digital [humanities|libraries] – Page 10

July 2, 2003

> read book

A friend wrote some weeks ago: “i like… the way your words get all twisty when you’re sleepy.” Well, that’s lucky for me, because sleepy seems the only state in which I write these posts lately.

Today, I completely surprised myself by getting through upwards of 45 pages of Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext, which I’m re-reading for work. It’s not that I don’t like it; it’s thoroughly enjoyable. It’s that I am a very slow reader. As recently as yesterday or today, there was a discussion of common reading speeds over at ifMUD, in which people were saying that one minute per page is decently common. On a good day, I can get through at about 3-4 minutes per page; usually, it takes much more time.

I used to swallow books whole, when I was a kid. Lightning-speed reading. Then I learned English, and then Italian, and never worked on reading speed in those languages. Didn’t know how: reading quickly in Russian always came naturally, from a very young age. (Thanks, big brother, for sitting me down and making me learn to read. His patience, in retrospect, is remarkable. Have I mentioned how very cool my brother is?) Nowadays, it’s difficult to get lost in a book – unless, for some unexplained reason, it’s the Harry Potter series or a handful of other authors, including Sturgeon, Gaiman and some Heinlein. I don’t mind it one way or the other, but graduate school reading load being what it is, time management has been a challenge.

On the other hand, when I know that any given project is more than halfway done, the rest seems to come more easily. Cybertext is way more than halfway done. Woot!

Particularly delightful this evening has been Aarseth’s explanation of the interactive fiction “walkthru” – “a step-by-step recipe that contains the solution, and ‘walks’ the user through a game.” (117) A recipe! That contains the solution, which is another name for potion, which requires a recipe in order to be made! But the recipe contains the solution; the description of the ingredients and their proper mixing procedures contains the ingredients themselves. I love recursive word happiness.

I’d promised myself to not write another entry without wording something new about Roland^HT. It’s difficult, though, to get started. Finding a recent Planned Obsolescence post about this tonight is kicking me into writing something. So what if it’s disjointed. I’m just out to voice it, before I forget it. Sometime in the near future this will get reworked and stuck into the thesis somewhere. (Comments from my dear, numerous readers will of course be invaluable in this.)

Roland is a corpus of works, spanning oral and written poetry and prose; drama; painting and drawing; music; electronic hypertext; and god knows what else. He may or may not have been a real person; if he did exist, he lived in the 8th century A.D. and died in 778 in the service of King Charlemagne of France, as the captain of his Breton March. Historical reality is pretty much irrelevant here, though, because in late 11th century the Song of Roland (Chanson de Roland) was written down in France, and from there spread like wildfire. I say written down, because it is obviously an epic poem strongly rooted in the oral storytelling tradition, which had to have been in existence long before the first extant manuscript.

So, from there, everyone and their brother has written about Roland in the West. This has been true for upwards of 900 years, and shows no signs of stopping. Most recently, there have been two Italian prose retellings of Renaissance-era epic poems about Roland; a Warren Zevon song (“Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”) which recalls strongly the plot of the French epic; an electronic game based on this character; and a four-issue comic book based on the French Song of Roland. He’s so rooted most everywhere in the West, it’s ridiculous.

So, here’s the main, most pressing problem. Here is a corpus of Roland works which has never been studied as a whole. How should it be approached, from a theoretical perspective? I tried applying Propp’s morphology of the folk tale to some Roland stories, but that morphology is meant to be a literary tool, and does not speak to Roland’s other forms. Numerous literary theorists, useful as their work is, are again working with literature. A new typology should be worked out for the study of a character’s permutations along a complex multi-dimensional coordinate scheme defined by temporal, cultural and generic axes.

Aarseth’s right: a typology for the study of cybertext (Roland’s a cybertext; I’ll write about this further another time) must be functional. But how do I come up with such a typology without ever having studied (say) art history formally? There seems to be an overwhelming need for knowing everything about all these constituent art forms. To know everything is impossible, so I’ll find a compromise; but what’s enough?

For that matter, I’ve looked for formal studies of character (fictional or historical or both; the key being, across art forms), and have been unable to find any. If anyone has suggestions for sources, I’d love to hear them.

May 13, 2003

audio from e(X)literature

I didn’t go to this conference, organized by the Electronic Literature Organization and/around its Preservation, Archiving and Dissemination committee. So it’s really great they put up what looks like all of the audio from the sessions!

May 12, 2003

sketchy thoughts on materiality

I wrote a paper… a first draft, anyway, in part prompted by this post on Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Web log (and also the discussion that prompted Matt’s post). The paper’s called Three Short Case Studies on Materiality in New Media and can be found here. I’d like to flesh it out more over the summer, and would love feedback! (As long as it’s, you know. Constructive.)

I guess, if I were to write a one-thought synopsis of what I’m trying to get at, it would be: materiality, by whatever name, does matter in new media. Considered on a case-by-electronic-case basis, it can be revealing of our (humans’? Western humans’?) interaction with language and art in general.

April 28, 2003

T minus one week

My prelim is in one week and two hours. There’s a symmetry to this one-two deal that makes me happy. Also, I’ve got an article due on the 30th. Consequently, I have been thinking Very Academic Thoughts. These are some of the things that have been on my mind lately.

Hypertext, the h word, is almost a bad word nowadays. Like Noah did, I went back to Theodor Nelson’s definition. “Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written and pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. [and then in a footnote:] The sense of ‘hyper-‘ used here connotes extension and generality: cf. “hyperspace.” The criterion for this prefix is the inability of these objects to be comprised sensibly into linear media, like the text string, or even media of somewhat higher complexity.” (This is from his talk at the ACM proceedings in 1965.)

Nelson’s done with that definition, it seems, it’s mutated and so has the computer. But we still attempt to find a definition for hypertext, or else to coin better suited words.

I am not saying anything new, but keep coming back to this: the “problem” isn’t with the term, the term’s fine. In defining it, Nelson hit on a quality intrinsic to the human experience. Everything, the world, is a hypertext; this is a scary concept to academics, because it is too vague and imprecise. Still, it’s unproductive to deny this, or to shy away from it. The question shouldn’t be whether a set of data is or is not a hypertext, but rather whether it’s interesting or revealing to represent it as such electronically.

The electronic medium is the most suited one in which to define the Roland corpus, because Roland is a hypertext spanning different media. He is in literature, film, theater, music, painting, drawing, sculpture, stone carvings… I’m probably forgetting something. (Are sculptures and stone carvings distinct, or is it all sculpture?..) Combining them, viewing them through the codified electronic eye acts as an equalizer. Any critical discourse affects the way we view an artifact, and critical discourse of several media which takes place in an altogether different medium fails to skew perspective in favor of one of the constituent corpus media. Am I making any sense, and if so, am I full of nonsense?

In writing the to-be-published article (as opposed to my written prelim, which is more than twice as long and will only be read by my committee), I omitted heuretics entirely. It is the lifeblood of my research, but I omitted it, finding it impossible to explain what’s going on with Roland^HT, put forth some preliminary conclusions and defend the heuretic approach, all in 6000 words or less. Greg Ulmer suggests scholarship as creativity, “a generative experiment: based on a given theory, how might another text be composed?” (Heuretics: The Logic of Invention 5). This feels liberating and right, both in my own research and in my thinking about teaching. (I’ll get to implement the teaching next spring, in “Codex to code: an introduction to humanities computing.”)

This’ll be its own article. But not until after prelim. And the two term papers. And the article. And Electronic Cabaret, at which I am apparently reading. Woot.

Besides academia, I am thinking about the summer. For all its foreseeable (and foreseen) difficulties, it will satisfy my wanderlust like no summer before it… mm, save perhaps 2002. Road trip down to Athens, through Roanoke where we get to stay with a friend I haven’t seen since December. After the conference, on to Huntsville, Alabama, where I’ll meet an exceedingly cool laser physicist MUDfriend whom I’ve never actually met in non-digital space. Then Memphis, the Mississippi river, New Orleans. West to Albuquerque, where Scott and Rachel are young doctors in residency and in love. Then Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles. Two and a half months in LA to do work and be with family, then drive north to Nevada, hang out with thirty thousand community-oriented nutjobs for a while, drive back east through Madison and probably Chicago.

In-between, learn perl, encode a 700-page text, digitize all my primary Roland sources.

I can’t wait ’til summer.

Oh, also, I’m thinking of applying for a Fulbright, and to that end am looking for experienced guidance wrt the application process.

March 19, 2003

tale of two talks

Yesterday and the day before I went to two talks given by N.Katherine Hayles here in the area.

The first, on Monday, took place at RISD. There, NKH talked about her work-in-progress book, titled Coding the Signifier. She spoke from her perspective as a literary scholar, and much of her work is aimed at an audience of literary scholars who, she says, must look at new media objects, evolving experimental digital literature, in order to – well – keep up with their field. We must, she (rightly) insists, study and understand all aspects of digital literature, and this includes the code behind it. We cannot base our understanding of electronic literature (I use terms interchangeably here) exclusively on the natural-language words in it. (The next day, at Brown, Hayles even raised the question of whether e-lit has to have words in it in order to be considered e-lit.) We must know and understand [some variety of] code, even as we continue to work as literary scholars and not computer programmers.

To learn code, she suggests we look at literary electronic objects, for example, Lexia to Perplexia. If they are Web pages, we can view source and see (some of) the code behind them. If they aren’t, well, we can always ask an author for access to muck about inside a particular work’s files, without modifying them.

Allusions were made also to electronic scholarly resources – like, for example, the Rossetti Archive. Conspicuously missing from this first talk, however, was any discussion of the practice of building such resources as this combination of literary and new media scholarship that NKH is getting at. We have already seen, with Rossetti and Dante and Blake and so many others, that looking at print literature through and with our electronic tools yields fascinating ways to look at literary production (“as a system”!) that haven’t occurred to us before. It seems to me that electronic literary study must include a conscious awareness of both creative and scholarly electronic writing. Natural language is changed by code, NKH says, and vice versa. We can’t afford to ignore the ways in which the natural language of exclusively-print literature changes when code is applied to its interpretation.

I’m becoming fond of typologies – they are useful. I wonder how well the following classification works, when thinking of the essential components of literary study. (These aren’t to be confused with a necessity to be an expert in all of them; of course we specialize in one more than the rest. But awareness of each of these categories, an elementary familiarity with the problems they explore, is absolutely critical to our understanding of the interplay between literature and the electronic medium.)

Creative electronic writing. As said above, this includes both the literary-plot text and the code used to manipulate and present it. If this means looking at what’s possible in DHTML, Flash and GIS, then so be it. It doesn’t actually take all that much time to understand the principles behind these systems, at least to the point where one understands what all the pretty pictures mean.

Philosophical and other theoretical bases for creative electronic writing. This includes theories that were put forth long before the advent of the electronic age. NKH talked a lot about Saussure and semiotics, for example.

Paper-based or paper-presentable criticism of creative electronic writing. [Part of] Hayles’ own Writing Machines – or at least the paper-bound book (as distinguished from the Web supplement) – is an example of this.

Electronic theory and criticism of new media. Take some ebr articles, for example.

Electronic theory and criticism which takes as its object of study non-electronic writing. An additional example to the ones I gave above would be the Decameron Web.

I guess what I am driving at is: the natural language that is being changed by code is not only the literary, but also the critical. This applies not only to literary studies, but to the whole of the humanities. We theorize in code – for example, by semantically encoding literary texts. I do not presume to ask that all humanists perform semantic encoding, or use GIS to study history. But to understand in rudimentary ways how these systems work is an imperative.

Of course, NKH talked more about this more the next day, at Brown. (What follows is more of a disjointed sketch of what was said, by her and the audience, than a detailed analysis.) Here, she discussed her and Anne Burdick’s work on Writing Machines. In the book, NKH takes a close look at three objects belonging to three different genres: Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia (new media work), Danielewski’s House of Leaves (experimental print novel) and Phillips’ A Humument (artist’s book). Analysis of a literary work should be medium-specific, she says as she discusses the materiality of these works. (She distinguishes this from physicality – which “doesn’t get you closer to the work’s meaning.” Materiality is those aspects of the physical object which are part of a work’s set of signifying strategies.) Wholly ignoring the physical aspects of a work of literature, attempting to study some sort of an ethereal Text which is unconnected to how it is presented in any given artifact, excludes a significant body of semantic information from the scope of inquiry.

Fascinating and rich, and I’m not doing it justice here. Her emphasis, even in electronically-anchored study of print literature, is on the contemporary and the experimental. Extremely useful, essential; but, in a literary-scholarship context, this needs to be considered alongside more… traditional… literature – I use this word with caution. After all, the Divine Comedy was pretty radical in both content and form, in its time.

February 10, 2003

CALL FOR PAPERS — MLA 2003 (http://www.mla.org)

27-30 December 2003, San Diego, CA

—Electronic Theory and Criticism—
Session sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (http://www.ach.org)

This session will focus on humanistic critical and theoretical exposition composed in and for various forms of the electronic medium. Submissions are invited on any related topic. The following are merely some examples:

– semantic encoding as critical exposition;
– audience, and readability with regard to scholarly hypermedia;
– the role of interface in critical electronic exposition;
– reception of critical electronic exposition.

Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words; completed papers are also acceptable. Participants in all sessions must be listed on the membership rolls by 7 April or have been granted a waiver of membership. By submitting a proposal you agree to travel to San Diego for the convention in the event that your submission is accepted. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide travel funding; however, MLA does have some financial assistance available on a year-to-year basis. Please see the MLA Web site for more details.

Please use plain text or MS Word format. The deadline is 3 March 2003. Submissions and any questions should be e-mailed to vika–at–wordsend.org. Please pass on this Call For Papers as you deem appropriate.

November 18, 2002

echoes in the network

I mused recently:

If you send an e-mail
and there’s no answer
and you send another e-mail
and there’s still no answer

did your e-mails make a sound?

Talan responded to the effect of: data makes language-like noise which is interpretable by the machine.

“In that regard, it is not the message that is silent, not producing a sound, but the human agent, the correpondent at the other end of the line. […] [I]t would seem… the riddle is more about the echo the message produces.”

The message produces an echo, but we don’t know where it is. We can’t hear it, cannot physically access the network “space”. Sometimes we request receipt, an electronic bounce that tells us the intended recipient (or hacker) has opened our e-mail, if not actually read it. But, unless the hands on the other side of this cup-and-string phone type OK, we don’t get receipt. So it’s not an echo. The only echo is the transmission.

Songs about Roland were transmitted first by the jongleurs, traveling minstrels. If we follow the above logic, then the results of this transmission � the comic-epic poems of the Italian Renaissance, the Sicilian puppet theatre, the recreation of Roland as fanatical religious martyr in Germany and as Civil War Hero in the U.S. � do not matter. What matters is the transmission itself, and possibly the vehicles of the transmission.

I’m most interested in the echo aspect. Echo is not the exact repetition of a sound; it is the original sound, modified. The precise way in which it is modified is directly dependent on immediate surroundings. The precise ways in which Roland is modified are a direct result of the cultural exigencies of the time. So, changes in cultures across geographical and temporal space may be inferred from a close look at the mutations Roland’s character and his stories continue to undergo.