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The Many Ends of Network Fictions: Gamebooks, Hypertexts, Visual Novels, Games and Beyond
This paper presents a digital humanities structural approach to branching stories across several media forms and genres over the past six decades – with special attention to patterns of endings in different narrative networks, as well as meta-patterns that mark the beginnings and endings of genres of branching literature.
Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 15:58
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"'Till Algebra is Easier —': Elements of Computation in the Poems of Emily Dickinson
In this paper, I present close readings of a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems that I propose might be best explained through an understanding of her awareness of the current scientific topics of the time. These include, for example, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Faraday’s and Maxwell’s numerous investigations into electromagnetism in the early to mid 1800s, and the production of Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1847. Specifically, in regards to Babbage’s computing machine, I demonstrate a connection between some of the innovations first formulated by the mathematician and proto-programmer Ada Lovelace in 1842 and 1843, including concepts of looping, modeling, and isomorphism, and Dickinson’s poems, written more than one decade later, which include references to cycles, recursion, and branching. Additionally, I show that there are clear stylistic similarities between Lovelace’s philosophical inquiries into the nascent discipline of computation and some of Dickinson’s poems that might be said to contain algorithmic structures or images.
Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 16:02
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Reading, Seeing, and Sensing: The Internet of Things Makes Literature
Critics have understandably fetishized the electronic page or digital screen as a way to understand the relationship between the algorithmic logics that drive computation and the public rhetorics of display. At the same time an evolving set of practices within electronic literature continues to be in dialogue with contemporary digital media arts practice and its move to explore the meaning of incorporating autonomous sensing and new forms of human-computer interaction in dialogic works. Considering the rhetorical position of devices such as the iPad and considering them as more than viewing apparatuses or interfaces for reading it is possible to engage differently with a whole set of binaries around camera vs. scanner, optics vs. sensors, and representation vs. registration.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 09:45
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Data Visualization Poetics
In the field of networks and big data, data visualization has become very popular in recent years. Scientists, artists, and software designers are working collaboratively using elaborate ways to communicate data, and visual design is playing a substantial role by making the language of science more accessible and comprehensible, through visualisations, in the form of infographics, sculptural objects, installations, sonifications and applications. But why this current outburst? Is it because of the availability of open data? The approachability of visual design? The need for new analytic methodologies in the digital humanities? Or, the fact that it is part of our collective consciousness?
This paper deals with the above questions and has evolved, as a practice-based research, in conjunction with the practical part, a mobile application designed to run on an iPad2 / iPad mini or later models. This work was created specifically for the SILT exhibition, hosted in Hamburg, Germany in June 2014.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 09:50
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The S.I.C. Method and the Great Open Novel: An Unconventional Method for a Conventional End
Crowdsourcing, networking, online community, Fordism, division of labor. These are words that one usually does not think of as being important or pertinent when one is about to buy a book – a historical novel – from a bookstore somewhere in Italy in 2014. And, most of the time, “our common reader” would be right: those words are not important or pertinent. Besides, even the reading of the book itself will not make our common reader change his/her mind: it is a typical historical novel set in the Italian Resistance during World War II. Nothing suspicious at all. Still, something else is at stake here and those opening words not only have something to do with this book but, in some way, they have cooperated to produce it.
Turin, May 12, 2007. At the Fiera del Libro, Italian writers Vanni Santoni and Gregorio Magini presented something that – they hoped – would transform collective writing into a common literary practice: S.I.C., an acronym which stands for Industrial Collective Writing but these three letters, as a matter of fact, contain and mean much more.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 09:55
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From The Unknown to Piksel Zdrój: Collaboration in E-literature: Models, Newcomers, Predictions
The talk reflects on the theoretical and practical aspects of collaboration in e-literature. Firstly a model of digitally enhanced collaboration that could encompass both its past and future instances is proposed. Matching several groups of categories (for example “production / negotiation / creation” against “material / story / discourse”) the model demonstrates that e-literature – even if we are really witnessing the end of it now – maintains its status of an important laboratory for any collaboration in digital environment.
Alongside acclaimed collaborative works (Forward Anywhere, The Unknown, A Million Penguins) several less known examples from Poland will be presented: Digital Green Eye (2012) and Bałwochwał (2013) – collaborative adaptations of Polish avant-garde classics – as well as Piksel Zdrój – a hypertext project by 8 authors published in 2015. The aim of the first part is to introduce both a universal analytical model and some rather unknown examples of e-literature to the international audience.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 09:59
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Letter to an Unknown Soldier: A Participatory Writing Project
This paper will present Letter to an Unknown Soldier, a new kind of war memorial, made entirely of words. Created by writers Neil Bartlett and Kate Pullinger, the project was commissioned by Britain’s 14-18 NOW to mark the centenary of the outbreak of WW1. Inspired by Charles Jagger’s 1922 bronze statue of a soldier, who stands on Platform One of Paddington Station, London, reading a letter, the digital artwork invited everyone in the country to write their own letter to the soldier.
Letter to an Unknown Soldier began with letters commissioned from 50 well-known UK-based writers; it opened to the public for submissions from mid-May 2014, and all the letters received to date went online on 28 June (the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand). The website remained open for submissions for 37 days, until 4 August (the centenary of Britain’s declaration of war). The project quickly snowballed in popularity. By its close, more than 21,400 letters had been received from around the world.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:03
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Electronic Literature as a Means to Overcome the Supremacy of the Author Function
In his seminal essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault maintains that we can only accept literary discourses if they carry an author’s name. Every text of poetry or fiction is obliged to state its author, and if, by accident or design, the text is presented anonymously, we can only accept this as a puzzle to be solved, or, one could add, as an exceptional experiment about authorship that is verifying the rule. This was in 1969. In the meantime, a profound change of all forms of social interaction has been taking place. Amongst them are works of electronic literature that use the computer in an aesthetic way to create combinatory, interactive, intermedial and performative art. One could argue, of course, that electronic literature as new media art often only is a proof of a concept addressed to the few tech-savvy select. However, these purportedly avant-garde pieces break the ground for developments that might happen barely noticed, and by this serve an important political, ideological, aesthetic and commercial purpose. Amongst these developments is a change of the seemingly irrevocable rule of the author in literary discourses.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:07
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Abandoned and Recycled Electronic Literature: Jean-Pierre Balpe’s La Disparition du Général Proust
his presentation addresses the fate of 1990s pioneering programs of electronic literature during the 2000s. What happened to 1990s electronic literature aesthetic theories and programs once its distribution shifted from floppy disks and CD-ROMs to the Internet? How did early authors of electronic literature revisit their work in light of the ubiquity of the Internet as a form of writing?
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:13
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Boolean Poetics: The Search String as Post-Literary Technique
Over the past decade, expanding access to Big Data has produced a number of innovations in electronic literature and digital culture more broadly, ranging from Twitter bots, media art and generative poetry utilizing social data to vernacular creative writing, journalism and fictocriticism on platforms such as Tumblr and BuzzFeed. These divergent modes of expression all rely on the ability to find and sort high-volume, real-time, multimodal digital data – for example tweets, Instagram photos, animated GIFs, YouTube videos, SoundCloud audio tracks and more – and recombine them in novel works of bricolage. Yet despite the increasing prominence of these writing practices, they have received scant scholarly attention.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:16
