upon each execution. This generativity is enabled by the Alloy system, which implements an algorithm that models key aspects of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's theory of conceptual blending. Alloy is the first implementation of Joseph Goguen's algebraic semiotics approach to blending. (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002; Goguen, 1998) This research also contributes to the theory of algebraic semiotics by developing a blending-based notion of style.
Scott Rettberg - 14.12.2012 - 09:37
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Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame 'Adventure'
In a New Critical approach rarely seen in academic discussions of IF, Buckles de-emphasizes the role of the programmer/author, taking "Colossal Cave Adventure" (Crowther, c.1975; Crowther and Woods, 1976) as a "given," and examining instead the reader/player's efforts to make meaning out of the experience. As an immature medium, IF has not yet produced great literature: "I do not believe that the literary limitations of Adventure means that computer story games are of necessity a sub-literary genre, or that there is something about the computer medium itself which pre-destines interactive fiction always to be frivolous in nature. The development of film can be taken as an analogy."
(Source: Dennis G. Jerz, Interactive Fiction Annotated Bibliography http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/bibliography/all.htm#Buckles_1985)
Scott Rettberg - 14.12.2012 - 09:54
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Poetic Machines: an investigation into the impact of the characteristics of the digital apparatus on poetic expression
This thesis aims to investigate digital methods of signification in order to examine the impact of the apparatus on poetic expression. This is done through a critical analysis of the translation process from analogue to digital, in the sense that even as we read a page we are in fact translating sight into sound. The resulting effects of this change in form are explored in order to understand their impact on meaning-making in the digital realm. Through this interrogation the comprehension and definition of ePoetry (electronic poetry or digital poetry) is extended, by exposing the unique affordances and specificities of digital expression. Digital poetry theorists such as Loss Pequeño Glazier posit that the emerging field of electronic literature is composed of interweaving strands from the areas of computer science, sociology, and literary studies. This is reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of this thesis, which necessitates an engagement with the broad areas of translation, literature, and digital media studies.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 14:33
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A homecoming festival : the application of the dialogic concepts of addressivity and the awareness of participation to an aesthetic of computer-mediated textual art
A homecoming festival : the application of the dialogic concepts of addressivity and the awareness of participation to an aesthetic of computer-mediated textual art
Scott Rettberg - 20.01.2013 - 00:01
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The Gothic in Contemporary Interactive Fictions
This study examines how themes, conventions and concepts in Gothic discourses are remediated or developed in selected works of contemporary interactive fiction. These works, which are wholly text-based and proceed via command line input from a player, include Nevermore, by Nate Cull (2000), Anchorhead, by Michael S. Gentry (1998), Madam Spider’s Web, by Sara Dee (2006) and Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). The interactive fictions are examined using a media-specific, in-depth analytical approach.
Scott Rettberg - 23.01.2013 - 23:37
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Szellem a gépben. A hypertext
The subject of the dissertation is the text represented on the World Wide Web, it’s problems, dilemmas, premises and possible ways of development. This text, which is recorded only in binary code, and the questions it rises is in the dissertation called the new literacy. At the end of the 20th century, the literary critic taged all the new phenomenons, forms and medias as postmodern. The aim of my work is to show, the text on the World Wide Web, and eventually the hypertext is not anymore part of postmodern. The World Wide Web, CD-roms, binary recorded text, and the hypertext raised multiple questions: what are the characteristics of new texts, who is the author, what is the purpose of literary critic, how can the documents be catalogised, etc. The materials used in dissertation are mostly written in English and Hungarian. The hypertext provides a connection between visual, oral and written communication, so the World Wide Web is a space where the arts are molded. The literery content on the World Wide Web has serious ties to matematics, filosophy more then anything ever before.
Patricia Tomaszek - 25.02.2013 - 15:05
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Hypertext and Ethnographic Representation: A Case Study
This study explores the ways in which ethnographic data might be represented within a hypertext format. It begins with an analysis of the historical roots of the technology to determine key characteristics that differentiate it from other media. Three characteristics surface through this analysis: multilinearity, multivocality, and multimodality. The current study examines these characteristics from a more critical stance to determine what is possible in practice. To this end, three ethnographic hypertexts are analyzed to determine strengths and weaknesses. From this analysis, a set of design implications emerge that provides a framework for a case study entitled The Congo Prototype . The Congo Prototype is built from an extensive study of a museum located in Belgium, The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), along with interviews with colonial veterans who served in the Congo up until Independence. This work offers the reader specific techniques that might be incorporated into future works, and at the same time, provides a stand alone ethnographic study of numerous narratives revolving around the Belgian Congo.
Patricia Tomaszek - 20.04.2013 - 14:10
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Towards Cinematic Hypertext : A theoretical and Empirical Investigation
Hypertext’s non-linearity has critical implications for scholarly discourse and argumentation, where it is commonly considered important to control the reader’s exposure to the line of reasoning in order to communicate complex ideas and maximise rhetorical impact. Hypertext’s non-linearity has been seen to threaten authors ’ control over discourse order and the coherence of their argumentative discourse. Existing hypertext paradigms offer different solutions to the problem of preserving user-defined navigation whilst maintaining coherence: pagebased hypertext relies on the expressiveness of linear associative writing; semantic hypertext relies on the expressiveness of link taxonomies; spatial hypertext relies on the expressiveness of hypertext’s visual features. This research combines elements of these with new theoretical insights, to investigate a fourth paradigm referred to as Cinematic Hypertext. The problem of maintaining coherence is framed as the problem of representing
Jill Walker Rettberg - 14.06.2013 - 09:25
