Serial fiction plays an central role in narrative today. The serialized novel started in the 19th century, driven in part by the cost of books: people who could not afford to purchase an expensive novel instead bought one piecemeal, in weekly or monthly installments. Recurrent characters in short stories also proved a reliable source of readers, and then radio and television series preserved the tradition of the serial. Whether we’re talking about television episodes, webisodes, or the fact that every film and video game blockbuster seems determined to have a sequel before opening day, serialization has certainly crept into our lives in a very powerful way.
Jo Walton examines the joy of an unfinished series , arguing that an unfinished series leaves us wondering, speculating, and (in my opinion most-importantly) talking about what might come.
If you come face to face with James Clavell in the afterlife, my advice is to tell him first how much you like his books, before asking if he’s had time up there to finish Hag Struan.
Of course, many of us read hypertext narratives serially. Hypertext naturally lends itself to open-ended narrative, and the joy of an unfinished series is relevant whether we’re talking about a hypertext series or just an exceptionally long hypertext. And with the immediacy of Web publishing and hypertext’s ability to be constantly changing and expanding, there’s very little real difference between the two anymore.
Brian Greenspan was one of the most fun and colorful people we met at the Future of Digital Studies conference. In addition to seeming to always be at the center of the most interesting conversations, he proved to have very interesting ideas on electronic narrative. His current project, StoryTrek, looks to provide fascinating and immersive possibilities for the future of digital storytelling.
The idea behind StoryTrek is that authors could combine their digital texts with geospatial location systems to provide location-specific text. Reading the text on her phone, the reader might be traversing the text as she walks, only to read a passage about arriving at a brook as she does so in the real world. Going a bit further might reveal a passage about dipping one’s feet into the water and so forth.
While in Boston for Eastgate’s Tinderbox Weekend Event on March 13-14, Felix Kuehn & Alex Strick van Linschoten will be at the Harvard Coop on Friday March 12 discussing My Life with the Taliban , an autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef, former senior member of the Taliban.
Editors Felix Kuehn & Alex Strick van Linschoten will discuss this harrowing autobiography by Taliban member Abdul Salam Zaeef. The book begins with the author’s early childhood before turning to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Zaeef’s decision to join the mujahideen resistance. Countering conventional accounts that the Taliban emerged in the 1990s, Zaeef maintains that the movement existed as early as the 1970s. The author traces his rise in the Taliban to his appointment as ambassador to Pakistan in 2000, and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment in Guantnamo Bay after September 11 and the fall of the Taliban regime.
Discussion and book signing will take place 7:00-8:30 PM on Friday March 12.
Treehouse is an interesting example of real-life events accidentally becoming a digital narrative. The work offers the love story of two people through long-forgotten emails recovered from an old hard-drive. It’s an artifactual hypertext, presented in “appisodes” downloadable for the iPhone.
After finding out today that my favorite Runner’s World weblogger will no longer be posting, I was deeply saddened and touched in a way that felt very unique to the medium. It’s funny; the retirments of many of my favorite writers, composers, and artists haven”t touched me deeply. But Web reading is a different experience; one doesn’t often go back and read (someone else’s) old archives just for fun to see how the story unfolds with knowledge of the future, despite hypertext literature’s emphasis on rereading.
So when a blogger retires, that’s it. Runner’s World may choose to take the all of the archives down in a couple of months, cutting off my access forever. With reading a book, looking at a painting, or listening to a song—even though those pleasures exist in a finite space of time like reading a weblog—the experience is repeatable in a way that reading social media updates isn’t.
Where is the line drawn? I wouldn’t read a newspaper a second time, though I would reread the anthology of an interesting columnist. And I would argue that the interesting columnist is the closest analogy to the blogger. And indeed, though I’ll never browse the archives, if the blogger’s posts were bound into a book, I would probably reread them. So why the difference? What is it about the Web that makes this distinction?
And in the age heralded as the birth of universal publishing, does the achievement really count if people won’t ever reread those works?
Over the next few days, HTLit will be reporting from Future of Digital Studies 2010 at the University of Florida. Mauro Carassai, a graduate student at UF, has organized an event which brings together an impressively strong program, including some of hypertext’s most esteemed authors and critics.
Mark Bernstein mentions his upcoming talk on NeoVictorian New Media and the problems with criticism and promises more information to come.
Shadow Unit s a serial Web fiction by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette and Will Shetterly. In addition to the episodes available on the main website (now in its third season), many of the series’ characters have Livejournal blogs, allowing fans to interact with the characters. The series crosses Criminal Minds with TheX-Files, adding a dash of several other paranormal TV series.
The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit hunts humanity's nightmares. But there are nightmares humanity doesn't dream are real.
The Behavioral Analysis Unit sends those cases down the hall.
Welcome to Shadow Unit
Though many Web fictions are serialized, the insistence on likeness to television drama is interesting. Breaking the narrative into episodes and seasons seemed limiting. At the end of each season, however, writers release “bonus content,” analogous to DVD extras, including “deleted scenes.” What an excellent idea! This way, writers can go back and fill plot holes, expand on certain characters without interrupting the pace of the overall narrative, explore counterfactual plots, and answer some of the cries of fans.
The idea of including interactive character profiles is narratively engaging. I have not read through all of the seasons, but my curiosity was immediately piqued when a link to one of the character’s profiles had a note next to it that read “No longer updated.”
This series is a step toward the maturation of Web fiction, and its appropriation of television tactics is a welcome move toward more engaging living Web narrative. The latest episode is available in RSS, ePub, PRC (Kindle), and PDF format. Seasons one and two are available in ePub.
Listening to Susan Gibb’s “Lust” read by Finnegan Flawnt got me thinking about the idea of hypertext audio books. Superficially, the idea seems little more than a gimmick. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like an interesting experiment.
Interaction is such an integral part of hypertext, would a complex linking structure be possible if interaction was taking place without a visual field? Even if those structures existed, would we be able to understand them the same way? What kind of voice-recognition platform might be designed to allow a work to interact with the user in an interesting way? The thought of a work and a user interacting back and forth through sound to create a narrative is worth exploring.
Sure, you might look like that person on the subway who talks to yourself, but you’ve been doing that for years on your Bluetooth phone. Why let it bother you now?
Richard Holeton’s slideshow fiction Custom Orthotics Changed My Life , available in the Spring 2010 issue of Kairos , provides an interesting blend of humor, tragedy, and triumph. The piece uses a slideshow typical of business meetings, complete with lots of charts and graphs to tell the story of a sad man who finds redemption with his first pair of orthotic shoe inserts.
Graphs of family discussions and changes in his son’s mood through adolescence are entertaining and remarkably good at conveying meaningful narrative. Surprisingly, the graphs are able to provide the characters with depth and believable motivations. The music, by Stanford undergraduate David Kettler, adds the appropriate emotional accompaniment
2K Games recently released Bioshock 2, the followup to the 2007 masterpiece that introduced us to Andrew Ryan’s failed attempt at a utopian super-society. Where the first game offered a harsh criticism on ideas of objectivism, Bioshock 2’s villain hopes to save the fallen society with an obsessively altruistic approach.
Nods to such literary predecessors as steam punk, H.G. Wells and Ayn Rand are so prevalent, that the designers released a recommended reading list before the game’s release, including an additional section of nonfiction “for supernerds” which includes several works of philosophy. The 2k forums are even fostering a Bioshock bookclub.
So far responses to Bioshock 2 have been positive, delivering praise to the complex and interesting narrative that manages to deliver high-brow narrative in a blockbuster game.
Mr. Dehaene shows how the brain works around its lack of an evolved module for reading. It turns out that a reader, scanning a text for meaning, is drawing not on a "module" but on a large set of brain regions. Each probably evolved for other purposes, but they are now "recycled" by the demands of our culture for understanding printed text. Areas for understanding language, lodged near the front of the brain, are linked with others farther back that recognize visual details and process the distinctive sounds of human speech.
[This functionality] accounts for why the faddish "whole language" method of teaching reading has proved inferior to the traditional phonics approach: Only teaching letter-to-sound correspondences enables the brain's systems for vision and hearing to cooperate efficiently and decode words they have never encountered before, an ability that allows children to go beyond what they have been taught by others and to learn new words and ideas.
A fascinatingting article by Jed Birmingham follows the aging of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs as they move into the computer revolution, focusing on how their work changed with the technology. Though the Birmingham is careful not to call Bukowski a pioneer of the level of Michael Joyce , he does note how innovations such the ability to quickly capture thoughts and edit/delete functions greatly influenced Bukowski’s work.
In late 1992, Bruce Kijewski approached Bukowski with the idea of electronic books. Bukowski was intrigued. He wrote back, “Yes, you have a strange project: electronic books. It might be the future as more and more people find that the computer is such a magic thing: time-saver, charmer, energizer.” […] But there are still reservations and a sense of nostalgia. The same letter to Kijewski continues, “But, still, when [the electronic book] comes I will still miss the old fashioned book.” Despite such statements, it is clear that Bukowski was a writer not afraid of, or pessimistic about, the future.
Occasioned by the opening of the Berg’s William Burroughs digital archive , the second part of article explores Burroughs’ relationship to the computer. It seems he did not use a computer to write. He embraced film, audio recording, and painting, but apparently he never experimented with writing and the computer to the level that Bukowski did.
As far back as the mid-1960s, Burroughs was aware of the possibilities of the computer and computer-generated poetry. In Insect Trust Gazette , Burroughs’ work appears alongside an early computer poem. In his interview with Conrad Knickerbocker in Paris Review, he stated that he had yet to experiment with the computer, but thought that such literature was valid and interesting, if it stood on its own merit. Yet as time passed — again, as far as I know — Burroughs never experimented with the computer. On one level this makes sense given the fact that Burroughs was well advanced in age and set in his ways by the time the personal computer was generally available. You might say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but Bukowski proves that you, in fact, can.
Critical Mass, run by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Board of Directors, is currently publishing a series on The Next Decade in Book Culture.
In a response to Katharine Weber’s bleak outlook, in which she sees converging texts blurring the boundaries “where the conversation about books ends and the book itself begins”, Peter Friedman writes ,
Prophets of doom tend to prescribe remedies intended to recall comforts forever past. That’s why a cultural freakout is not a healthy thing. It leads to bad decisions. Had Jack Valenti and the entire film industry had their way, there would be no VHS machines, no CD and DVD burners, etc., etc. But it turned out that the VHS was the biggest financial boon the film industry had ever experienced…
Like the businesses that once dominated the film and music industries, the monopoly held by the industry over production and distribution is now in the hands of any kid with a laptop. The film and music industries are still making money. But that money is now made in a far wider variety of ways, and is split among more parties. It’s no wonder these industries are therefore decrying their deaths.
Hypertext pioneer Cathy Marshall has just written Reading and Writing the Electronic Book. Marshall offers a brief history of electronic books, and focuses on what facets of reading eBooks inherit from print, how they are written and read, and how they are presented, and what they do to advance the future of literature. In contrast to much of what’s appeared to date, Marshall doesn’t base her opinions of books on received wisdom, nostalgia, or press releases, and this book’s explanation of how we can study actual readers is at once rigorous and accessible. Based on extensive research and thoughtful consideration, this volume is clearly the authoritative source on new ways of reading and new reading tools.
BBC Audio has released Neil Gaiman’s Twitterfiction, “Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry.” The story is splendidly narrated by Katherine Kellgren, bringing the characters and action to life. (Here’s a Mark Bernstein review of another Kellgren audiobook.)
I have to admit, I was surprised at how good this was. The re-mediation is a suprise, moving from Twitter to voice is not an obvious choice. I expected to hear many different voices pulling the narrative in different directions; I expected the sentences to feel short and staccato. I expected to be driven to distracted. And I didn’t realize I expected any of this until I found that it wasn’t there. The story is immersive, with much credit given to Kellgren’s narratiom. There were a few moments which would occasionally remind me that the work was written over Twitter, with sentences like “Then Sam couldn’t believe what happened next.” But the story is fun, and it made my long and chilly commute much more enjoyable.
Sweet Agatha is a mystery narrative-building game by Kevin Allen Jr. that allows players to put together the mystery of a girl who vanished. It plays like a cross between a tabletop role playing game and a campfire story session. The game calls for two players. One player reads through an included booklet—her investigative journal—which includes cut-out clue tiles. Another player, The Truth, controls the clues, revealing them during dramatically important points in the story. The Reader and The Truth go back and forth to build the story of Agatha’s disappearance.
The very well-written booklet creates a sense of eerie mystery while leaving the scenarios open-ended enough to allow for creative input from both the Reader and The Truth. The images are haunting, and serve as great points of departure for the imagination.
This game would be a great exercise for writers looking to test their narrative development skills, or anyone looking to spend an afternoon building an interesting story.
Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue”, a hypertext fiction by the author of afternoon: a story, explores the duality and the flow of life not only through the well-crafted segments of text but through its very structure.
Joyce begins one section by announcing there are “many ways to go over Niagara Falls”, illustrating a central concept of the story: that there are often many different ways to get to the same place. This idea applies to life in general, as Joyce elaborates through descriptions of maze-like roadways (all leading to Route 9), the motif of flowing water and a dose of religious skepticism – likening the mind of god, at one point, to the swirling mind of a drowning boy. Story segments comment on the scant control we have over our lives, not due to some divine plan but to life’s randomness and natural gravitations between certain people or things.
This interpretation is paralleled in the way the hypertext is set up: there are many ways to click through the links, thus giving the reader the illusion of choice, but there are very few options once a number is chosen at the beginning. We may take many different paths to reach conclusions, but we’re all reading the same story.
The narrative often splits or flows back, much like the rivers Joyce discusses. Points of interest for him are the brief moment a current flows in two distinct directions and the feeling of being overpowered by the river while either drowning or going over the falls, as people are overpowered by their lives’ flow.
“Twelve Blue” demands patient reading; time must be taken to appreciate the language and figure out how the different story lines relate. I found the story recalls the subtle lyrical style of Faulkner or Ondaatje. True, the meaning doesn’t jump out at you, but that’s what makes it appealing. The challenge of exploring the text and putting the meaning together through snippets of clues enhances the reading experience, and in this case parallels the central theme of human submission to life’s natural flow.
Michael Kinsley offers one reason why newspapers are dying which has nothing to do with cost, technology, or distribution: the wordy conventions of newspaper articles. Kinsley notes that newspaper conventions dictate that the article give “context” and “backstory” whereas Web articles get right to the point. Thus paper articles often give more context than content.
Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” […]The 1,456-word report begins:
“Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.”
Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened. If someone saw you reading the paper and asked, “So what’s going on?,” you would not likely begin by saying that President Obama had won a hard-fought victory. You would say, “The House passed health-care reform last night.” And maybe, “It was a close vote.” And just possibly, “There was a kerfuffle about abortion.” You would not likely refer to “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system,” as if your friend was unaware that health-care reform was going on.
While it’s certainly true that weblog posts tend to be more tightly-worded than newspaper articles, an important factor to remember is that weblogs can be more concise because they link. Rather than giving backstory, we can just link to it. We no longer need to spend several words introducing our source or proving that it’s credible; the reader can easily follow the source and determine its credibility for herself.
Susan Gibb points to new media professor Dennis Jerz’s screencasts of his 11 year old son, Peter, playing Interactive Fiction for the first time. Familiar with the conventions of modern video games, Peter’s responses and hesitations at the constraints of the IF parser are reminiscent of my own (though perhaps a bit more emphasized due to the awareness of the recording). Though the clips are edited, watching someone new to the genre play through pieces for the first time is enlightening and makes for interesting study.
Interesting to note are Peter’s questions to his father, which are all highly influenced by his experience with other software as he tries to draw correlations to the new form. He asks, “If a word isn’t recognized, can I add it to the dictionary?”
Matthew Battles responds to Robert Darnton’s The Case for Books, reminding us that the facets of blogging and social networking that are supposed to be shortening our attention spans—serialization, focusing on small bits of text, jumping from bit to bit—have all been part of the practice of creating commonplace books for centuries.
Deep in the early modern bibliosphere, readers kept notebooks to record especially amusing, provoking, and useful quotations. The resulting commonplace books not only preserved a record of one's reading life, but also furnished material inspiration for further study, contemplation, and writing… [Darnton] declares that early modern readers read "segmentally, by concentrating on small chunks of text and jumping from place to place and jumping from book to book..." does it sound familiar?
I knew that the day would come when I would rather read something on a screen for reasons other than convenience or portability, but I must admit I was not expecting it to be so soon.
With Twitter use at all-time highs and growing interests in flash-fiction, the book is appropriately timed, but I found myself genuinely surprised at it’s release in paperback. This actually seems like a book which would be better suited to a screen, and particularly well-suited to something like daily serialization through blogs or Twitter.
I was recently watching a feature-length fanflick video inspired by the Legend of Zelda series. The production value was on par with some of the “dramatic reenactments” I’ve seen on the low-budget History Channel documentaries—good enough that you know what they’re trying to do, but not good enough tto sit in a theater and watch. For a fanflick, it wasn’t bad.
The comments for the movie were mixed, but many of them expressed that the idea of a film adaptation of a movie was doomed because the narrative of a game is too long and dense to be easily compacted into a two-hour film.
And then it occurred to me: Perhaps for the first time, we’re moving into narrative media that are not backwards-compatible. The written word can be spoken, the printed word written, movies can be translated to books, but games and hypertext narrative don’t go backwards.
Li-bel is an interesting new electronic bookmark which seeks to add another dimension to book reading. It’s a bookmark, designed to be used with printed books, that provides complementary information to the text, such as video, sound, and reference text.
The idea was born from the designer’s pursuit of the hybridization of books—a point in between print and hypertext literature. So far, information on the li-bel is sparse, but it’s something to watch . We were told that computers would come to books, and not the other way around; this is an interesting example of that theory.
The Purpling is a hypertext poem by Nick Montfort in which each sentence links to another lexia. As each page is visited, the sentences begin to turn purple. The text of the poem focuses on how we read and the nature of reading hypertext.
Adam Penenberg speculates on the evolution of the book and future of reading. Unusually for pundits dazzled by the Kindle and iPhone, Penenberg observes that the real future of eBooks surely lies in books that do more – not merely paper simulators or books with video illustration.
The first movie cameras were used to film theater productions. It took early cinematic geniuses like Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Charlie Chaplin and Abel Gance to untether the camera from what was and transform it into what it would become: a new art form. I believe that this dynamic will soon be replayed, except it will star the book in the role of the theater production, with authors acting more like directors and production companies than straight wordsmiths. […] Instead of stagnant words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living,
Much of Penenberg’s vision, while accurate, is not very new. When he writes that
A novelist could create whole new realities, a pastiche of video and audio and words and images that could rain down on the user, offering metaphors for artistic expressions. Or they could warp into videogame-like worlds where readers become characters and through the expression of their own free will alter the story to fit. They could come with music soundtracks or be directed or produced by renowned documentarians. They could be collaborations or one-woman projects.
he’s saying rather less than Robert Coover wrote in 1992, or Eric Drexler wrote in 1987, or Ted Nelson in 1976. Though Penenberg couches this paragraph in the future conditional, all these possibilities (and more!) have been realized in published works.
The article sparked some interesting and intelligent comments. Maryanne Conlin posts:
I do however have to ask- why veer away from the analogy in the article? I DO agree with your vision of the “ebook” of the future…but I also think, as we still have lots of theatre production of all sizes today….we will still have books published too!
Just because we have newer, richer forms of media does not mean that the old ones must die. Though computers can create stunning digital images, the oil painting has not been cast carelessly aside.
The Maryland Institute for Technology (MITH) has announced a new Web site featuring the Deena Larsen Collection. Larsen is an important hypertext pioneer; her Marble Springs and Samplers are published by Eastgate and her Web work has appeared in many venues.
The collection also includes Larsen’s many early computers. MITH will be opening the collection to scholars on a limited basis. Researchers interested in visiting Maryland to work with the Larsen materials on site should write apply to mith@umd.edu.
Artist Richard Wright was this year’s winner of the prestigious Turner Prize. Wright was shortlisted for his gold-leaf frescos on exhibit at Carnegie International, Pittsburgh and the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. His work is painted directly onto gallery walls, and is destroyed at the end of its exhibition. According to an interview with BBC News, he believes this process is important to the spirit of his work:
"I am interested in placing painting in the situation where it collides with the world; the fragility of that existence. Being here for a short period of time, I feel, heightens the experience of it being here."
Previous winners of the prize include Martin Creed, Grayson Perry, Gilbert and George, and Damien Hirst.
Rick Moody recently delivered a Twitter Fiction via several publishers in an effort conceived by Electric Lit to reach readers unfamiliar with Twitter fiction. Unfortunately, many people were following more than one of the publishers and became annoyed at the repetition. Some of the publishers backed out, calling the attempt a “noble failure.
But is this fair? The story is actually pretty good and addresses how the internet connects people.
If anything failed, it was the delivery, not the fiction. Too many figures in the online literary world were too quick to jump onboard without considering the logistics of the delivery. Much of this could have been resolved through Twitter’s new retweet function.
But I liked the narrative. And according to the comments on Vroman’s so did others who were not aware Twitter fiction existed as a form. And those people are telling their friends about social media as a platform for narrative.
Abrina Jaszi introduces Flavorwire, a site which straddles the line between culture and popculture, to electronic literature and its possibilities, emphasizing the openness of a form which is “not constrained by the physical world.”
Some of the best reads this season are being produced by electronic writers — techies devoted to the life of literature off the printed page. Their experimental fiction and poetry is colorful, cacophonous, animated and interactive — and often mediated by a host of different technologies. The term “electronic literature”
This is, of course, wrong: most writers of electronic literature are not particularly technical. Beyond this, it’s a good introduction.
But did he consider that the alternatives he propose are also not fun? He contends that moral choices in video games a la Fable, Knights of the Old Republic, or Fallout 3 are black-or-white, subverting the impact the system is supposed to have. He proposes alternatives like having truly difficult moral decisions to make. Rather than either helping an orphan or killing her, you’d have to choose between saving the orphan and her baby brother. (This is a choice? – ed.) McCalmont wants the consequences of the player’s decisions to be more consequential:
The real challenge facing morality mechanics is realism. Because in-game moral decisions have no real-world consequences, it is all too easy for moral choices to become tactical or aesthetic ones. It is precisely because these decisions are not real that it is vital to make them feel real. They must be based not only in a real understanding of the psychology of moral decision making but also a grasp of how people react to the people they disagree with and disapprove of. It is not until gamers feel as though they are making real moral choices that moral choices will become fun again and no amount of force lightning can change that.
The problem with making moral decisions more realistic is that it would not necessarily the game more fun. Moral dilemmas are difficult, and we hate to make them. Moral dilemmas add depth and dimension to the story, but alone they will not make the game more engaging. On the contrary, they might make the game confusing or frustrating if they are not given a very clear reason for being there, as they were in Modern Warfare 2.
I want moral decisions because it makes sense within the story, not just as a gimmicky platform for prestige or sales. Fable players were disappointed when their moral choices affected their avatar’s appearance, not because the game didn’t do what it said it would do but because that’s all the game did: the story and characters were shallow. The fun behind killing people to get horns only lasts for so long before you’re left with an unmemorable story. And horns.
McCalmont’s morally grey system will be fun for as long as it’s novel, and you won’t even be done playing the first game by then. I believe what McCalmont actually wants is more than a facelift to a tired morality system. We want more than, "do this to get horns." The answer is good narrative development that uses the medium’s proximity to the player to affect our emotions, and this narrative must be threaded into every facet of the game’s development.
Recommended reading: Jason Morningstar’s Grey Ranks explores teenage resistance fighters in 1944 Warsaw. D. Vincent Baker’s Dogs In The Vineyard turns the players into enforcers of a sternly alien and arbitrary morality. Both are narrativist tabletop games.
The Miracle in July is a fiction blog that incorporates music and images into its text in an interesting way. Rather than just including images in the text body, Michelle Anderson hides the images behind links, allowing the reader a sense of exploration and discovery. More importantly, however, her use of music is unique: she places links in the narrative that begin or change the background music to enhance the mood of the story.
Sometimes this technique proves awkward, as when she includes the name of the song to link in the text, which often has the same effect as having characters recite the title of a movie . It does, however, reveal some interesting ways that this could be done very effectively. Music could pace the narrative—that is, it could be used to demonstrate the passage of story-time or to exaggerate inconsistencies between story time and real time.
Starting a song just as you begin a long and detailed description of a brief encounter which actually takes very little story-time (narratological deceleration), and trying to time it so that the clip ends as you finish reading the passage, could be used to good effect. Everyone will read at different speeds, but I can’t image more than several seconds of difference.
Electric Literature is a quarterly anthology of five short stories per issue. Their goal is to distribute the short story “in every viable media,” bridging the gap between print literature and electronic media:
We're tired of hearing that literary fiction is doomed. Everywhere we look, people are reading—whether it be paperbooks, eBooks, blogs, tweets, or text messages. So, before we write the epitaph for the literary age, we thought, let’s try it this way first: select stories with a strong voice that capture our readers and lead them somewhere exciting, unexpected, and meaningful. Publish everywhere, every way: paperbacks, Kindles, iPhones, eBooks, and audiobooks. Make it inexpensive and accessible. Streamline it: just five great stories in each issue. Be entertaining without sacrificing depth. In short, create the thing we wish existed.
Electric Literature hopes to place the emphasis back on the story and not the medium, and aims to provide easier access to literature for readers and fair pay ($1000/story) to the authors they feature.
Nick Montfort posted a link to Morpheus Biblionaut, a new work created by William Gillespie with stunning visuals by Travis Alber. The work follows an American astronaut and poet who is sent to Alpha Centauri to test a nuclear weapon capable of destroying a planet but returns to find that there are no longer radio signals. Except, maybe, one.
The Louvre is currently featuring an exhibition by Umberto Eco entitled “Mille e tre,” which focuses on the concept of the list:
The exhibition “Mille e tre” traces the evolution of the concept of a list through history and examines how its meaning changes with the passage of time: from its ancient use in funerary traditions to its present-day use in everyday life, via the creative processes of contemporary artists, the list is a vehicle for cultural codes and the bearer of different messages.
"Mille e tre", 1003, is the length of Don Giovanni’s list of lovers.
Eco draws from several disciplines including printed literature, poetry, and paintings. In a recent interview, he explains that lists both serve as an expression of limitless concepts which language can not express, and also serves to highlight the concept of death:
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.
This idea that lists serve to express that which can never be expressed reminds us of Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue , in which “each ever after” lists many things which “can be read.” This list, which is repeated often in most readings of the work serves to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all that “can be read” and indeed is also indicative of that which can not be expressed: the complex relationship between people, lives, events, and words and their meanings.
Some people argue against electronic fiction because the codex book offers a certain tangible manipulation. There is certainly something to be said for having a product in your hand, especially for children who learn spatial reasoning from their physical interaction with the world. David Merrill and Jeevan Kalinithi’s Siftables respond to this critique.
Siftables are programmable interactive blocks with screens. They respond to movement, orientation, and each other’s presence. They can also produce sound. As you can see in the demo, these blocks show amazing promise as a learning tool for kids, allowing them to practice their multiplication tables, as well as hone their authoring skills. (Also interesting: the Taco Lab Blog)
David Gelernter of Yale University recently made some interesting predictions about the future of books in the “Room For Debate” section of the NY Times
I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa. I might like to make a book beep when I can’t find it, search its text online, download updates and keep an eye on reviews and discussion. This would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding. Such upgraded books acquire some of the bad traits of computer text — but at least, if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, I’ve still got a book.
Matthew Battles notes that electronics have already crept into the codex, like RFID tags, and asks interesting questions about what else could be done for the book.
Could little piezoelectric sensors be incorporated in the binding to furnish a digital "bookmark"? Would it be useful to store the resulting data somewhere to track how quickly you read the book? How could the digitized text of a bound book be linked to/accessed/interacted with, within the confines of the codex, to enhance the reading experience?
Last week, we reported on an early performance of "Sleep No More", an immersive hyperdrama at the American Repertory. Mark Bernstein saw the production this week, and his reaction was ecstatic.
I was recently able to attend, courtesy of the ART, and it was truly one of the most memorable theater experiences I’ve ever had. I had never been to a hyperdrama before, but I was familiar with the concept and, having a fair amount of experience with hypertext, knew that my choices on which characters I decided to follow would influence my experience.
One problem I couldn’t figure out was how the audience could watch the action without getting in the way or detracting from the experience. The solution is brilliant: each guest wears a white mask. In the dimly lit rooms, the masks make us seem like spirits gathering around a group of mortals who were only faintly aware of our existence. Though we were asked to be silent, the occasional stifled giggle or whisper between other ghosts added to the ambience. As the action moved down a hall, groups of spirits would break off their exploration of scenery to join the larger group on the move, and as more and more spirits gathered and followed, the action seemed to take on a new sense of foreboding. The experience created by the masks was incredible, like watching a scene from beyond the grave.
I was also struck by the authenticity with which the play space was transformed: smells, temperatures, textures, and sounds brought the experience to life. The choreography was impeccable, and the cast did a wonderful job of helping the audience understand exactly what to do. I may even go back to catch some of the things I missed the first time.
If you’re in the Boston area, treat yourself and go see this production! Shows run through January 3, 2010.
Roger Ebert recently republished his review of Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa’s groundbreaking film, which depicts a murder through the subjective flashbacks of 4 different characters. The movie was so influential that a psychological theory accounting for the effect of subjectivity on recollection is named after it.
Ebert remarks on the incorporation of “Rashomon” into English lexicon:
Its very title has entered the English language, because, like "Catch-22," it expresses something for which there is no better substitute.
The Rashomon effect, as well as the discursive structure that its namesake pioneered, is an important pattern of hypertext and has been the subject of very important works.
Dan Jurafsky of Stanford University has recently started a blog on the language of food which covers topics like how “entrée” came to describe a main course and why “tomato ketchup” is not actually as redundant as it seems.
Jurafsky teaches a course on the linguistics of food; the syllabus is worth a look. Coming up, for example, we’ve got a lecture on “The Grammar of Cuisine (or, Why do we eat dessert at the end?)”, starting with Claude Levi-Strauss and ending with “Taking the Biscuit: the structure of British meals”.
Interestingly, it appears that language influences food, and not the other way around.
Maple-glazed apple bacon donuts are an anomaly. Why?
Twitter has proven, yet again, that micro blogging is a great venue for emerging literature. Neil Gaiman, the creator of Stardust and The Sandman comic series is teaming up with BBC Audiobooks America to produce an interactive story which will be written through the collaboration of Twitter users. Gaiman started the story last Tuesday, and others may pitch in and help create the narrative by adding the hashtag #bbcawdio to their Tweets. BBCAA then sorts through the chaos and compiles the results to string together the best narrative. You can check out the story so far by following @BBCAA .
Once the project is finished, BBCAA will record the result and it will be available for free download at the BBCAA website and will also be available at iTunes or other audiobook retailers.
He writes of Susana Pajares Tosca’s two papers, “I like very much her writing” and declares, “Greco is super interesting.” He particularly singles out Mark Bernstein’s new essay, “Into the Weeds":
“I find Berstein’s writing illuminating…There is something very decisive about his writing. Something very performative. He sees how to translate a simple phrase into a sort of philosophical and practical maxim.”
Roger Ebert, the movie critic famous for his thumb being up or down, has almost as many books as Eastgate’s own Mark Bernstein. I found out about Bernstein’s books when dropping by for dinner, finding that they covered most surfaces not occupied by the plates. Ebert recently described just how one can come to own so many books — including multiple editions of the same title — and why he can’t get rid of them.
“I cannot throw out these books. Some are protected because I have personally turned all their pages and read every word; they're like little shrines to my past hours. Perhaps half were new when they came to my life, but most are used, and I remember where I found every one...Like an alcoholic trying to walk past a bar, you should see me trying to walk past a used book store.
In a response to the release of vooks, a video-book hybrid, Laura Miller asks, “Do Readers Really Want Video-Book Hybrids?” (Miller, you may recall, once attacked hypertext as claptrap.com, blaming it for the Postmodern attack on the seamless dreamtime of narrative.)
I think the answer to this question is a bit more complicated than Miller’s observation that many kids today are reading printed books to find “a welcome break from staring at screens all day.” The reaction to vooks has been pretty clear: people don’t want books interrupted by video; but does that mean they don’t want to the two to come together?
Good books offer readers complex narrative, interesting language, and most importantly, imagination. Good video offers beautiful visuals and can enhance the viewer’s experience through use of lighting, color, sound, and the composition of the shot.
If people weren’t interested in combining video with reading, the current video game market would never have gotten off the ground. Original Nintendo RPGs relied heavily on text delivering the story, and even the most recent Kingdom Hearts game for the PS2 has no less than a 10 minute introduction, conveyed through a combination of cutscenes and textual character dialogue.
The key component that these vooks are missing--and which video games and hypertext fiction offer--is interactivity.
Simon and Schuster, the book division of CBS, have introduced the vook™, which they hail as a new form of eBook that integrates text with video illustrations. Of the vooks in the initial launch, two are fiction. The others seem to be what the platform is really designed for: instructional books, promising toned abs and better skin.
The fiction intrigues me, as I’m wondering how they would be able to offer video interjections without losing the level of immersion that print books and fully visual narratives offer. It seems that a Richard Doetsch thriller like Embassy would not want to interrupt its “page-turning suspense” with “dazzling video components that advance the storyline.” Don’t get me wrong, there are ways to join text and video together beautifully, but what sound like video cut-scenes to an otherwise straightforward linear text narrative seems like an awkward way to do it.
It’s a little surprising that none of the members of the 8-person Leadership Team at Vook.com seem to have come from the ebook, hypertext, or publishing worlds. There’s a lot of real-estate talent on view. Meet Peter Richter, the lead engineer:
“ Peter Richter spent the last 11 years working for the GlobalEnglish Corporation which provides an online English Learning service for ESL learners. There he combined his former experience as a teacher with his technological skills to help pioneer the world of eLearning. Peter brings with him the experience of create dynamic, engaging user experiences while architecting sophisticated data driven web applications.”
The company can afford a Brand Director and a Social Marketing Manager and a Creative Director and a VP of Content Development; they might want to get an editor to rethink that “architecting”.
Bob Stein, whose Voyager Expanded Books ploughed this furrow years ago, isn’t impressed.
“Basically it's an ordinary romance novel with video clips interspersed in the pages. In terms of form the result is ho-hum in the extreme, particularly as there doesn't seem to be much attempt to integrate the text and the banal video, which seems to exist simply to pretty-up the pages.
What greatly interests me about these vooks, however, is their accessibility through the iPhone and iPod Touch. I can’t wait to see what new and interesting possibilities writers can come up with using video, sound, and creative use of the touch screen.
Golovchinsky mentions the ever-present copyright issues and the durability of the files, but his main concern is the ways in which eBooks are inferior to print books. They cannot, for example, show color or images. He disputes that the book is an obsolete tool.
Gene Golovchinsky
One reason eBooks loose the drag race with paper is that they don’t yet take much advantage of hypertextuality. The ebook simulates paper. It is produced in advance, linear and rigidly structured, and one organization must fit everyone.. It must be read in a particular order, and it can’t be added to once it’s complete. Perhaps this comforts the completionists, but it’s not the way information works.
Urban Sketchers creates art using pen, watercolor, even iPhone’s Brushes app. They display their art on their Flickr group , but they also have a blog which features various artists (currently an incredibly talented 10-year-old) and includes articles by the artists, discussing their inspiration and technique.
I was actually surprised at the quality of some of the Brushes work. One artist in particular, Xoan Baltar , stands out . His work is truly incredible, especially to think that it’s drawn on a touch-screen!
It’s great that artistic communities like Urban Sketchers are embracing new forms of art creation. Interestingly, though, Urban Sketchers does not accept art that is altered drastically in programs like Photoshop. This fact suggests that something about Brushes is still considered organic in this artistic community, even preferable to Photoshop. What, then, constitutes too much intervention of the machine, and is the use of touch screen the only factor to make Brushes more organic?
The HBO Cube presents its stories from four different camera angles simultaneously, while the viewer switches between them, choosing how to watch the action. The project is reminiscent of hyperdrama: that from one space to the next at any given time can alter the viewer’s interpretation of a scene dramatically.
The stories use their scenery to create visual barriers, which interrupt the camera’s line of sight, so that the viewer really does need to switch views to catch everything. The importance of barriers in interactive media is not sufficiently understood or appreciated.
The Cube would definitely be improved if the audio followed the angle you were watching, for example, in this scene having the couple’s dialogue slightly muted if you were watching them through the doorway of another room. Also the movement can be a bit quick, but overall the Cube is clever and innovative. It’s glance in the right direction for new media on portable electronics.
What is the relationship between images, words, and narrative?
Antione Bardou-Jacquet’s The Child raises these questions and more. This short film uses words as images to provide background scenes, portray moving vehicles, and even act as characters (oh the puns!). The narrative action of the piece is actually conveyed by the combination of these words, diaglogue, and mise en scène.
It might be interesting to do a Lacanian reading of the piece, examining the relationship between the word-images as signifiers, the signifieds conveyed through filmic aspects of the piece (e.g. sound, dialogue, etc) and how the words convey meaning through their role as images.
It’s a very interesting piece; definitely worth watching a couple of times to catch some of the words you missed the first time.=
A few days ago, Prof. David Millard from Southampton twittered about a new tower defense game for the iPhone. It’s David Whatley’s GeoDefense Swarm. Clare Hooper also twittered about it. They’re right; it’s very good.
Millard’s work on Auld Leakey points the way, I think, toward an interesting new approach to thinking about links and, especially, hyperdrama. Claire Hooper is part of the Learning Societies Lab at Southampton, and wrote another interesting card-shark hypertext system called Storyspinner.
But what does it mean, exactly, to say that a tower defense game is good? And to what kind of “good” can a tower defense game aspire?
Raymond Chandler addressed the same question with regard to mysteries in The Simple Art of Murder.
With all this [Dashiell Hammett] did not wreck the formal detective story. Nobody can; production demands a form that can be produced. Realism takes too much talent, too much knowledge, too much awareness. Hammett may have loosened it up a little here, and sharpened it a little there. Certainly all but the stupidest and most meretricious writers are more conscious of their artificiality than they used to be. And he demonstrated that the detective story can be important writing. The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not 'by hypothesis' incapable of anything. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the pedants will deny that it could be even better."
It seems to me that this argument can’t work for tower defense games. What tower defense game could justify our confidence that it could be capable of anything? Anything? But there’s got to be a better way to talk about art like Geodefense Swarm, a way that is more satisfying than simply saying “I liked it.”
Dene Grigar hails the results of the 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project. “Over 85 stories were submitted by 25+ participants from five countries,” she says. Also of interest to fans of Twitter-narrative is Laurent Sauerwein’s Taploid project, though these Tweets are individual narratives while Taploid’s episodic tweets come together to form a narrative.
The two approaches offer different experiences and raise different questions. Taploid recounts a trip to South India over the course of several Tweets, emphasizing social media networks as a medium for imparting episodic narrative. The question is, at what point do we separate the cheese sandwiches and trivial experience from the serious literary narratives? Or do we? How do we criticize such a piece?
The 24hr project is more concerned with a collaborative effort to create stories no longer than 140 characters, à la Hemingway’s famous “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Here we face the familiar flash fiction question: how short is too short? Whatever that threshold is, I would argue that we haven’t reached it yet, as the stories in the 24 hr project are still able to invoke emotion and understanding of character. Some of my favorites:
Brian Eno has introduced his new app for the iPhone and iPod touch, Trope. The new app is a follow-up to Bloom, an application that would create different sounds and images when the user moved her finger around the screen. Eno explains,
“Trope is a different emotional experience from Bloom—more introspective, more atmospheric. It shows that generative music…can draw from a palette of moods.”
The blend of music, visual art, and user interaction make this a very interesting app—more interesting when you ask how we should think about or critique this type of art.
In the Wall Street Journal, a great article by Terry Teachout on The New-Media Crisis of 1949 which details the decline of network radio. The music, television, and print industries should be taking notes. Sentimentality won’t save a medium, and those who embrace the new form tend to be more successful. Thanks. George Landow!
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoffrey Nunberg calls Google’s book search a disaster for scholars.
“Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one.”
The article points out errors in the scanned books’ metadata including category listings, publication dates and even titles. Google has already faced criticism for the legal and ethical aspects of creating a digital library, but this is the first article I’ve seen that addresses the quality of the project’s execution. Thanks, TiltFactor.
In her blog, Susan Gibb discusses the process of writing and revision for her new hypertext, Blueberries:
“So what is the impetus for selection [of which link to follow]? Does it depend upon the individual as far as style (first, second, third link in order) or experience either of reading hypertext or of knowledge of the author’s style? Is it the text itself that creates desire to go further in that direction, whether it be the single word (or phrase) that is obviously the link, or the context in which the link resides?”
Gibb is able to trace the path of her readers, finding out which link they clicked on and how far they went afterwards. She uses this information to revise the text— fascinating!
Be sure to check out the comments as well, as she brings up interesting points of discussion on the fact that a reader might be done with the piece and not have visited every link:
“As far as am I okay with a reader missing many of my most eloquently written spaces, I’m getting used to it. There are two evident solutions for the author to take: 1) ensure that the paths lead through the story in a way that would both please the reader and satisfy the writer, and 2) more importantly, make each and every writing space a piece of art.”
In elementary school, I was asked to be a reading tutor for children a few years younger than me. My teacher told me to remember the golden rule of teaching: "I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand."
One trend that I’m seeing more in recent years is the employment of same tools authors are using in creating hypertexts, including having students use Storyspace and Tinderbox for projects.
Pamela G. Taylor, who teaches Art Education at Virginia Commonwealth University writes:
I'm teaching a graduate class in visual culture and they are organizing all their work---reading synopses, connections to other realms of experience (readings visual and popular culture) and a special class project----into a Tinderbox process-folio
Not only do assignments like these generate more interest in the subject, but they allow for more flexibility and creativity in presentation, perhaps also offering a glimpse into another often-overlooked aspect of hypertext narrative: its role in nonfiction.
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explores how the brain converts words on a page to understandable meaning. In a review for the Wall Street Journal, 
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