I’m the 2014-2015 U.S. Fulbright Scholar of Digital Culture at the University in Bergen.
Here’s what I’ve been up to.
In Kraków, I presented “Trends in Digital Poetry” at Festiwal Literacki Ha!wangarda. I also led an e-literature curation workshop and gave a talk about my book project “Algorithmic Subjects” at the Jagiellonian University.
Essays published or submitted fall 2014
–“Judy Malloy’s seat at the (database) table: a feminist reception history of early hypertext.” Literary and Linguistic Computing: Journal of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. (2014) 29 (3): 340-348. Online and print. Open access online thru November 2014.
–“Interface” chapter. Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. New York: MLA Press. 2016. Open access online and print.
–“Live/Archive: Occupy MLA.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. In press. Open access online.
–“Touch & Decay: Adapting Steve Tomasula’s TOC for iOS.” The Art and Science of Steve Tomasula’s New Media Fiction. Ed. David Banash. New York: Bloomsbury. May 2015. Print.
–“Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces“. Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. In press. Open access online.
Invited Talks
–Jagiellonian University and Festiwal Literacki Ha!wangarda. Kraków, Poland. October 3-5.
–Äarhus University. Digital Humanities Lab of Denmark. December 11-12.
–University of Rostock. Fulbright lecture series. “Why Teach Video Games?” 15 May 2015.
Service to the Profession
–Nominated to the Modern Language Association Executive Committee.
–Executive Committee of the proposed MLA Creative Writing Forum “Rhetoric Composition Writing Studies: Creative Writing.”
Talks
–Two MLA 15 presentations in Vancouver:
—-“Want to ‘Save the Humanities’? Pay Adjuncts to Learn Digital Tools” on the “Disrupting the Digital Humanities” panel;
—-“Occupy MLA: Protest Fiction in Networked Environments” on the Literary Twitter panel.
–Two “Paratext in Digital Culture” Workshops:
—-“Street Paratexts: Paratext as Agent of Political Action.” 8 December. Bergen.
—-“Taroko Gorge: a Theory of Networked Paratext.” 30 August. Bergen.
–Bergen Public Library. “Stories Beneath Your Feet and Fingertips: Playing Locative Stories.” 4 November.
Teaching
This spring I’m teaching DIKULT 103 Digital Genres and co-teaching with Scott Rettberg DIKULT 303, a master’s class in Digital Aesthetics. Last fall I taught DIKULT 203 Electronic Literature, and one third of the DIKULT 106 Online Identities course. My fourteen e-literature students come from Slovenia, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Norway and Spain. Digital Culture at UiB is an English-language major, so we have a common tongue. My curriculum blends media analysis, literary criticism, and making art. Students author art and criticism individually and collaboratively. They have made short videos, memes, generated poems (adapting M.I.T. professor Nick Montfort’s elegant javascript poem “Taroko Gorge“), several analytical oral presentations and, at the end of the term, a location-based Netprov, OUTSOURCE MY STUDY ABROAD, a collaboration between my students and those of Rob Wittig, Visual Arts professor at University of Minnesota Duluth.
Here are two particularly canny Tarokos–though really, many of the students did inventive and beautiful work.
—Silje Fossdal dramatized the late, tense years of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s marriage by staging quotations from The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz as an accusatory dialogue. This is a savvy use of the generator, because the dialogue rarely (if ever) repeats, which imparts the feeling of not being able to escape. The watercolor art in background is Zelda’s. When Silje’s friends told her the poem was beautiful, she added a jarring audio track to evoke the distance between the Fitzgeralds’ beautiful appearance and shattered marriage.
—Patrick Durdel, who had never worked with javascript before this class, eliminated lines of code to see how the output would render. Playing around, Patrick reduced Scott Rettberg’s Tokyo Garage to one outputted line and tinkered with it to exaggerate its overlap: brilliant of Patrick to see in the bold yellow letters a visual poem of Tokyo’s skyline.
Hiking Lyderhorn, one of the 7 mountains ringing Bergen.
