Notes and Quotes: New Media Poetics (Watten on page 335)

Notes and Quotes

Barrett Watten (beginning on page 335)

Poetics questions the nature and value of the work of art as it expands the ground of its making into the context of its production and reception (335).

Literariness is in a crisis of new meaning due to its expanded cultural ground (336).

It is the possibility of a univocal/universal literariness that demands an account of poetics as a specific genre (338).

It is important that poetics in the modern era entails equally the positivity of a self-focused mode of organization and the negativity of that which it cannot represent (340).

A paradox emerges where the material text confronts its limits in the alterity of the reader (342).

Corollaries necessary for such an analysis: the genre in question really is structured in relation to a differential field of oppositions, and that this logic of oppositions is productive of new work (349).

Not-language, not-poetry… poetics (349).

The author’s first task in thinking through the question of poetics here has been to disclose a logic of genre that provides a genealogy of poetics and accounts for the range of its practice. The second is to extend this logic to forms of art that have emerged more recently (351).

The interpretive effort, however relentlessly applied, always fails within an overarching architecture of machine interface that absorbs not only interpretation but consciousness and subjectivity into its own orders (364).

We also need to consider poetics’ negative relation to the object and its dialectical or diacritical unfolding as well (365).

Are Memmott’s poetics specified by the nature of new media, or not? And if not, what larger cultural logics inform them? (366).

Notes and Quotes: New Media Poetics (Cayley on page 307)

Notes and Quotes

John Cayley (beginning on page 307)

We must keep asking ourselves, what is code? What is the relationship of code and text in cultural objects that are classified as literary and that are explicitly programmed? (307).

Code that is not the text may instantiate—as durational performance—the signifying strategies of a text (308).

Atoms or instances of language are not things, but processes (309).

For an object to be identified as a process there must be some way for its state to change over time and perhaps enumerate the temporal sequence of such states (310).

Five provisional categories that “code” is used in discussions of codework: Code as language, code as infecting or modulating natural language, code as text to be read if it were natural language, code as a system of correspondences, and code as programming (311-312).

The author wants to read more critically about the code that is hidden, and possibly operating, as we read (312-313).

The idea that the signifier is multilayered, with shifting and floating relationships of correspondence between the layers, is well known and widely accepted in criticism (314).

Coding applied to textuality in new media allows us to perceive, if not the coding itself, then the unambiguous effects and consequences of that coding (315).

What the punctuation does is set up a time-based revision of the atomic meanings of and within the sentence (316).

No reading takes place without a process of reading (320).

Textuality as instantiated in programmable media realizes the potential for a more radical restructuring of the culture of human time (321).

Many hypertext theorists and researchers would say that the Web falls short of even the fundamental requirements for a properly hypertextual system (322).

The author is, more specifically, discussing programmed signification in which codes and coding operate to generate or modulate texts substantively (322).

For Nelson, “a document is really an evolving ONGOING BRAID” (323).

The Nelsonian docuverse and the “permascroll” (323).

The textual event is defined culturally, by cultural institutions and media technologies (324).

Criticism must address the cultivation and articulation of temporality in this work as well as an analysis of the code that guarantees and drives literal temporality (327).

List of reasons for a necessity to elaborate this distinction (distinction on bottom of page 327) listed on 328.

Code is presented to us a special type of linguistic archive (328).

Notes and Quotes: New Media Poetics (Memmott on page 293)

Notes and Quotes

Talan Memmott (beginning on page 293)

The context in which any given term is used provides the framework for its definition, however tentative or temporary. The terms are conveniences—(perhaps) for the sake of argument (293).

Because digital poetry cannot be reduced to a genre of poetry, we must begin to consider the applied poetics of the individual practitioner (294).

The poetics of this piece, its conceptualization and facilitation, are more important qualities than the poetry it generates. The intertainment is more potent than the entertainment (300).

Interactivity is a slippery concept (301).

Because the grammatological aspects or signifying harmonics of digital poetry are not universal, it is essential to understand each digital poetry application as an environment or poetic microculture with its own grammar and customs (302).

Does digital poetry have the power, not to define thought but to cause thinking? (303).

We not only read the text but assist in its de.scription, or ex.position (304).

To an extent, the idea of taxonomy itself is contrary to the realities of digital practice (304).

There are no guidelines for creative cultural practice through applied technology, and it is therefore up to practitioners to develop their own (anti)methods (305).

Notes and Quotes: New Media Poetics (Morris on page 1)

Notes and Quotes

Adalaide Morris (beginning on page 1)

There is a lag between two kinds of knowledge: what we know because it is what we see and do, and what we know because it is what we think (1).

From a posthuman point of view, we are not the fully self-conscious beings imagined by Enlightenment thinkers but cybernetic organisms joined in continuous feedback loops with media and information technologies (4).

A common element in the use of the term “posthuman” is a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines (4).

The most generative approaches to discussions of the computer as an expressive engine tend to be those that work from bottom up rather than top down (6).

The approach of this book has been to open the hermeneutic circle with texts new media poets and critics of poetry include in the category of new media poetics in order to think about the contexts and theories within which these writings operate (8).

Three inseparable components of a digital poem: data fields, code, and display. Because only the display is visible, critics of print poetry often underestimate the otherness of new media writing (9).

Bush’s “Memex” (11).

Some suggest interactivity is an ideological term… clickable options are preprogrammed, therefore the reader’s claim to compositional agency is a “sham” (13).

Frist-generation critics of electronic literature drew much of their terms from analyses of narrative classics, while second-generation critics of electronic literature invoke strategies developed to read the texts of experimentalist poets (13-14).

The machinic is not to be confused with the robotic (17).

New media texts engage and extend the body’s energies (17).

Part of the reason new media is hard to define is because of the rapid evolution of software and hardware and the variety of uses they can be put to (18).

The author wants to position new media poems in an expanded field that is neither poetry nor not-poetry but an active exchange between two forms of discourse: the late romantic print lyrics, one the one hand, and the networked and programmable poem, on the other (19).

Literal art: they feature not the stanza, line, phrase, or resonant word but tumbling, morphing, graphic, and semiotic letters (20).

Poem games: Interactive (22).

Programmable procedural computer-poems: emerges from avant-garde practices associated with groups such as Oulipo, Fluxus, and the Language poets. They are generated by a database and algorithm (24).

Real-time reiterative programmable poems: the demon coughs up for consideration endless algorithmic iterations of its source texts. It demonstrates on the fly the art of survival by surfing and browsing rather than perfecting and preserving (26-27).

Participatory networked and programmable poems: an inquiry into a global flow of trademarks, gadgets, and images that exists at the intersection of electronic commerce, networked personal computers, and ambient attention spans (27-29).

Codework: Frequently hidden and always instrumental. Its purpose is to facilitate the execution of commands. It scares a lot of people (29-31).

New media artists belong to Stein’s tradition of outlaws who prepare the way for a future that is already here (31).

The coding applied to textuality in new media allows us to perceive the unambiguous effects and consequences of that coding (33).

In the last chapter Watten discusses its dialectical and historical efforts to dismantle customary standards of judgment, on the one hand, and its generation of new cultural meanings and possibilities on the other (34).

                          Watch for this!

Notes and Quotes: Strehovec on page 207

Notes and Quotes

Janez Strehovec (beginning on page 207)

Screen: http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/wardrip-fruin_screen.html, http://www.noahwf.com/screen/
Background on Screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOwF5KD5BV4

Digital poetry turns out to involve several experimental projects (207).

Digital poetry projects challenge literary theory to redefine and adjust its methodological approach by applying concepts and devices taken from other fields (207).

Text is undergoing radical shifts in addressing both the author and the reader (208).

Digital poetry helps to blur the differences between elite and popular arts and it attracts many different types of people—not just people that read books or are a member of the university (209).

The links between digital poetry and net art, software art, browser art, and text-based electronic installations are often stronger than their connection to poetry printed in a book (209).

In digital poetry, experimentation is gaining importance over passionate and emotional poems (210).

What exactly is the very literary nature of this kind of poetry? Can it still be considered poetry or has it already developed into something else? (211).

Defamiliarization enables one to grasp and define the digital literature and poetry author’s effort in arranging her material in a very uncommon fashion (211).

Defamiliarization in terms of digital poetry means that the authors arrange the subject’s feelings, sensations, dreams, etc… in an unfamiliar way in order to ensure a non-habitual and non-automatic perception of an individual’s intimate realm as well as of her language, views, and ideas (211).

Digital texts bring something into the language, its organization, and into reading that did not exist before (212-213).

In digital poetry, you “sculpt again” rather than “read again” because of the fact that it enables the reader to have a very creative and intensive contact with the text (213).

Digital poetry really is about events based on two levels: the internal “unwrapping” of the textual hidden layers as well as on the reader’s/user’s reading in the form of her interactive intervention into the texts (214).

In current television the screen is no longer a sacred space dedicated to a single image (216).

A user of digital textuality needs to focus at the visual aspect of the text, at the digital word-image itself, not purely using it as a point of reference… a literary world with meaning (217).

Instead of the traditional reader, the digital text user is being recreated: she is abandoning the merely linear readings and becomes as capable of complex and non-trivial perceptions and cognitions of such texts as possible (218).

The very principle of plurality and non-conflicting coexistence of heterogeneous elements is characteristically demonstrated by the web site (219).

It goes without saying that naked bodies can also be dressed bodies, landscapes, politics, etc… (221).

It seems correct that the perception of new media contents is a dry run for detecting the consequences of this reinvention of the bodily activities within the new media arts and culture (222).

New technologies of organizing and processing a text emerge with their own conventions and demands of reading (222).

In the moment the words come loose in a 3D virtual environment, each of them speaks to our body, hits it, and challenges its complex behavior (224).

Notes and Quotes: Goicoechea on page 183

Notes and Quotes

Maria Goicoechea (beginning on page 183)

http://hermeneia.net/eng/index.html (184).

http://www.ucm.es/leethi (184).

http://www.ecuaderno.com/ (184).

In this article, the author is attempting to provide an overview of current Spanish criticism regarding the literariness of digital texts (185).

Spanish critics tend to think that it is the social, economic, cultural, and literary history that illuminates technical history, and not the other way around (185).

                          Can we discuss this in class?

Transposing postmodern theory to the digital sphere is necessary but it does impose certain restraints since there is the artificial imposition of measuring virtual texts with structures of the past (186).

Not everybody agrees with the idea that digital literature actually exists, either because it has not reached a certain quality or because its identity as literature is put into question (187).

Technosceptics and technophiles disagree on what constitutes digital literature, which results in much misinterpretation (187-188).

Some critics believe digital literature is an art of its own which will not end up displacing literature (188).

Common definitions of hypertext are imprecise (190).

Vega believes that we have not yet seen hyperliterature and what is currently being made are tests and shy beginnings (190).

In the transfer of concepts from one medium to the other, critics continuously confuse or fail to distinguish between the act of text production and the act of reception (191).

In practice, it helps to distinguish between two types of intertextual relations: those that are part of the textual structure and those which the reader uses as reading strategies (192).

The need for a reading context in which to integrate the hypertextual information becomes redundant since hypertext already is a self-sufficient and self-explanatory unity (194).

The knowledge of the reader starts where the author ends (194).

Pajares compares the reading process of a poem with that of a hypertext (195).

The structure of hypertext admits a forgetful reader at the same time that places the reader in a relation of dependence with the computer (196).

Interactivity is both a property of the text and the reader (197).

Interaction that the print medium allows is “metaphorical” because it is considered less “real” than the interactivity that occurs in the digital medium (197).

Radical technosceptics find it difficult to understand the ways in which the text also has the ability to communicate. Holland argues that people falsely attribute actions to the text that are actually performed by the reader (199).

The degree of interactivity depends not only on the technology but also the reader’s ability to use the technology (199).

The challenge digital literature poses for critics and teachers regarding interactivity is that digital texts also require an adjustment of the interactive strategies both writers and readers are accustomed to share (200).

On-going Spanish research focuses on the concept of intermediality as a key to read digital literature beyond the hypertextual paradigm (201).

Notes and Quotes: Saemmer on page 163

Notes and Quotes

Alexandra Saemmer (beginning on page 163)

The Dreamlife of Letters: http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/stefans__the_dreamlife_of_letters/the_dream_life_cleaned.html

Digital literature is continuously changing, gradually discovering its specific potential (163).

Texts are regarded as paintings and paintings can be read (163).

French critics refer to pre-hypertextual structures that seem to suggest hypertextual adaptations (163).

“Everything happens as if, with multimedia, literature had finally found the technical devices it suggested and required long before” (163).

                          Not sure I agree with this, but it’s very poetic and thought-provoking.

“Nouveau roman,” first paragraph on page 164. Can we discuss this in class?

The first electronic text generators nevertheless seem tightly linked to the rules that human beings impose on them (165).

The “virtual” unpredictable dimension in electronic texts (165).

                          We have a lot of this going on being unable to access works.

The operation of digital literature on computer screens is always conditioned by the “intentionality of the computer” (165).

Now that digital literature seems more and more aesthetically convincing, the time has come to define its stylistic features with more precision (165).

                          Main purpose of essay?

It is not the clicking gesture that transforms interaction into a figure. It is the relationship between the gesture, the media content, and the media content appearing after the gesture (166).

The style of digital literature is partly based on a discrepancy between the reader’s expectations and the realized events on the screen (166).

                          Possibly one reason why they all seem to avoid the narrative arc? Would a narrative arc remove a piece of work from the category of digital literature?

Two distinct “aesthetics of frustration”:  the resistance of the work against the readers’ habits/expectations and any bugs in the system being used (167).

Retroprojection—the term proposed to characterize the space metaphors described on the end of page 167 to the beginning of page 168.

The semiotic approach has helped to refine the concept of incongruity essential in the definition of a figure (168).

One of the most conventional relationships between a hyperlinked word, a manipulation gesture and an activated content consists in providing an explanation of the word (169).

The repetitive use of hypertext links creates the illusion of a recaptured past in Explication de texte (170).

In The Subnetwork, neantisms and incubations contribute to building a complex metaphor, suggesting similarities between memory and digital network (171).

Multiplication of pop-up windows on the screen can be considered allotropic (172).

Media figures vs. a-media figures—top of page 173.

The Dreamlife of Letters: Edward Picot does not consider it as an avant-garde work. James Mitchell argues that the methods of traditional literary analysis would not be effective to interpret this poem. Marjorie Perloff says it should be considered as lettrist. Philippe Bootz says it refers to kinetic poetry. Lori Emerson thinks the reader plays, above all, a passive roll. N. Katherine Hayles asserts the morphemes and phonemes of this poem are charged with “eroticized graphic imagination” (173).

Kinetic allegories should not be confused with moveie-grams (177).

The interactions of all these figures of animation constitute a kinetic allegory (177).

Saemmer defends the existence of kinaesthetic rhymes in The Dreamlife of Letters (177).

The voice of digital media poetry seems decidedly closer to the surrealist experiences than to concrete or Lettrist experimentations (178).

Notes and Quotes: Ensslin and Pope on page 311

Notes and Quotes

Astrid Ensslin and James Pope (beginning on page 311

The Mobius Case: http://www.media.bournemouth.ac.uk/studentshowcase/work/mobius/

Inanimate Alice: http://www.inanimatealice.com/

Denarrator Blog: http://genarrator.blogspot.com/ (hasn't been updated in almost two years)

The main focus of the authors’ case studies will be on how digital literature is being used to help students build knowledge and skills in the areas of digital literacy, multimodal narrative analysis, stylistics, creative writing, and in the creation of digital fictions (311).

The first case study is an example of how skills in digital literacy, multimodal narrative analysis, and ludic interaction have been and may be taught by using Inanimate Alice (311).

Inanimate Alice and Laccetti’s education pack (311-315).

The second case study project was dedicated to testing and fostering intrinsic motivation, developing advanced communicative competence in a foreign language, medially extended literary competence and spatial macrostructural thinking through creative collaborative writing in the digital medium as well as to teaching critical awareness along the lines of poststructuralist and hypertext theory (315).

Foreign language to discuss hypertext (315-318).

            I’m curious as to how this worked out considering so many of the words used in digital literature are words even some native speakers don’t know.

One motivation has been to “lift” digital literature out of the creative and critical ghetto it would appear to have migrated to (319).

            What.

Critical stalemate and lonely creative corner (320).

            Why do they feel the need to word it like this?

Case study 3 is an attempt to bled theory with practice and break down conceptual/theoretical barriers (320).

            Finally making sense…

They seem to want digital literature to lose its “underground” status… now it makes sense why they keep trying to distance it from creativity. You don’t have to pretend something isn’t borne out of and completely intertwined with creativity to establish it as a legit subject to study (321).

The authors argue that critical literature has largely overlooked the areas of how narrative structure, voice, character development, drama, and closure are affected by the interface in interactive narrative (321).

This whole essay seems to be an attempt to argue that digital literature should become more popular, and (as I comprehended it) that digital literature should work harder to be less obscure so that more people can enjoy it. So is that kind of like “selling out”? I didn't particularly take to the essays by Ensslin and I’m not sure if it was because I didn't agree with most of the ideas or if it was because of the abrasive writing style. Maybe it was just written for people that have already emerged themselves in the field. I just felt like I didn't get enough time to warm up to the ideas before the authors moved on to the next ones. Maybe I'll change my mind when I do a second reading.

Notes and Quotes: Ensslin on page 145

Notes and Quotes

Astrid Ensslin (beginning on page 145)

The Breathing Wall: http://www.thebreathingwall.com/

The author contends that we can only use the term “digital literature” if and when the reception process is guided if not dominated by “literary” means (145).

Interest in close-reading various forms of digital fiction derives from the distinct narrative techniques used by digital writers (145).

The author argues that from the vantage point of reader-response criticism, this spectrum parallels a move from an aesthetic of revision and revisitation to an aesthetic of retro-intentionalisation (146).

Hypertext instigates multilinear reading processes (147).

Some early works of digital literature emphasize the meta-theoretical component and thereby neglect the aesthetic effects necessary to attract a non-academic readership (148).

Hypermedia typically combines a variety of semiotic modes including typography, (scanned) handwriting, digitized speech, sound and music, pictographic and photographic images, animation,  and film (148).

Cybertext… readers become part of a cybernetic feedback loop with operates on the basis of mutual stimulus and response between machine and operator (149).

The author argues that Aarseth omits two crucial elements contained within conventional communication models: reference, and the role of the author-programmer (149).

Hyperlinks are not generally replaced but rather combined with other creative technologies to produce literary and artistic novelties (150).

The author argues that all of the new technologies enable writers to use and experiment freely according to need and mood (151).

Cognitive stylistics uses the principles of cognitive science to investigate how textual elements evoke certain psychological patterns and cognitive effects in the reader’s mind (152).

Empirical stylistics applies empirical research methods to examine reading and response patterns and processes (152).

Author argues that literary criticism still lacks a significant degree of auto-physiological awareness to complement cognitive stylistics (152).

Retro-intentionalization (156).

Notes and Quotes: Koskimaa on page 299

Notes and Quotes

Raine Koskimaa (beginning on page 299)

These Waves of Girls:  http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves/

Digital culture courses provide a situation where all those phenomena that do not neatly fall into the traditional disciplinary fields can be addressed (300).

Digital culture is, in essence, so fundamentally global that it is highly beneficial to have a truly international student body (300).

One’s life story is always, to some extent, constructed in the act of writing (302).

Print fiction has the underlying assumption that a story is read in a linear manner from start to finish but hypertext fiction does not have this assumption (303).

Hypertextual structure and narrative structure are two separate levels of hypernarrative and the former is the basis for the narration and sets certain limits to it without determining it in any way (304).

During the short history of hypertextual practices there has been a strong connection to the idea of associative writing (305).

The sound of glass in the broken thermos activates in an associative manner the memory of the event on the school bus (305).

The hypertext serves both to simulate the associative working of the narrator’s memory and to present a way for the reader to follow potential associations (306).

Casual and temporal logic is hard—if not impossible—to maintain in hypertext (306).

Whereas linear narrative can be seen as power discourse, multilinear narration bears the potential of challenging this by building up a network of rivaling voices of others and avoiding the one dominant ideology altogether (308).

These Waves of Girls is a story of the growing-up of a girl but also the growing-up of hypertext fiction (308).

Notes and Quotes: Koskimaa on page 129

Notes and Quotes

Raine Koskimaa (beginning on page 129)

Cyborg author: complex combination of human and machine jointly producing texts with literary qualities. Machine is no longer seen as only a tool but also as a partner in creative processes (129).

Temporality of cybertexts: through analysis of temporal experiences of dynamic cybertexts, we should be able to better grasp the temporality of the digital culture we are living in (129).

Digital literature: 1. Digital publishing 2. Scholarly literary hypertext editions 3. Writing for Digital Media (129).

When we talk about digital literature, we do not talk about digital literature alone because all of this is relevant to more traditional forms of print literature as well (130).

The challenge facing teaching literature could be described as a need for “media-specific analysis” of literary works, as argued by N. Katherine Hayles (130).

All digital works are in a very concrete sense experimental writings not to break down established conventions but to establish new ones (130).

Cybertexts can be located within a triangle: cinema, literature, and games (131).

                        I know the author says “roughly speaking,” but isn’t this a bit limiting?

Systematic analysis of a given work requires an understanding of the specific nature of cybertextuality and the logic of the work. Without this it is impossible to accurately describe the work (132).

                        Weighs in on the conversation we had during our last class period.

Textons: deep structure. Scriptons: surface structure. Traversal Function: mechanism to turn textons into scriptons (132).

Seven more variables and their possible values: Dynamics, determinability, transiency, perspective, access, linking, and user function (133).

We lack adequate classifications of digital text types (133).

Interpretative, explorative, configurative, and textonic functions (134).

Ergodicity refers to the extra effort required from the reader in addition to the interpretation (134).

Temporal dimension is the most underdeveloped part of the cybertext theory (134).

One way to classify temporal possibilities in programmed texts: Limiting reading time, delaying reading time, limiting the reading opportunities, temporally evolving texts (135).

Pseudo time: the amount of text used to describe an event as measured in lines of text determines the speed of narration. It is not a temporal measure at all but a spatial one. It is counted (136).

We have at least four temporal levels for cybertexts with narrative content: user time, discourse time (pseudo time and true time), story time, and system time (136).

It seems that one of the most promising areas of research within digital literature is the reorganization of these temporal issues through the dynamics of system time, reading time, and textual time (136).

“The significant aspect of this sort of machine relationship is that it is very hard—maybe even impossible—to exactly define who is responsible for the final outcome, and it is this combination I call the cyborg author” (139).

                          Impossible? That seems to be a stretch.

The plethora of WWW communications seems to be a close enough approximation of the human unconsciousness to serve as a source of machinic creativity (140).

                          I think “close enough” is an extremely dangerous concept and this                            argument is pretty weak.

Notes and Quotes: Reading Moving Letters (John Zuern)

Notes and Quotes

John Zuern

Self-definition and disciplinary legitimation are particularly urgent because of the poor shelter academic institutions have for this field and humanities in general (59).

Top of page 60 is Zuern’s objective.

The strictures of such an approach would demand that we ask ourselves whether computation as such is essential to the specifically li8terary properties of the text or essential only to the existence of the text as a particular kind of physical artifact (60).

Zuern wants to suggest that the history of comparative literature’s emergence contains an important caveat for the developing field of digital literary studies (60).

In reading these texts, a preoccupation with media specificity threatens to override our attention to aspects of digital texts that are analogous to aspects of print documents (61).

The author will attempt to describe how debates in comparative literary studies might contribute to things that have to do with digital literature (61).

He shows how an orientation to the study of digital literature that takes into account to the digital literature’s departure from the print tradition can open our eyes to vital dimensions of the digital literary artwork (62).

ELO defines electronic literature as work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and context provided by the stand-alone or networked computer (62).

“When literature leaps from one medium to another…it does not leave behind the accumulated knowledge embedded in genres, poetic conventions, narrative structures, figurative tropes, and so forth” (63).

Spivak makes an appeal for literature by talking about the rhetorical effects literature has on the reader (63).

Spivak’s suggestion that the text’s impact on the imagination ought to be the focal point of comparative studies provides a valuable corrective to the preoccupations with “media specificity” that have taken a firm hold on digital literary scholarship (64).

How often do we find in any given computer-based literary artifact only what we’ve learned to look for? (65)

We need not choose only one among the alternative antecedents of “One.” In fact, holding them all in suspension intensifies the poem’s philosophical density (68).

The words in Lemcke’s poem are meant to be read as well as looked at (69).

Competing for attention… (69) This seems to be a very common trend in digital literature.

Autumn and The Uninvited employ their particular material configuration to call our attention to the potential moral agency of our own hands (71).

The Uninvited reminds us of something that critics of digital literature too often appear to be in danger of forgetting: that literary texts have on the whole tended to concern themselves with topics other than their own material conditions of possibility (73).

Zuern believes that digital literary studies should maintain a focus on the literariness of digital texts, as should comparative literature become more attentive to the material conditions of textuality and their impact on figuration (74).

Digital modernists, instead of referring to the flatness of print in terms of its dimensions, sometimes use this term to degrade work that happens to have been printed. This underestimates figuration, which the author concludes by explaining how dangerous that act is (75).

Notes and Quotes: Reading Moving Letters (Noah Wardrip-Fruin)

Notes and Quotes

Noah Wardrip-Fruin

To Wardrip-Fruin, digital art is the larger category of which digital literature is a part (29).

Being digital is not specific to computers (31).

Once there were stored program digital computers, all that remained (for our field to take its first step) was for someone to make literary use of one. The author believes that Christopher Strachey was the first to do so (31).

Love letter generator (32-33).

Strachey wrote that the chief point of interest is in the remarkable simplicity of the plan when compared with the diversity of the letters it produces (33).

The love letter generator was created before Mad Libs (34).

Faulkner wanted four-color printing in order to make the time shifts in the first section of the book easier for readers to follow (35).

Dakota mention (35).

Computer scientists in digital literature focus on more than just the creation of language (36).

As soon as the stereotype that writers innovate on the surface level while computer scientists innovate at the process level is expressed directly it also becomes apparent that it must be taken apart (36).

Crawford’s “Process Intensity”: Process intensity is the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data (37).

We need to read and interpret both process and data when we read digital literature (but this is not an exclusive list) (38).

Turing machines give us a way of thinking about what is computable, but much of the computing we do each day is not of this form (39).

Hypertext is specified at the level of system behavior (39).

Interactive drama is a term for interactive digital literature that produces for users an experience related to theatrical drama—and how the system behaves while producing this experience is not specified (40).

To read digital literature well, we need to be specific about system behavior and user experience—and explicitly aware that data’s impact on experience is at least as great as process and interaction (40).

Computationally variable and computationally fixed digital literature explained (41).

The distinction between environmentally and audience interactive digital literature is not exclusive (41).

When the author says that digital literature requires computation, understanding computation required as context is one of the challenges (42).

There are a number of forms of digital literature for which space and the body are obviously essential to our consideration, but we’re not necessarily well served by ignoring the reader’s body when interpreting other works of digital literature (44).

Work on social context is necessary if we are ever going to understand player experiences (44).

The representational power of a new medium might cause us to mistake its products for reality (45).

It is important when reading a work in a context quite substantially different from that in which it was created and first experienced to take that fact into account (45).

Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature is one of the most important books for those interested in digital literature to consider (45).

Aarseth writes that a cybertext is a machine for the production of variety of expression (46).

Just as a film is useless without a projector and a screen, so a text must consist of a material medium as well as a collection of words. The machine is not complete without a (human) third party and the text takes place within this triad (46).

A text is not equal to the information it transmits (46).

Variables that allow us to describe any text according to their mode of traversal: dynamics, determinability, transiency, perspective, access, linking, and user function (47).

Wardrip-Fruin’s expansion of (not a rejection of) Aarseth’s ideas (the five-part model): data, process, interaction, surface, and context (47-48).

Notes and Quotes: Reading Moving Letters (Roberto Simanowski)

Notes and Quotes

Roberto Simanowski

This book investigates literary innovations with respect to new ways of aesthetic expression triggering questions such as:

            Is there a new quality of literariness in digital literature?

            What are the terminological and methodological means to examine it? (15)

Digital literature deals with “digital birth” that carries the features of the “parents” such as connectivity, interactivity, multimediality, non-linearity, performativity, and transformability (15).

Real digital literature cannot live without digital media (15-16).

A more general definition therefore characterizes the literary as the arranging of the material or the use of features in an uncommon fashion to undermine any automatic perception for the purpose of aesthetic perception (16).

How do we look at experimental writing in new media that, as Koskimaa points out, are trying to create new conventions rather than to break the established ones? (16)

The “literariness” of digital literature undermines the identity of digital literature as literature (16).

If the features of digital technology are essential to the literary properties of the text, they inevitably more or less undermine the dominant status of the text (17).

“Real” digital literature proceeds beyond the linguistic layer of digitality (17).

When to call something digital art vs. digital literature (17-18).

Technosceptics vs. technophiles (18).

The overall task is to be aware of the historic continuities as well as discontinuities that materialize in digital literature or art respectively (18).

Digital literature is partaking of the literary tradition as well as other art genres and disciplines (18-19).

Wardrip Fruin distinguishes between “computationally variable” and “computationally fixed” digital literature (19).

Study of digital literature should not emphasize medial specifics at the expense of the concrete object (19).

Rigorous close reading starts with looking at the trees rather than the forest (20).

When thinking about digital literature, we must read both data and process (20).

Wardrip-Fruin’s five-part model and Koskimaa’s two-perspective model on page 20.

Is knowledge of code the same as having a background knowledge of art history when looking at a painting, or is the code rather the material or technique (paint, drawing, watercolor)? (21)

Among the results of Schafer’s and Gendolla’s discussion is the fact that literature does not work if it intends to work like “real life.” They give the example of a detective novel… in real life, if you went back to talk to someone again they might tell you something different (22).

Ensslin focuses on the human body as an integral part of the reading process (22).

Language to describe digital literature. Classical rhetoric isn’t exactly able to describe fully what is going on, so Saemmer develops her own terminology: kinaesthetic rhymes, kinetic allegory, transfiguration, interfacial antagonism, and interfacial pleonasm (24).

Aesthetics of frustration (25).

Lack of narrativity and meaning is also an element of digital literature and arts (25).

Even though a work of digital literature and art may be the unpredictable result of the audience’s interaction, the specific mode of interaction is designed and controlled by the artist (25).

Notes and Quotes: Chapters 5 and 6

Notes and Quotes

Pressman: Chapters 5 and 6

Chroma explores the idea that mathematical code is a universal language (127).

From Chroma: What appears to be real and true is actually a constructed façade based in forgetting and erasing history (128).

This is a work of digital modernism because remembering requires excavation and this excavation is (according to Pressman) the novel’s subtext (128).

Cyberspace is not natural and the ideologies that represent it as such have deep histories in need of excavation (129).

Chroma introduces itself as a multimodal work deeply concerned with exposing the different ways in which information is accessed and understood (129).

Something is always lost in the translation of content across media platforms (131).

It was built in Shockwave. Its obsolescence is ironic and possibly poetic (131).

Marrow “transmits information just as the air transmits sound” (131).

Pressman’s take on this is that Chroma is about the necessary failure of efforts to seek universal language through computer code and within cyberspace (132).

Alan Liu: “the governing ideology of discourse network 2000: the separation of content from material instantiation or formal presentation” and the “ideology of division between form and presentation” becomes “a religion of text encoding and databases” (132).

Writing code to create a gameworld encodes biases, cultural hierarchies, and power structures that remain unseen but present and powerful (134).

Duck sees ideological problems rather than technical problems (134).

Universal language is not possible, even in cyberspace, because languages are codes programmed by human beings which infuse specific ideological positions into their protocological endeavors (135).

Universal language projects are part of both media studies and media history. Pressman attempts to expose the intersection of literary and media studies (136).

Terry Winograd says that the computer is not a mathematics machine but rather a language machine. It manipulates linguistics symbols (136-137).

This chapter strives to illuminate the interconnected histories that continue to foster a cultural imagination that universal communication is possible through computers (137).

The idea that computers and digital code can enable universal languages lies at the heart of computationalism (138).

Computationalism depends upon the idea that rational calculations can describe the world (138).

Rational and computational projects might be technical but that does not mean that they are devoid of human and cultural biases (138).

It is precisely because Pound could not read Chinese that he could claim that the Chinese ideogram is a universal medium for poetry (140).

Pound’s editing and forward of Fenollosa’s work turns it into a treatise of aesthetics (140-141).

Fenollosa focuses on literature as a means of addressing larger, political issues. He also recognizes literature to be a cross section between national and poetic registers, and an ambassadorial act to understand “the other” through their language and literature (141).

Pound is not only an editor but also a kind of medium through which messages flow and are transmitted (142).

It is in this way (turning Fenollosa’s text into a treatise on universal poetics) that Pound “invents” Chinese as a new medium for modern poetry (143).

I don’t really take to the ideas on pages 142-143.

The idea that a binary operating function underlies a universe of dualities becomes the foundation for the mathematical structure of binary states in digital computing (144).

Poets, philosophers, and computer scientists use the ideogram to serve their own, individual ideals. They use it to hallucinate about supposedly universal truths (145).

The idea that code is a natural language turns it into a contemporary equivalent of the Chinese ideogram (145).

Efforts to repair the ruptures of Babel through the digital computer thus depend upon a substitution of English for universal language (146).

Basic English is an International Auxiliary Language constructed to enable universal communication through a simple but potentially global language. It is a pared-down version of English comprised of 850 words (147).

An extension of Basic English was into the realm of cybernetics and computer science (147).

Recognizing the connection between Basic English, Printed English, and their derivatives should remind us that the heart of these foundational computing projects is an English-based effort to achieve universal language (148).

The web developed into Web 2.0 in the mid 2000s (149)? Is this a typo or am I missing something?

The result of cultural and technological layers is a new computer culture—a blend of human and computer meanings, of traditional ways in which human culture modeled the world and the computer’s own means of representing it (149).

Recognizing that English dominates computer code despite its mathematical relations might cause us to pause before identifying the computer and its code as universal (149-150).

Interesting views about Spivak’s comments (150).

The quest for a universal language is as much a technical challenge as an ideological one, and this is shown by the need for constant emendations to translation software and machines, among other things (151).

Ironically it is Chinese that disables contemporary hallucinations about universal language (151).

Pound’s later cantos are similar to YHCHI’s Nippon (152).

Nippon reorients the ways in which we read to remind us that computers, their operations and codes, and the ways in which they are discussed are never separate from but always embedded in specific cultural context (153).

Pages 153-154 are a stretch, to me anyway. On 155 she lists the conceptual dichotomies portrayed in Nippon, which make sense, but her explanations before that were a real stretch. I’m not saying I couldn’t be convinced but the way it was written was almost painful to read. It might be different for other people, though.

Nippon and Chroma are digital works which expose message to be dependent on medium and remind us that neither are ever universal (155).

YHCHI employ the ideogram as a poetic symbol in order to resist Pound’s earlier usage of it (155).

Recuperating and asserting the importance of the literary in a digital age tis the main point of this chapter and of this book more generally (156).

Translation is at the heart of digital literature, despite rhetoric about the potential of digital code and computing to produce universal communication (156).

Digital modernist works resist the hallucinations of cyberspace and illuminate the importance of literature in our digital age (157).

All literature, regardless of its output platform, is impacted by digitality (158).

The book is a mediating technology (160).

Only Revolutions encodes a digital influence in ways that promote the types of literary critical reading practices that Pressman has been advocating: close reading and comparative, media-specific, media archaeological approaches (160).

Reading Only Revolutions is an act of recycling (161).

Only Revolutions challenges simple distinctions between print and digital (162).

How does April 15, 1992 relate to the terror of post-9/11 life? (165).

Only Revolutions is so obsessed with visual details that the subtle but clear visual and intertextual detail to Ulysses should not be overlooked (166).

Danielewski says that the thing about the internet is it’s just an extension of a capacity that was already understood when the encyclopedia was being written, when Joyce was writing Ulysses (167).

Only Revolutions is about technology because technology is specifically missing from the book. You have to ask, “What’s not here?” (168).

The embellished words extracted from readers’s emails serve as figurative hyperlinks connecting unseen readers of Danieleski’s previous novel to this one (170).

As archaic as it is, Only Revolutions could not exist without technology (170).

Jenkins describes convergence culture as a paradigm shift—a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels…and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture (172).

Acts of concluding by refusing to end are poetic statements (174).