Literature: June 2008 Archive Page
The newest version of the Associated Press Stylebook is available, and if you follow it, "WMD," "iPhone" and "anti-virus" are in, while "barmaid," "blue blood" and "malarkey" are out. Those are just some of the changes to its rules for certain often-used phrases and words. There are also new acceptable forms of describing the Sept. 11 attacks, and a different rule for use for "African-American."Via the Reeves Library weblog, which recently also announced the discovery of a bit of journalism history and a letter found on what should have been a dark and stormy night.
For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable.
How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly corrected the OCR.
Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.
Using Text Analysis Tools for Comparison: Mole & Chocolate Cake « Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
I wanted to get a quick visual sense of the two texts, so I plugged them into Wordle, a nifty word cloud generator that enables you to control variables such as layout, font and color. (Interestingly, Wordle came up with the perfect visualizations for each text at random: Pierre white type on a black background shaped into, oh, a chess piece or a tombstone, Reveries a brighter, more casual handwritten style, with a shape like a fish or egg.)
Using these visual representations of the most frequent words in each book enabled me to get a sense of the totality, but then I also drilled down and began comparing the significance of particular words.
Information Flows and Social Capital in Weblogs: A Case Study in the Brazilian Blogosphere (Long Paper)
Qualitative study. Perception is that bloggers are just wasting time, but people have strong personal reasons for blogging. Went quickly through the obligatory background slide... I wonder that this audience might include so many quantitative researchers that she might have spent a bit of time explaining more about ethnography. Again, I'm used to scholarship with a long discursive introduction, so I always feel out of place when presenters rush through their introduction. I'm generally far more intersted in the related research and the motiations for study than in the mechanics of the model, but that's a feature of my disciplinary training.
Ethnographic study of very personal connections in a small web network of Brazillian bloggers. Motives for blogging include creating personal identity, social interaction. Popularity is a strong draw; getting more comments, being the center of a network; a blog is a "publicity strategy"
Age range 15-50 years. Some 32 of [did she say 40 some?] bloggers in the community responded. Tracked "interaction memes" (everyone does it; publish the meme to belong) and "informational memes" (an opportunity to create authority and popularity by being the first to post a meme).
Interaction memes -- send a questionnaire or the equivalent of a chain letter, bond with your gorup by answering these questions creatively.
This is different from publishing information that there's a new online journal or YouTube link -- these kinds of links aren't repeated.
Interactional memes are connected to creating a personal space. Informational memes are connecting to creating authority and knowledge. What social capital does the blogger want?
Interactional memes -- visibility, interaction, social spupprt. (Relatively more emphais on maintaining new ties.) [This is about modding and mutating the meme, so that it maintains its novelty, not passing it along.]
Informational memes -- visibility, reputation, popularity, authority. Bridging (creating new ties) rather than maintaining and strengthening existing ones. [It's likely that bloggers who regularly come up with new ideas probably have at least some "long" connections with people who aren't tightly connected within their groups.]
Making Revisions Hyper-Visible (Short Paper)
David Kolb
14 years ago, published "Socrates in the Labyrinth." How do you revise a hypertext? Mentioned some philosophers who published retractions and revisions; scholars publish both versions. Notes that Auden and other poets revised their works when collecting them for many reasons, both internal and external.
Revising literary works and revising expository or argumentative works. Consider that Joyce revised "afternoon, a story" -- if you mark them they seem like part of the text. There are very few reasons to emphasize revisions in a literary hypertext. In an argumentative work, you might make those revisions and the reasons for them explicit.
Not just the revised text, but also the meta-comments about the work.
Print -- you have two volumes, with the later one footnoting the earlier one. The new version generally replaces the old version, since print operates on an economy of scarcity. Hypertext has an economy of abundance. Wikipedia and Word hide the revisions. In hypertext, you will link the old and new versions. You could leave the old structure and add notes. But a significant update would include new links; the revision will embrace the original (or large parts thereof) but add complexity.
Revision of an argumentative hypertext will lead to a new hypertext with an more elaborate link pattern. [I'm following this closely because I'm working on the development of the map to Colossal Cave Adventure, and all this talk about nodes and paths is sparking lots of ideas.]
Why revise hyper-visibly? Helps scholars clarify what was meant; helps readers identify the changes; helps readers judge whether the changes are useful; provides more chance for the author and reader to think together about the issues.
Audience comment: This is a subset of a more general problem -- we don't have rich enough object models in which the objects were all accessible in versions, this problem would go away. [I can't help but think again of the variable implementations of Douglas Adams' H2G2 -- TV show, radio play, IF game, movie...]
Audience comment: When we change words we often intend to change the whole work [but the example was poetry, rather than David's example of expository.]
We're All Stars Now:
Reality Television, Web 2.0, and Mediated Identities (Short Paper)
Michael A. Stefanone and Derek Lackaff
Derek began by echoing Raquel's paper. Why would someone post the cursed rabbit confessioal meme? What happens to identity when it gets mediated. Invoked the post-coporality promised by Turkle and others. [I'm reminded of My Tiny Life, where Dibbell notes that the best writers got the most virtual "action" -- while people were no longer limited by their bodies, the were, in a textual environment, defined by their ability to write. I think it was insightful for a writer like DIbbell to percive that a world that doles out rewards according to writing talent is really no more fair than a world that rewards looks or riches.]
Reality TV recently voted 2nd worst invention of all time, but it's very popuar. Rise of Web 2.0 represents ability of people to participate. [I note that "youtubing" has entered the lexicon... ]
Observational learning -- requires a model, a learnable behavior, and a context that conduces people to model behavior. [Reminds me of the Frontline video, "Merchants of Cool," that tracks trends through the various forces that combine to manage what the "mooks" and "midriffs" of the world think are cool.]
Hyphotheses -- Reality TV consumption related to time spent on social networking sites, breadth of networks including online only friends, and photos shared online. Asked participants to self-report.
People who watch TV news, fiction, documentaries has little effect on network size, connectness, or photo sharing; rate of watching Reality TV is significant.
Takeaway - we have empirical links between traditional media consumption (watching TV) and the "really cool things that are going on online." Definite change in the understanding of social space. People talking about the social networks that they're part of in new ways. Having an identity online is increasingly banal.
Look at specific media genres -- not TV as a whole, but what kind of TV being watched. [The reality TV genre really got its start during a writers strike in 1989. COPS, Americas Funniest Vidoes... also a resurgence of sitcoms based on figures who could provide their own content, such as Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen... probably building on the success of The Cosby Show.]
Future directions -- attention as power, validity of articulate network structures.
Audience comment: Note that professionals and academics put up lots of information about themselves; we do a different kind of self-promotion, but is it really different from youth social networking?
Response: The scale of social networking sites is greater... novel in the scope.
Mark noted that it could be social networking that gets people interested in reality TV.
The Revenge of the
Page (Long Paper)
David Kolb
The little paper on revision you heard a little while ago was the paper he had intended to write... the issue of complexity began as a footnote, then became an appendix. The dream was complexly linked hypertexts with long, complicated hyperlinks; patterns of links that demand rereading and demanding contemplation beyond the boundaries of the next link.
Quote from Mark B invoking the concept of complex linking... Moulthrop's Victory Garden. Complex literary effects to be achieved from this idea.
14 years later, "Let's face it, there aren't very many complex hypertexts like that."
Wikipedia's links are all single-step links, going from one self-contained mini-essay to another; links are "you want more information? Here's some more."
Reality: Google Analytics looks at Kolb's own example of a complex hypertext: Kolb's Sprawling Places. [I have got to follow up on this for my work on Colossal Cave.]
Kolb notes that Google Images is sending most of his visitors attracted by words in photo captions. Almost nobody visited a large number of pages. Most people navigate through the site by clicking the menu bars rather than the inline links.
Trivial number of people encountered his text in the way he hoped reading would develop. Does it make sense to continue to support the idea of expository and argumentative texts with complex linking patterns.
There are some assertions that can't be made well in a single page; understanding of some concepts requires complexity. [I would add that complex sites can also meet the needs of multiple users, giving newbies a way to explore unfamiliar terms, and advanced users more depth, generalists more breadth, etc.]
The page metaphor -- we expect a page to contain a little mini self-contained essay. We browse things we expect to be relatively self-sufficient. Web-writing tools are optimized for the creation of pages. The link becomes the link between pages rather than part of a chain of links.
But there's a deeper reason. Node and link hypertext itself is one node at a time. We expect one node to replace the other. Maybe we need to do more than we've done if we want complexity. Maybe hypertext is more than nodes and links.
Collage/montage? Make the individual pages more complex. You could use the collage effect of a page to create complexity within the page. Pages are becoming more than pages -- embedded rich media.
You might also make more than one node visible. You can have a web page spawn another window, but that's seldom done.
Replace complexity of linkage with complexity of spatial juxtaposition. [That's a return to the model of the highly annotated illuminated medieval manuscript.]
More sophistication in the relationship between tet and graphics. Images aren't simple illustration. [That's an interesting connection to the idea about links.. an image that merely illustrates is like a Wikipedia link that simply offers more information. A link can also offer an alternative opinion, provide context, refute opposition, etc.]
layertennis.com -- color commentary on two graphic artists competing with each other to generate images in the same file on different layers. The play of images and text is a way to bring complexity into web habits of reading.
Audience comment: Shocked that the invention of the web browser is a done deal and there's not much else to do with hypertext. The web browser chains hypertexts in the same way that the book when it was first invented was chained to the wall. [But hold on... the illuminated medieval manuscript was chained to the wall because the value of the labor and materials that went into the production of that book was probably higher than the value of the building to which the book was chained. How does the "browser as chained book" metaphor map to the present information economy? The pen that's chained to the desk in the bank isn't there to prevent people from writing, it's there so that people who are in the bank can count on having a pen there for them to use. I don't see the chianed book reference hanigng together beyond a surface analogy that the medum of the browser is like a chain, but the chained public book was chained so that more people could consult the book and not hide it in their private collection.]
Hypertext '08: Literatronica. Adaptive Digital Narrative :: Juan B. Gutierrez, and Mark C. Marino
Juan: Empower the computer to be part of the literary transaction... mathematical literature.
Mathematical literature -- not the syntatic approach, using mathematical language to describe a story. Not a semantic approach, using theorems to define stories.
Lexicographic Hypertext -- basic HTML with nodes connected via links. We navigate through the network to get from the beginning to an ending.
Tree fiction -- constructing a narrative through choosing options.
Adaptive Fiction -- the computer delivers chunks based on what the user knows about the story world. Same lexia, but the links to continue reading is different based on what the reader knows.
Temporal development of the plot. Juan agrees that we should not really find a plot as the authors... the reader will, however, find a plot. The reader finds a plot that was rendered on the fly during one sitting. In a printed book, you measure by pages... in electronic text, Juan suggest measuring by time invested. [Meaningful time invested?]
Story changes to flashback create a greater cognitive gap than a change of scene.
The computer should keep track of what the user has done. Shortest path algorithm. System will calculate the links between every pair of lessons. The author only has to build a limited number of links, let the computer handle the hard work of tracking and managing the connections.
Introduced a twist -- the hypertextural attractor (lexias that attract a lot of traffic, connected from many lexias, could be repeated). In traditional hypertext, repetition of these key nodes can be a problem -- IBM researcher examined the liklihood that a reader will lose interest during a navigation event; repition increases significantly the probability of losing the reaer's attention.
Hypertextual Friction - if a narration has too many narrative jumps, or a sequence of lexias that's disruptive, we increase the liklihood of losing the reader's attention.
Author, reader, computer are three actors. We can create a dynamical system that adjusts the text according to the relationships.
Juan invoked Aarseth's Cybertext, ergodic, noetic... Within a system, when a consciousness outside that of the reader acts this is extranoematic.
We will discover essentially the same narrative space with new tools. If we all play Oblivion we will eventually visit the same places. In a book, readers will acquire all the contents of the narrative space. The difference is how they are collected.
Showed graphs of interest versus time (steep drop off, slow increase.)If readers pass a certain number of lexias, they are more likely to keep reading.
Firction increases as the reader experiences the space... as we become familiar with the world, we have fewer options.
Juan says the results will be published in a few months.... maximize interest, minimize friction, recalculate each time the user clicks, which requires a supercomputer.
Implementation -- we start with a lexia, adaptive links displayed based on the probability that the next link ensures narrative continuity. [How are these calculated -- not by keywords, but by the shortest-path algorithm? What would the applications of a similar tool to keep track of what page a reader clicks off of a walled website like Facebook, or on a given newspaper's website?]
Juan notes that each lexia could include video... number of links per page could change. [I wonder... are inline links possible?]
Mark Marnio spoke of his experience using Literatronica to write A Show of Hands.
Says that Literatronica solves several important problems facing writers of hypertext.
Proglems include the sense of aporia when Aarseth is lost in a hypertext... "I'm not sure that Aarseth likes literary hypertext" -- that concern of not knowing when it ends, encountering repitition, etc. Mark differentiated his characters from Joyce and Jackson's (which he characterized as white and upper-middle-class), saying he hoped to bring in more types of stories from a broader array of stories.
His work is inspired by Chicano literature from the southwest of the US. Sees Joyce drawing on "the new novel," and wants to draw from the Telenovella -- soap opera. Noted how Charles Dickens reworked melodrama; has in mind a goal to move towards a more popular form. Open up electronic literature to a wider reading audience; center on families, move away from theoretical and historical and literary texts.
Mark noted that he labeled his threads with the characters that feature in each. "I got trapped by my own storytelling." Showed a graph in which different threads converge in a lexia that ends a chapter, moves through a liminal section, then opens back up again. [Reminds me of The Heist, which describes an event from multiple perspectives, and after the reader has seen a few perspectives,then offers the reader to click on a different level to advance to the next main story event.]
Mark noted his desire to communicate initial conditions, so that the reader can track the changes in that character. There's a challenge in getting even experienced readers to move beyond about 50 lexias. Mark walked the audience through the process of scripting out the relationships between lexias... you really only need to add one link to each lexia (which suggests a linear relationship... the story depends on chronology, so that makes sense).
Hypertext '08: Susan Gibb, The Hypertext Effect: the Transfiguration of Writing and the Writer
Susan presented us with the thinking behind the creation of a 300-node creative hypertext work in StorySpace.
Susan walked the audience through the process of a single "writing space" morphing into a story. As the writer moves in time, the character reveals her past through vignettes. Reflections (from the present looking back) and memory (more dramatic and lyrical than the present.)
Hypertext welcomes "those neat distracting ideas" that we have to squelch into order to develop an idea in a linear format.
[My question... what does this do to focus? Are 1000 story spaces, of which 300 are really good, better than a story with 300 good story spaces? Are 300 story spaces, of which 30 are phenomenal, preferable to a story with just 30 spaces? Moving from brainstorming and world-building to the narration of details can be tricky... Susan is very careful and meticulous about what she does, and while like Alan she's inspired by the openness of the medium, my mind jumps to how I can use this in a class full of students who are taking basic comp, and therefore haven't developed even the basic skills that contribute to a coherent paragraph, much less a coherent webtext. Susan's experience introducing multimedia to older people can build on the print literacy that a 75-year-old has developed over a lifetime of reading.]
Susan discusses the separation between the writer and character, and referred in passing to "One of the Annes," which I found interesting.
[I never think of the "you" in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel as having multiple personalities, but of course if the book were a "Develop-Your-Own-Consciousness" novel or "Interpret-Your-Own-Metaphors" book, then perhaps I'd need different language to describe the experience.]
Just after I wrote the above, Susan just mentioned the CYOA format...
Susan notes that a linear form needs a reason to go off on a side-track, but in hypertext you don't need a reason. [Again, does that limit the focus? I don't mean to suggest Susan is encouraging frivolous side-trips, since of course the reader can avoid sidestories. What implications does this have for "Murder your darlings" -- Quiller-Couch's advice for writers who cling too much to passages that just don't fit. "Marginalize your darlings"?]
Susan says she feels she hasn't mastered the hypertext form... she says she doesn't mind when the reader misses side stories, but she does have a "full" text in mind and she wants to make sure the reader experiences it all.
[Is this why she says she hasn't mastered the form? Would there be no difference between vital nodes and optional nodes if she had mastered the form, or if she masters the form will she be more confident in her ability to steer the reader, or if she masters the form will she embrace its differences and not worry it?]
Her narrative structure depends upon a loop, leaving the reader with uncertainty... suggests the image of macrame, with the threads forming a "complete story".
Susan noted that short sentences increase the pace in hypertext, but also the number of writing spaces. A short lexia forces the reader to stop and contemplate. [I'm puzzled... I would think that a long lexia would slow the reader down. I wonder how the use of bold keywords and bulleted lists would affect the reader's experience of a literary hypertext.]
Next example -- A Bottle of Beer -- a sample in Hypertextopia. Ended with a quote from Steve, emphasizing the value of even an incomplete sampling of a hypertext space. To "finish" a hypertext (as a reader) is less important than the value of contemplating the nodes one encounters.
In a question, Mark referred to "killing your children" and a "defense of hoop-de-doodle." "How do you decide what to cut and what to move to the margins?"
Susan noted that editing with each writing space means it's easier to trim the nodes.
Chris: 100 identical people each take different paths through a text, creating 100 different paths. To what degree, if you were to estimate the quality of the experience, would there be a few that are really great, some that are horrible, or would they be pretty much the same quality?
[Susan noted that she liked the slide presentation tool Keynote, a couple of times referred to "angry people" who followed a particular path through the text... ]
Marc from USC -- notes that Susan seems to value her work when the ideal reader meets the ideal story... value comes from sympathy between the experiences. Do we always have to write stories that look more like the new novel, and less like the discursive novel -- Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders.
How to get away from the concern about ensuring the reader get the "right" or "full" story?
Steve -- notes that we have not yet fully explored the aesthetic of linking. "It may be that every path in a hypertext is the only way to read it. Not the right way, or the wrong way."
Juan: If we have a message, the narrative piece created by the author, can be acquired by the reader... how closely does the reader's final perception of the work match the intention of the author? [Juan's point was about information, but the establishment of the author's intention is subjective, and the value of a work fluctuates in culture, just as the author's intention fluctuates over the life of the author, and our understanding of that intention fluctuates based on what kind of access we have to the author's notes, letters, etc.]
Mark notes that craft is important -- a work that's not communicating its message might have a technical imperfection.
2008 Kids & Family Reading Report
A new study released today finds that 75% of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, "No matter what I can do online, I'll always want to read books printed on paper," and 62% of kids surveyed say they prefer to read books printed on paper rather than on a computer or a handheld device.However,
Two in three children believe:
that within the next 10 years, most books which are read for fun will be read digitally - either on a computer or on another kind of electronic device.
Paul Bunyan and the Spambot
Well, Paul Bunyan was always a sucker for a bet, and anyhow lumber futures were down, all the rivers he knew of had been tamed, there was no room for new Great Lakes, and frankly, life had been boring of late. So with a gigantic laugh that was heard as far away as San Francisco, Caracas, and Berlin, he took Sam up on that bet.
Naturally, just getting Paul Bunyan online was already no mean feat. There was no broadband available in the remote areas of the woods where they'd been working, so the first thing he had to do was string optical cable from the nearest T1 line, which was clear down in St. Paul. For anybody but Paul Bunyan, that would have been near impossible, but ol' Paul just ordered a couple flatbeds of the finest glass windows Minnesota had to offer, chewed'em all up in a single mouthful, and drew'em out between his teeth to spin three hundred miles of perfect fiber optics. Then he just coiled it all up in a loop, and walked all the way into town, stringing that cable all the way. So getting online wasn't a real problem.
From bad to verse: Vandals get classroom penance
More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost's former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.
