E-Literature At the Library of Congress

Docent Gary Nasca showing an e-essay to a guest at “Avenues of Access” e-lit show.

Dene Grigar and I curated “Avenues of Access,” the second show of Electronic Literature at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference, this year in Boston, MA. Read our 10-page IMPACT REPORT to learn how many people have used our virtual gallery, and why exhibiting electronic literature face-to-face at a professional conference is influencing literary scholarship.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Many visitors to the “Avenues of Access” exhibit at the Hynes Convention Center actively sought it because the 2012 e-literature exhibit positively affected their scholarship.

Visitors lingered for upwards of an hour, even two, immersing themselves in the various generic stations and talking with curators and other scholars about connections between their own research and the exhibited e-lit.

The natural affinity between e-literature and digital humanities manifested itself in conversations that are sparking scholarly collaboration on projects, speaking invitations and publications.

Young scholars tell us they are revising their courses of study and dissertation plans to account for electronic works they encounter at MLA e-lit exhibits.

Because e-lit is emergent and dynamic, scholars discovered new paradigms within primary source materials.

E-lit’s platform and thematic diversity made it amenable to many traditional scholarly fields and encourages transdisciplinary collaboration.

A number of visitors remarked that they now expect to encounter an e-lit exhibit at MLA. E-lit at MLA is another demonstration of how MLA leadership embraces new technologies and scholarly developments in the field.

EXHIBIT MISSION AND GOALS

Our mission was to introduce scholars of language and literature to electronic literature being produced right now around the world in multiple languages, and for scholars to apprehend the historical and material antecedents of this emergent work.

These goals helped us achieve our mission:

Create a physical setting in which scholars new to electronic literature could “learn” how to engage it and share their experiences with expert readers, scholars, artists and enthusiasts;

Provide scholarship and online resources to scholars for the purpose of further study of electronic literature;

Encourage those interested in the creative arts to produce electronic literature;

Demonstrate in the hands-on Antecedent and Creation Stations how one “makes” electronic literature;

Raise awareness of electronic literature as a field with defined parameters so that scholars can assimilate it into the broader scholarly discourse about canonicity & periodization.

PHOTOS AND TWEETS

See also this Storify I built documenting the “Avenues of Access” exhibit in photos & Tweets.

NEXT STOP

Washington D.C., where Dene and I will curate the first show of electronic literature at the Library of Congress April 3-5, 2013!

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Janelle Jenstaad and Rob Wittig mapping stories at MLA12.

“Practice mobility as a kind of dwelling,” concludes Jason Farman at the end of Mobile Interface Theory (2012). “Practice movement that is not indelibly linked to ideas of progress and obsolescence. The result will value the unique characteristics of place” (141).

I thought a lot about “mobility as a kind of dwelling” as Dene Grigar and I curated “Avenues of Access,” our second show of electronic literature for the Modern Language Association’s annual Convention. Unlike last year’s large show — 160 works that told a comprehensive history of e-lit from its origins in concrete poetry and early hypertext to present day mobile apps — the 2013 show “Avenues of Access” is an intimate collection of thirty new works in five sub-genres, each genre loaded on an elegant computer station located in our exhibit space, Hynes Convention Center Room 312.

Mobility, a “dwelling,” is also a mode of thinking and being. Locative storytelling has always existed — graffiti art is the readiest example — but ubiquitous computing has changed where stories live, and who can tell them. One thinks of VozMob, in which L.A. immigrant and low-wage laborers voice record their daily experiences, or CicLAvia, a pro-bike initiative in which, among other things, riders snap photos en route and post them to a Google map. The Australian e-lit artist Megan Heyward (whose work “Of Day, Of Night” is on exhibit at “Avenues of Access”) is launching in January 2013 “Notes for Walking,” a narrative written on landscape at Sydney’s Middle Head National Park and Mosman Art Gallery.

It follows that as the location of stories moves from book or device to spaces themselves, our notion of what constitutes “reading” is abruptly changing. We now understand that space and story work in tandem to produce the text. Our mobile devices collaborate with our bodies to shift us effortlessly — sometimes imperceptibly — between virtual and embodied states. In fact some e-lit authors expressly design for different types and durations of reader engagement: a sampling, a skim, and a fully immersive reading. Authors have learned to do so by tracking reader engagement with their works.

Readers have always yearned to read stories in the physical settings the stories describe. How many enthusiasts have ported copies of Walden or The Prelude to the famous lakes? But immersive reading habits are actually disjunctive with “situated” or “implaced” reading, because we block out sensory input in order more fully to immerse ourselves in the story. We read near Walden Pond; maybe we glance up, dislodge ourselves from the Thoreau’s prose and dream a little. But people are scarce in Walden, and Walden Pond is a popular, sometimes noisy place. Does authenticity ruin the immersive fantasy?

Reading spaces increasingly compel my attention as I think through what I find most novel and exciting about e-lit being made right now. Code works and locative works — that is, stories set in both virtual and physical space — fascinate me. When a new device, or software, or code library comes into being, e-lit artists ask themselves: what kinds of stories will this let me tell? Our exhibit features Alexandra Saemmer’s use of Prezi as a storyspace, Manuel Portela’s “Google Earth: a poem for Voice and Internet,” and the hidden story lurking in the comments of the source code powering Mark C. Marino’s literary game. Each artist in this exhibit is pushing against convention in one way or another. Alan Bigelow, Jason Nelson and Jim Andrews have all migrated from Flash to HTML5 in order to explore how their work might differently operate on mobile devices. Check out their exhibited work in Boston and compare it to their large and distinguished collections of Flash-based work.

Image from Zaylea's SpeakToMeInCode

Some e-lit actually capitalizes on the fluid attention of a mobile reader. Laura Zaylea’s “SpeakToMeInCode,” a work commissioned especially for this MLA show, is a locative romance that intends to disperse the reader’s attention across story, device and social space. Set at a fictional convention, “SpeakToMe” begins as a guide to grammar and good writing but transmutes into an illicit romance. Readers will walk around the Hynes Convention hall pulling bits of story onto their mobile browsers via QR codes. As they do so, the rhythms and ambient sounds of the bustle between panels will intrude upon their concentration, adding verisimilitude to the story’s theme.

E-literature is readily available free and on-demand from outstanding collections, blogs and journals such as these: The Electronic Literature Organization’s Collection 1 and Collection 2, The New River Journal, SpringGun Press, The European Anthology of Electronic Literature , the daily blog I ♥ E-Poetry by Prof. Leonardo Flores, The Drunken Boat, and Hyperrhiz.

With so much curated e-lit available on-demand, what’s the point of a live exhibit?

One is much more likely to encounter difference, make spontaneous and serendipitous associations, at a live event. A favorite moment from last year’s exhibit was when Renaissance scholar Janelle Jenstaad and “Invisible Seattle” artist Rob Wittig mashed up London 1560 and Seattle mid-1980s. Janelle unscrolled her gigantic London map and she and Rob poured over it talking narrative, urbanism, and who knows what else. Experiences like that don’t happen when you read e-lit alone. Convergence.

Toward that end, “Avenues of Access” will feature two Creation Stations where guests can “get their hands dirty” in creative computing. Creation Station One will feature Nick Montfort’s JavaScript source code for “Taroko Gorge,” his brilliant transposition of landscape poetry into a poetry generator that writes a new line every 1.2 seconds. “Taroko” has been remixed at least twenty-two times by other artists; guests might review those to spark imagination, then try their hand at filling Nick’s source code with new variables to make their own poems: remixes or defacements.

Creation Station Two will feature two vintage computers, a Commodore 64 (1982) and an Atari Video Computing System (1977). Guests will be free to to engage the computers as those vintage devices run the one-line BASIC program 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5+RND (1)); : GOTO 10, which is also the subject of a new MIT Press book by 10 authors writing in one voice: a book that sold out its first run in three days. Five of the 10 PRINT authors will visit the exhibit and perform at the live reading Friday night at Emerson College’s Bordy Theater at 8PM. See the poster at the bottom of this post for more details.

We are extremely fortunate that more than ten of our thirty-two exhibited authors will swing by the exhibit to talk informally with guests. Docents and I will livetweet these happenings so that virtual participants can join in the fun.

One’s notion of what can be digitized grows every day. The acceleration of digitization in higher education alone is rushed by venture capitalists who sniff gold in the hills.

“As for art,” the Canadian e-lit poet Jhave recently wrote to me, “my faith in its longevity faded awhile ago. Its purpose is now instructing conversations, things like [the] MLA exhibit are crucial for that. I am sorry I won’t be there.”

For Jhave (whose exquisite spoken-word poetry mashup MUPS is on exhibit), ephemeral “instructing conversations” endure when computational works wither. It seems counter-intuitive, but it’s not. Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare: “He is not of an age but for all time.”

E-lit is of an age.

Let its convergences take you someplace new.

IN BOSTON:
“Avenues of Access” E-Literature Exhibit
Hynes Convention Center Room 312
January 3rd (12-7 PM), 4th (9AM-7PM) and 5th (9AM-7PM);

Friday Jan. 4th, 8PM
Readings and Performances
Bordy Theater at Emerson College
216 Tremont Street
Free, open to the public reading at Emerson College’s Bordy Theater Friday, Jan. 4th; and

On TWITTER #MLA13 #elit

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The intimacy born of learning face-to-face is a misattribution. It’s not the face or the body that conveys intimacy, but shared, dynamic experiences of time.

Virtual learning environments are awkward because the software can’t yet pivot between the dynamic flux in time dimensions when I’m face-to-face in a classroom with some students and also engaging virtually via classroom software with others. It’s a bizarre truth that the same students who will slouch in sweats around a conference table will sometimes refuse to come on-camera unless they look “camera ready.” Men and women alike; it doesn’t skew by gender. As computing power increases, and as a generation of homeschooled learners log their 15,000 K-12 classroom hours in predominantly virtual and hybrid environments, the software’s insufficiency will come to an end.

Will the embodied classroom?

That’s what we’re focused on as we take the measure of MOOCs. That’s what administrators and donors reckon with when they assess whether to invest in the campus’s physical capacity. But “will the embodied classroom end” is not the real question.

Because the new learning is ancient.

Agape, loving-kindness, can’t be dispersed. It’s a specific call or procedure, a transaction that’s both medium- and user-specific. It’s existed for thousands of years passed from body to body in whatever counted as “the classroom” of its day. It will persist if we create conditions for it to flourish. Before ubiquitous computing, agape was a byproduct of physical intimacy and shared dreaming that unfolds in a good class over a semester. “I’m more accustomed to looking at a screen than at my professors,” one student told me after our first virtual class. “But I’m scared that this is what education is going to become.”

I’m not; and I suspect that her fear that “this is what education would become” has been diminished by the durable artifacts of fifteen weeks of nearly constant collaboration with the other three members of “Team Coke.” “I learned how to mic and light a scene,” she told me in office hours outside last week. “We stayed up til 3 with Graham even though he was the only one editing.” I interpret this to mean that at the beginning of the term, Jessi thought the classroom was mine, and that she entered my world when she streamed me inside the screen of her MacBook Pro. Over the term her classroom became anywhere she and her teammates happened to be working: filming at the student center or on John McKay Field; editing and voicing over in her apartment and goofing around with her teammates into the wee hours; arriving, always a little late, into the physical space of our classroom; steaming in herself when she wanted to, and almost always game to push an idea some place unexpected. That’s her classroom. I’m the one who makes sure she can build what she needs and take it anywhere she wants to go.

Students from fifteen years ago, or five years ago, or from last term will Facebook me, or find me via email or Twitter and say, “Did you see Aung San Suu Kyi?…. or….Franzen’s new book?….. or……how Machimima is contracting content for women…..” A woman selling cosmetics a Nordstroms stopped me mid-sentence and said: “you were my literature professor. I recognize your voice.” When did you graduate? I asked. “2004.”

I don’t worry that computers will get smarter and virtual classrooms will remediate embodiment better than they do now. It doesn’t matter to me if my classroom is a little rectangle in a building or a little rectangle above my keyboard. Doors are rectangles; rectangles are portals. We walk through.

What can’t be digitized is love.

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A couple of short thoughts on ordering and activating my iPhone5. This was originally an FB post responding to a question from a former student (now friend) about my impressions of iPhone5.

Is it worth the money and time? Yes to the 5; yes w/reservations to AT&T.

The 5 processes much, much faster than the 3GS. Siri is great fun. Talking txts rather than typing is terrific. Camera = worth the wait. Accelerometer works on iOS apps, but less reliably in external ones (such as FB). I don’t like iTunes prompting me to log in even when I load local files. (Dude, that my bizniz, not yours)….

As for AT&T: it simply was not ready for the transition to 5. Probs w setting up VM on the 5 is a “known issue” that requires talking to a human to work out. I spent abt 90 mins (first w chatbot, then with human chat, then w human voice to voice) resolving probs, such as VM and my missing txt plan (!!)

See anything missing? iPhone5 not an option.

ATT messaging on their “my att” site is breathtakingly unclear. One imagines Apple might have dictated terms or deadlines to AT&T that ATT simply could not meet. ATT has lagged at both launches w the 5 (9/14, 9/21). Example: at 12:30AM 9/14, I spent abt 2 hrs working through a set of loops that prevented my card number from being recorded to advance the transaction. Tried lots of workarounds, including renaming my ATT user profile. Nada. 2:30, I quit everything. Hunch told me to reboot et voila: after 3AM PST (more crucially perhaps: 6AM EST), a brand new interface. Transaction took me 90 seconds. (But: even that ease is illusory, since I had to do clean up w ATT that prevented full use of device immediately after opening it.) All told: the device & fast connectivity worth the effort. The time I spent figuring out why the interface wasn’t working applies out to other situations. I’m at the place where the FAILs deeply intrigue me. As to the Apple Maps [friend name omitted], I haven’t played with it yet. That’s today when I use it to find good hiking near my folks’ house…..

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Reader –> Critic –> Tinkerer. Maker? Does it count as “making” if you steal the code?

I read e-lit for two years. Increasingly, I wanted to make it. Here’s my first digital poem, “Tournedo Gorge.”

Last Sunday, my first e-lit conference, “ELO12: Electrifying Literature,” came to a close. It was hugely exciting and inspiring. To hang out with artists I’ve read, and whose works have reinvigorated my love of literature, was heady. It was also sweaty: we tromped the hilly campus at West Virginia University at Morgantown in hot, humid air. Panels started at 8:30AM and ran all day until 7. Then we ate dinner and hung out at the local pub until 2. I saw a lot of amazing new work from Jason Nelson, Alan Bigelow, Erik Loyer, Fox Harrell, Bill Bly, Caitlin Fisher, Laura Zaylea, Jody Zellen. I played with some work in beta from Jason Lewis and Samantha Gorman. Maria Mencia debuted her new piece, Mimesis, on our panel. I presented my first e-lit interpretation, “Geolocative Storytelling Off the Map,” a reading of how audio elements in the fiction L.A. Flood implace the reader uniquely at a site, and operate differently from a map’s visual elements.

The immersion in art and the conversation with artists about how art gets made — so many conversations — recombined with everything I brought with me to the conference. All those lexia and desire. It nudged me into alignment. A week ago right now I was flying over the midwest from ELO12 back to my home in Portland, Oregon; today I’m publishing my 1st born-digital poem, “Tournedo Gorge.”

I copied Nick Montfort‘s code for his generative poem “Taroko Gorge” and filled the variables with my own words and context. Inspired by the panel featuring Nick and six others who’ve remixed “Taroko Gorge,” I came up with a concept and spent the last two days noodling around in javascript to see how it would render.

[I knew nothing of javascript, btw. I had to figure out how to run js in a browser, to give you a sense of how new this is to me. There are still some lines in the code I can't quite parse. That's OK. I raced through to find out what happens next, how it would look, whether I could get it to run, whether it made sense. Now I can go back and remove bits of code, run it in the browser to see what each logical operator does in the sequence Nick laid out. If I want to.]

Nick’s script is short, about 130 lines. It is concise and beautiful. Twitter pal Lee Skallerup asked me during ELO12: what is e-lit? What should I read? A close reading of Nick’s poem and the subsequent remixes could go a long way toward answering that question. It’s a pretty neat trick Nick’s done, to excise the “sole genius” from British romantic poetry and replace it with a perpetually generative algorithm that is itself so malleable that it can be appropriated into many different contexts. Scott Rettberg made Machinima-animated clown speaking a rocknroll Taroko. J.R. Carpenter made 3 remixes (“they’re addictive,” she admitted during the panel); my favorite is Along the Briny Beach, which braids pieces of Bishop, Carroll, Darwin and Conrad. Mark Sample did a funny and moving “Takei, George” (that was also Mark’s first work of e-lit, as “Tournedo” is mine.) Talan Memmott‘s “Toy Garbage” strips kid culture of the illusion of innocence.

I’m a code novice. (More on this here and here.) But I’m an intuitive cook because I’ve now been cooking so long and so experimentally that I understand the capacities of the different elements in any given meal preparation. When you know what you’re doing, you can monkey with procedure. I’m teaching my daughter to cook this summer and I hear myself issuing all kinds of commands with conditions: don’t stir the eggs too much because it will toughen the protein; but stir the eggs in this case to loosen the bacon bits from the metal pan; you couldn’t do this in Teflon because the bacon wouldn’t have stuck in the first place, and your spatula might tear the Teflon coating.

Which is not all that unlike:
function path() {
var p=rand_range(1);
var words=choose(above);
if ((words==’recipe’)&&(rand_range(3)==1)) {
words=’firstChild ‘+choose(trans);
} else {
words+=s[p]+’ ‘+choose(trans)+s[(p+1)%2];
}
words+=’ the ‘+choose(below)+choose(s)+’.';
return words;
}

I wrote “Tournedo Gorge” because I wanted to mash the space of computation with the female, domestic, and tactile. Early on in ELO12, about six women found ourselves in the john by the sinks talking about code (Flourish, Maria, Claire, Amaranth?). I was interested by this. Even though there was nothing at all condemnatory about men or the environment of coding, etc., etc., nevertheless there we were: women standing in a lopsided circle in the only physical space expressly marked as female, talking about what we can and can’t do with code. A conversation that didn’t persist when we walked out the bathroom door.

I don’t know js. Working on this poem, I now know one pinky-fingernail-shaving’s worth of js. But I also don’t *not* know js.

I’ve decided for now that what I know and don’t know is irrelevant. The question is, do I have what I need in order to author? Turns out that if I don’t, I’ll acquire it.

I seized the chance to use js expressively. Nick’s code made it possible. I scribbled and scribbled in that primer. I doodled my experience as a mom and wife algorithmically.

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Coming to the Modern Languages Association’s annual Convention, Jan. 3-6, 2013 in Boston, MA: “The Classroom As Interface.” It will feature presentations by Elizabeth Losh (UCSD), Jason Farman (U.Maryland/College Park), LeeAnn Hunter (Washington State Pullman) and me (USC Annenberg).

Here’s the proposal. I invite anybody out there — particularly teachers (K-12, college, community college, univ., online or f2f) to reach out and comment.

A “Media-Specific Analysis” is “a mode of critical interrogation alert to the ways in which the medium constructs the work and the work constructs the medium” (9). Although N. Katherine Hayles‘ subject in Writing Machines is the material construction of electronic literature, it is now appropriate — even necessary — to perform a “media-specific analysis” of the “classroom.” The classroom has always been an interface, a point of interaction between the physical and the virtual. Now that the classroom is no longer the de facto site of learning, the unique parameters of the synchronous, networked classroom may be seen, altered and tested. For the first time, learners with intellectual disabilities or even just personal predilections might use software to customize their mode of classroom engagement. Whether an ADD learner hacks virtual classroom software to eliminate distracting video feeds, or a shy learner anonymously participates in a lecture’s Twitter backchannel, ubiquitous computing is permitting a rapid proliferation of learning interfaces. This profusion merits scrutiny and interpretation.

We propose an interactive, participatory Special Session in which each presenter talks for ten minutes and the remaining thirty-five minutes are reserved for 1) twenty minutes of question-and-answers and 2) fifteen minutes of hands-on engagement with key elements of the presentations. That is, each presenter will be prepared not only to present a “talk” but also to show exemplary assignments, demonstrations of software, or clusters of data. This blend of theoretical and experiential presentation is meant to provide attendees the necessary theoretical and applicative close readings to appreciate the specific interstices of the classroom as interface. Our panel is designed to present four unique but telescoping vantages on the classroom as interface: the institution, the classroom, the software and the learner’s body.

Elizabeth Losh notes that mass distributions of handheld digital devices to first-year students on college campuses offer new ways for undergraduates to “read” the university and its interfaces and to be instructed in new modes of digital reading by campuses interested in promoting electronic rites of initiation. How should we look back on a decade of large-scale distribution efforts aimed at giving mobile computing to first-year college students? Four cases studies – the 2002 distribution of HP Jordana Pocket PCs at UC San Diego, the 2004 distribution of iPods at Duke, and the 2010 and 2011 distributions of iPads at Seton Hill and the University of Maryland – tell us about institutional attitudes about how students should decipher the messages encoded in higher education. With mobile technologies students are encouraged to read textbooks, read buildings, and even read each other. The institutions’ tacit promotion of passive and active surveillance activates competing anxieties: traditionalist fears about post-literacy and distraction, and progressives’ misgivings about usurpation of private space.

Jason Farman’s paper focuses on recent debates around the effects of digital technologies on practices of distraction and disconnection in the college classroom. Examining the lives of American college students as a lens through which to read the broader culture’s responses, Dr. Farman looks at the heated discussions about the ways that multitasking is, as Nicholas Carr argues, “rewiring our brains.” From 2009-2011, many cultural events underscored the urgency of these debates, such the 2009 shift which marked, for the first time ever, when mobile phones were used more for data transfer than for voice conversations. Farman’s autoethnographic approach draws upon his experiences using mobile media in the classroom and considers emerging scholarship on multitasking and distraction, such as Cathy N. Davidson’s Now You See It. The exhortation to disconnect, Farman argues, simplifies a complex, embodied process of engagement across the spaces of our screens and physical environments.

Software developers prize transparency: a desktop folder holds files just like a manila folder holds papers. But in the virtual classroom, where the software is meant to remediate a huge range of conscious and unconscious communication practices, “face-to-face” is distractingly literal: a Brady Bunch grid of nodding heads. Kathi Inman Berens spent a year experimenting with virtual classroom software in her classes. In this “medium-specific analysis,” Berens contextualizes the results of these software-and-pedagogy experiments with readings from Hayles, Apple’s Software Developers’ Kit, and Oram and Wilson’s Beautiful Code. How does choice of platform influence student engagement and interactivity? Should student reaction to the virtual classroom software become a subject of course content, or should it be “invisible”? Walled gardens (Blackboard, Adobe) and ad-supported services (the Google suite, Twitter) necessitate thinking through the ethical implications of commerce that openly underwrites our freedom to “make stuff.”

“I’d like to think that meeting in a physical space has value,” discloses LeeAnn Hunter. “But unless we begin to think of human interaction as a technology in itself that aids learning, I can see why publicly funded institutions would want to go the way of Khan.” Hunter proposes to formulate — or begin limning the parameters — of a technology of human interaction. What are the advantages and specs of embodied, collective, synchronous learning? How might it impact learning and growth? In an economy of scarcity, what is its cost-benefits analysis? Exploring the perspective of embodied learning, Hunter turns to the canons of disability studies and non-verbal communication such as dance to seek alternative paradigms for understanding the stakes of embodied learning in ubiquitous computing environments.

Beginning our panel with the institution and ending it with the body implies a trajectory of inquiry that has a rich history in literary studies. Decades of feminist and queer writing on embodiment, “writing-from-the-body” and the body inscribed by the institution prompts us to wonder to what extent our humanness, in this world of newly ubiquitous computing, might be a byproduct of interface?

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