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…..

Share this:

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?

Share this:

The Classroom As Interface
Call for Papers MLA 2013
Boston, MA
Jan. 3-6
300-word abstract & bio due Wed. 3/15/2012 to kathiberens [at] gmail [dot] com

The classroom has always been an interface, a point of interaction between the physical and the virtual. Mashing up concepts from MLA 2012 sessions about digital pedagogy (“Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom,” “Digital Pedagogy,” “New Media, New Pedagogies”) and interface (“Reading Writing Interfaces: E-Literature’s Past and Present“), this panel considers how ubiquitous computing (“ubicomp“) reveals the unique affordances of “the classroom.”

Now that the physical classroom is no longer the de facto locus of learning, the unique parameters of the synchronous, networked classroom may be tested. Generations of innovative teachers “hacked” the classroom to make it more interactive and student-centered, but their experiments rarely threatened the core mission of the university sufficiently to merit moritoria. Today, calls to ban laptops and smart devices from the classroom bespeak a deep unease about the sorts of learning practices–and student expectations–ubicomp inaugurates.

“The Classroom As Interface” will feature assignments and pedagogical design that manifest an awareness of ubicomp; such presentations may or may not involve “building stuff.” Paul Fyfe asserts in “Digital Humanities Unplugged” that “an unplugged digital humanities pedagogy can be just as productively disorienting as doing humanities digitally.” Elizabeth Losh’s UCSD digital poetry class ran an “E-Lit Writing Exercise: Locative Corpse” that could not have been done online. Jason Farman’s many experiments with mobility, storytelling and pedagogy explore the recursive loop between movement and fixed location, reflecting central tenets featured in his book Mobile Interface Theory. Dene Grigar, Brett Oppegaard and Chief Ranger Greg Shine are pioneering mobile, interactive, site-specific historical interpretation at Fort Vancouver. Many digital humanists use Twitter to expand their classrooms’ discourse communities. Literary scholars are exploring the political, social and privacy implications of the GeoWeb.

The object of this panel is to draw scholars’ attention to the classroom as an interface that can’t simply be remediated online. As Avenues of Access to higher education constrict and budget-conscious administrators enlarge enrollment through asynchronous distance-learning classes, it’s important to make visible the affordances of the synchronous classroom.

Share this:

This is the revised statement I edited after the Exhibit.

Mobile and Geolocative E-Lit: Private and Public Liteatures

Curatorial Statement for
MLA 2012 Electronic Literature Exhibit

by Kathi Inman Berens

“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.” –Baudrillard

Thirty years ago, when Baudrillard declared the map a “precession of simulacra” (1), he glimpsed the way media would proliferate as local and mobile, a superabundance of “information devour[ing] its own content” (80). Locative and mobile e-lit stand as tiny bulwarks of meaning, or meanings, among the several billion stories, images, songs, and links we drop monthly onto networks of SMS and microblogs. Mobile and locative e-lit earn the capacity to mean by being alive to the arbitrariness of their parameters. The defamiliarization, the cognitive dissonance, of encountering L.A. Flood outside on a cloudless SoCal day is one example of how locative literature might disclose strategic arbitrariness to its readers.

The human holding her mobile device stands at a ninety-degree angle to the surface of the earth, her GPS receiver deriving location so long there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. She is, in Edward Casey’s word, “implaced”: a body rooted in a particular spot calculated through geometry and represented in metadata. Except that the geometry interpolates several conflicting reference datums, which renders the metadata unreliable: “Different reference datums can produce large variation in ‘exact’ location,” note the authors of the Wikipedia entry on Latitude. “The Eiffel Tower is computed at geodetic latitude of 48° 51′ 29″ N, or 48.8583° N and longitude of 2° 17′ 40″ E or 2.2944°E. The same coordinates on the datum ED50 define a point on the ground which is 140 m distant from Tower.” Change the reference datum, and even exact geospatial coordinates produce different results. This is both a fact and a metaphor of locative storytelling.

In this, the first exhibit of electronic literature at the Modern Languages Association’s annual Convention, the exhibit hall was another of e-lit’s multivalent interfaces: a meeting point between the physical and the virtual, though mobile computing permits those spaces to be no longer discrete from each other. Room WSCC 609 was the exhibit’s physical location, but the social interactivity between the exhibit’s physical and virtual visitors–some of whom were scattered a few hundred feet from the exhibit floor– created excitement for e-lit at MLA. “The idea of the interface cannot be reduced to its medium or content,” notes Jason Farman in Mobile Interface Theory. “It is both and neither…a set of relations that serve as the nexus of the embodied production of social space” (62). “In all serious[ness],” tweeted Ben Robertson from the exhibit floor, “I feel like I’m watching something important, which I almost never get from panels or regular poetry readings[.] #MLA12 #elit[.]”

Part of the exhibit’s “something important” has to do with encountering e-lit away from the distractions of our own computers: the beeps and pop-ups that might yank us out of deep reading or play. But the other “something important” is serendipitous meeting between people. Bahktin’s word for this was “eventness”: the contingencies bubbling up from the babble (our audience might prefer “chatter”) of polyvocality. Serendipity is awfully hard to find via directed search: we prize results customized to our specifications in deciseconds. We lament the closure of bookstores, our “third spaces,” each aisle a micro-community of ideas and the people drawn to them, but we are unable or unwilling to pay for the bookstore’s true value as a social nexus. So long as bookstores remain, in our cultural imagination, purveyors of commodities and not experiences they will lose to online distribution and with them will die the eventness that made bookstores so remarkable. An exhibit of electronic literature might fulfill a similar sort of social function, providing “eventness” to people that exceeds mere questions of access: almost all of the e-lit featured in our exhibit is perpetually and freely accessible via the Web.

503 visitors stopped by the MLA exhibit in WSCC 609; but just as some people came in via Twitter, our embodied visitors wafted from the exhibit into nine Toronto neighborhoods (among many others) featured in [murmur], and the environs of South Central Los Angeles in L.A. Flood, and post-Katrina New Orleans in the desktop-viewable “Blue Velvet,” and the geocached mysteries hidden on the University of Maryland College Park campus in Blue Light Project and Glitch — both exceptional student projects created by Jason Farman’s undergraduates. The “space” of the exhibit in WSCC 609 thus became fungible: reified through use.

My initial reason for yoking mobile and locative e-lit in one category was logistical: such works can be accessed on mobile devices and were designed for mobility, either as a means of engagement, a theme, or both. Many of our desktop works could only be engaged on desktop. In practice this meant I advised visitors to access mobile e-lit via iPhone and locative works via iPad because locative works benefit from display on a bigger screen.

But upon consideration, the yoking is fortuitous, because it helps us to see the differences between mobile and geolocative e-lit. The most important of these distinctions is how the reader accesses the story because access influences interactivity. “The medium is the message,” observes Ian Bogost, “but the message is the message too. Instead of ignoring it, we ought to explore the relationships between the general properties of a medium and the particular situations in which it is used” (“Media Microecology,” the introduction to How To Do Things With Videogames, 5). Locative works imply public consumption; mobile implies private. To locate a story on a map is a rhetorical appeal to public discourse, shared meanings, and ever-changeful, PHP-fueled dynamism. Dropped pins designate parameters that constitute fictive and non-fictive communities. Mobile e-lit, by contrast, lives in the privacy of the tiny screen that’s never far from your body: a proprioceptive extension of your body into the virtual world and vice versa. When mobile e-lit changes, it’s because the creator tweaks it: fixes bugs, or (more rarely) adds a new element. This is very different from the perpetually evolving locative works. (One thinks of the afterlife of Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg’s “Implementation”: all those orphaned stickers.)

The physical intimacy of the mobile phone means that mobile e-lit can insinuate itself into one’s “offline” life. Standing in line at the grocery store last summer, a push notification from The Carrier, a graphic novel included in this exhibit, nudged me in my pocket. The Carrier remediates serial distribution: the reader waits between installments released to coincide with events transpiring in the novel. When I saw it was a notification from The Carrier, I rolled my shopping cart out of line and leaned against a mini-fridge while I read the latest installment. I haven’t experienced a locative work interrupting my day like that.

Even the Twitterfiction that launches a 6-day installment of L.A. Flood — timed to simulate the course of a catastrophic flood — permits desultory engagement. L.A. Flood didn’t push its way into my daily life, but the rupture it occasioned was no less dramatic. Driving from the Burbank Airport to Hollywood last October, my mind wandering, I crossed the Tujunga Pass over the L.A. River. Earlier that day, I’d been nodding in and out of the L.A. Flood Twitterstream. As I crossed Tujunga, I observed the familiar blue sign with a white pelican denoting the L.A. River. Instantly I peered out the window, panicked, expecting the flood to swallow my car. It was over in two seconds, this reverie, but it has stayed with me, the sharpness of the fear. Falling into such aporia has always been one hallmark of good fiction. But locative fiction anchors the aporia to site specificity, and mobility permits us to encounter its strange doubleness in situ.

One short video–on display in our exhibit–is almost all that remains of the first locative media experience, Jeremy Hight’s 34 West, 118 North, a walk through a patch Los Angeles where “sonic ghosts of another era” relay the story of the railroad industry in downtown L.A. Hight, considered by many to be the pioneer of locative storytelling, created a consciousness that is characteristic of locative media experienced in situ: the disjunction between the space and time, the awareness of one’s own immediate physical surroundings as evitable and contingent.

In Kate Armstrong’s Ping, participants receive directions culled from a telephone tree about where to go next: “the effects of the environment on the perception, behaviour and mood of individuals” is under study here. Four other projects not included in this exhibit continue in the vein of Armstrong’s pioneering work in the psychogeographical: Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, Paul Notzold’s Speak to God and Bluebrain’s two first-ever location-aware albums Listen to the Light (Oct. 2011; set in Central Park) and The National Mall (April 2011). In each case, in situ experience is elemental to the art. In Teri Raub’s Core Sample, featured in this exhibit, a GPS-based interactive sound walk puts the soundscapes of Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art in dialog with the landscape of Spectacle Island and asks “what is recorded versus what is suppressed and denied?”

Where locative works wander beneath your touch, guiding you to treasures both fictive and (in the case of geocached “Blue Light Project,” literal), mobile works are instantly summoned. Jason Farman speculates that touch interface seems “invisible” because our muscle memory bypasses consciousness of how we access the story: we notice interface only when it doesn’t work. But touch is more than a navigational gesture; it becomes a vernacular–a touch vernacular, I argue–when tactile navigation becomes expressive: not just a means of accessing the story but interactively constituting it.

Erik Loyer’s Strange Rain on the Apple iOS yields an experience that demonstrates the narrative complexity that can arise when touch is treated as a narrative element capable of nuance, mood and layering much the way we think of sound. Both Strange Rain and the previous year’s Ruben and Lullaby are featured in the mobile works exhibit. Synesthetic, narratively rich because multi-sensory and choreographed both to frame text and stand alone, Strange Rain is the best example I’ve found yet of the multimodal sense/text recursive loop that augments narrative possibility beyond the familiar dyad of sight/sound. Unlike Loyer’s gorgeous but less compelling Ruben and Lullaby, which eschews text for drawn, interactive facial expressions to propel the arguing lovers’ narrative, Strange Rain is as much a puzzle as it is a sensory experience. Loyer calls his works “stories you can play,” and indeed, the tension between the narrative and ludic elements pull the reader/gamer in opposite directions. Games urge us to move quickly, to “level up.” Narrative enjoins us to slow down and feel. Strange Rain approximates synesthesia when the reader/gamer oscillates quickly between those two modes of interaction. It’s a splendid disorientation.

Jörg Piringer’s abcedfghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is a canny app that features crisp sound recordings of each letter. Activated by touch, these letter-sounds bounce, fly, drop and putter around the screen in any combination a gamer can create through touch. Endlessly imaginative, this game has no narrative element; but the play is so inspired it causes us to hear–for the first time in how long?–the sonic building blocks of language. Piringer’s defamiliarization creates a surprising range of euphony and cacophony. He is a member of Vienna’s legendary Vegetable Orchestra.

Silent and stark in black-and-white silhouettes, Aya Karpinska’s Shadows Never Sleep withholds the sonic and tactile gratifications of works by Piringer and Loyer. Karpinska’s play with children’s nursery rhymes and bedtime stories casts the scary “shadows” as text itself, to which the reader has to “zoom” with her fingers in order to gain access. These beautiful text panes are the creatures under your bed. In P.o.E.M.M.’s “What They Speak,” the reader glides her finger atop the mobile screen and lines of poetry spring up and trail behind, sometimes right side up and sometimes backwards. The app features poems by luminaries David Jhave Johnston, Jim Andrews, J. R. Carpenter, Aya Karpinska, and platform co-creator Jason Lewis.

“Pursue error & failure, exploit autocorrect, disturb the placid surface of interface that deceives us into believing in unshakable humanness,” exhorts co-curator Lori Emerson, guest-tweeting on Mark Amerika’s @remixthebook. Amerika, an e-lit author since the early days of hypertext, shot the first feature-length film on a mobile phone: Immobilité is on view in our mobile exhibit. From Amerika’s ’90s hypertext, to his current film, to the next generation of mobile and locative fictions authored by undergraduate e-lit artists featured in this exhibit: the history of innovation writes and rewrites itself on a palimpsest you can swipe.

Share this: