Words’ End

Oh, Friday! Friday was a big day for electronic literature and the digital humanities (see this earlier post). A great session to go to was “New Reading Interfaces,” presided over by Rita Raley who knows how to get a discussion going. Here are some cool projects and topics discussed in this session.

Jeremy Douglass talked about tag clouds as an aesthetic medium. They are web browsing interfaces, and despite their name they’re usually organized alphabetically or by popularity. Douglass takes the idea of cloud and runs with it, exploring them as a creative medium: the example he gave of this was the Flickr Fiesta 2005 invite he received by email. Algorithmically sophisticated literary renderings like TextArc, where terms have geographic meaning may look like tag clouds, but the latter are much simpler, Douglass said; plus, TextArc isn’t searchable, whereas tag clouds are. Later in the session, he brought home the broad(er) point that the tag cloud isn’t just a utilitarian interface; it can be portraiture, for example when some blogs replace their mastheads with tag clouds.

Then Joseph Tabbi talked about the semantic literary web, mostly in the context of the ELO Archive-It MediaWiki, a joint project with the Library of Congress. How do you preserve something, Tabbi asked? Well, you can tag it, which is limited but useful as a field-building (as opposed to literary) activity. OK, so what counts as a literary interface? Clouds are interesting as conceptual art, but their literariness (found through reading) is limited. Tabbi talked about Electronic Book Review (ebr) as an example of experiments in literary interfaces: the ebr website gets completely overhauled every couple of years, sometimes with sub-optimal for readability results. The key, for Tabbi, is to find conceptual connections while reading, and cross-link, cross-categorize – both to writing within and outside electronicbookreview.com.

Elizabeth Swanstorm talked about the interface in Jeffrey Shaw’s installation piece The Legible City. This is one I would travel overseas to play with, given more time and financial resources. Here’s how Shaw himself describes it:

In The Legible City the visitor is able to ride a stationary bicycle through a simulated representation of a city that is constituted by computer-generated three-dimensional letters that form words and sentences along the sides of the streets. Using the ground plans of actual cities – Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe – the existing architecture of these cities is completely replaced by textual formations written and compiled by Dirk Groeneveld. Travelling through these cities of words is consequently a journey of reading; choosing the path one takes is a choice of texts as well as their spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions of meaning.

Better: the latest installation is multiplayer! If people are using more than one stationary bike, they may encounter each other’s avatars in the virtual world. So each rider is a node in a distributed networked system; their actions influence others’ virtual world; and their physical surroundings, irrelevant, fall away. So what kind of interactor, Swanstorm asked, does The Legible City produce – readers, riders, writers? Her eventual thesis was that this project highlights textual analysis as something one does by actively interacting with the text. No kidding; imagine giving undergraduate students of literary writing and/or criticism the visceral experience of this installation. They’d have a different relationship with literature forevermore.

Finally, Victoria Szabo talked about teaching, reading and creating scholarly works in 3D environments. Specifically, she talked about how they (Information Science + Information Studies at Duke) use Second Life in teaching. Students create objects, hold events and collaborate on criticism virtually… oh, just look at the ISIS site I just linked to. Szabo’s overarching point was this architectural metaphor: building and thinking are closely related. They put this into successful ongoing practice over at ISIS, encouraging students to combine creative and critical acts in their use of 3D virtual worlds.