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).

 

Notes and Quotes: Chapter 4

Notes and Quotes

Pressman: Chapter 4

One of the central questions facing the humanities in the digital age is the relationship between reading and data (101).

For Manovich, database is potential and narrative is its resulting output. Instead, the relationship is intertwined and inseparable (102).

Literature provides insights into this discourse by illuminating the structural opposition between information and interpretation (reading and data) and invites the deconstruction of it (102).

Databases are not just for storing data. They organize, prioritize, and shape information (102).

Ulysses is an obvious source of inspiration for digital modernism, according to Pressman, because it takes a text from the past and experiments with remediating that older work into a different medial format (103).

Modernist literature developed stream of consciousness, and Joyce was one of its primary innovators (103).

The literary community didn’t care too much for the Twitter remix of Ulysses but Pressman sees it as a significant experiment that shows writers using digital media to explore and renovate modernism specifically modernism’s stream of consciousness (104).

Pressman says that twitter represents the stream of consciousness narrative (105).

Remediation is the central operating strategy of The Jew’s Daughter (105).

The Jew’s Daughter, just like Dakota, uses a complicated medium to provide something very simple. Ciccoricco calls it a radical statement. Pressman reiterates that digital modernism is a conscious act of rebellion (106).

Books are media and that media shape literature and the reading practices we bring to bear upon it (107).

Some people thought that hypertext invited interaction so much that the readers became authors. Such claims have, for the most part, been refuted (107).

Despite its simple interface, The Jew’s Daughter is one of the most difficult narratives that Pressman has ever read on or off screen (108).

The Jew’s Daughter is hard to access, not because it flashed by too quickly, but because its contexts keep changing (109).

The Jew’s Daughter demands rereading and thus posits rereading as central to close reading (109).

The Jew’s Daughter is an adaptation of a section of Ulysses (109).

“Ithaca” depicts the experience of retrieving information from a database. Its formal structure of query and response and the effect of this format serves to focus attention on how the information is processed (111). This whole thing really feels like a stretch.

The database aesthetic of “Ithaca” is often described as resembling the “catechism,” and Joyce himself described the chapter in this way (111).

The idea in both (catechism and database architecture) is that the formal organization of data enables its retrieval (111-112).

Bonnie Mak says that the page is the material manifestation of an ongoing conversation between designer and reader (112).

Pressman says that Ulysses provides RAM (113).

Intention, ordering, and authorship are part of database construction even if their related actions are hidden from the reader/user (113).

The way we read always happens through media that mediate (113).

The idea that consciousness is technologically mediated has become the capstone in theories of posthumanism (113).

The work reflexively displays a cyboric reading practice, with the computer turning pages as human memory is pulled up from its latent depths (115).

Form and content converge to subtly suggest that human and computer memory coproduce consciousness and its textual representation in literature, namely in the technique of stream of consciousness (115).

The Jew’s Daughter uses Ulysses to pursue posthuman cognition and suggests that the modernist one might also present a similar sense of distributed cognition (115).

Stream of consciousness is a technique used to describe, mirror, and model the way the mind works (116).

Our access to consciousness is always already mediated (116).

Stream of consciousness is not just a literary technique but also a literary technology (117).

Pressman says that the literary technology of stream of consciousness is made available for critical reconsideration by digital modernist works (117).

What connects these writers is an effort to use text to depict the associative nature of cognition (118).

In an essay titled “As We May Think” published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945, Vannevar Bush introduces the memex (118).

Bush shared with Bob Brown the perspective that changing the way we read would in turn change what we read (119).

Nelson defines hypertext as “non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader” (119).

NLA was also called “Augment” because it, like Bush’s memex, strived to augment human cognition (120).

This literary trajectory complicates linear narratives about the progression of social movements by connecting literary history to computer before the period of cybernetics and digital technologies (120).

Ulysses contains both notions of hypertext: (1) a formal means of depicting cognition and (2) a technical format for distributing consciousness across media platforms (120-121).

Joyceware. What? I mean, I get it. But what? (121).

Lexia to Perplexia (Memmott) is a work in the canon of electronic literature (122).

Pressing the Return key represents the central act of digital modernism: returning to the past to make it new through new media (122).

Memmott promotes an understanding that the relationship between writing technologies and written texts constitutes a feedback loop between human mind and media format (124).

What we think to be real and analog about humanness is actually the result of digital production (124).

The works in this chapter take from their modernist inspiration a desire to examine and represent the operations of cognition through literary technologies (125).

They renovate stream of consciousness for a digital age by expressing the intertwined relationship between human consciousness and digital computer (125).

Literature that experiments with representing consciousness as its subject becomes posthuman and its medium becomes digital (125).