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).
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