WRT: Writer Response Theory

How do you teach Web 2.0? With elit, of course. This post offers an elit work for each tool.
A number of my colleagues (myself included) attempt to teach courses around Web 2.0 technologies. The idea is that if you can just get students to blog, bookmark, twitter, annotate, wiki, wink, and aggregate, they’ll be ready for the bold new world of networked software applications– building on their existing propensity for social networking, facebooking, IMing….

What these skill and tool-based courses miss is an opportunity to enrich this education with some electronic literature. You wouldn’t think of teaching writing without some examples of powerful rhetoric or inspirational works of literary mastery. At the very least, you’d expect students to be aware of some of the poetic, evocative, and creative potential of language. So why teach a course in Web 2.0 tools without some examples that push the boundaries of functional literacy with these tools?

This post offers a companion to your course in social software and multimedia literacy. See it as that set of short stories or classic essays in the back of the writing text book.

Please help me develop this list. It is hardly exclusive, but a useful resource.

Continue reading ‘Elit 2.0 (a guide to literary works on social software)’

[This continues the experiment of live blogging conferences, although here I will present some documentation of a workshop and open up this post as a conversation space for those who are attending the conference and far beyond. ACM Hypertext 2008, Pittsburgh]

Charles Deemer presented his work “Changing Key” as an exploration of interactive narratives. “Changing keys” is a story of a group of characters who surround a jazz musician struggling with addiction. We experience their stories by choosing to watch videos from their individual points of view. Deemer shows his master hand at direction here — turning a low budget production into an engaging set of scenes, well intertwined.
His talk is here: “Changing Key” the talk.

Deemer’s two: Hyperdrama: Live and on video. Deemer has been producing what he calls hyperdrama since 1985. His use of the term largely relates to works that afford opportunities for encountering a drama by pursuing the performances of a variety characters in different order.

“Changing Keys” is an example of the video. Audience members have the opportunity to search through the videos. Comparisons were drawn to Babel, Rashomon, 11:14 and others — but the largest question was is this fundamentally different when accessed via a web page.

Was the story different based on our paths? Was the effect different based on our paths? Does it matter? Is this wat we think of by hyperdrama?

His proposition: Hyperdrama needs an address. A new kind of stage.

Deemer’s model is not process-intensive, but it does ask a very fundamental question about approaches to one particular question in electronic narrative.

Some other questions that this raises are What is the legacy of hyperdrama: video games? interactive dinner theater? Reality TV?

[For now, I will leave this post as an introduction. I invite you to investigate his talk and join the conversation]

See a more indepth post about this talk on Dennis Jerz’s blog.

A few years ago, I began to post about the renaissance in literary hypertext. Next week, I will participate in that renaissance in a presentation with Juan B. Gutiérrez as part of Steve Ersinghaus’ workshop Creating out of the Machine: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web Artists Explore the Craft at the ACM Hypertext 2008 conference in Pittsburgh.

This year, the conference turns 21, which offers a useful opportunity to reflect on how visions of hypertext have changed over the past two decades (or longer, if one is tracing back to the origins of hypertextual systems). For some educators, this evolution has meant the shift from explaining to lay folk what a link is to explaining to information system developers what a link should be. I am reminded of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s account of reading mid-90s hypertext theory and responding — but this isn’t what hypertext is supposed to be — recalling his early encounter with Ted Nelson’s writing.

In the era of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, the conference has no intention of taking a backseat to zeitgeist of social networking, stating on the conference homepage:

The web, the semantic web and Web 2.0 are all manifestations of the success of the link.

(No word as to whether or not there will be Twittering at the conference.)

Electronic writers are also returning to these hypertextual roots (and will no doubt continue to). Consider some of these recent developments:

Continue reading ‘ACM Hypertext is No Longer a Wild Teenager’

[More liveblogging from ELO Visionary Landscapes]

In the following slides from my presentation at ELO Visionary Landscapes, I offer several provocations for the future of the Electronic Literature Organization — about what we value in elit, what the ELO should be in its conferences, and how we can analyze elit works as information systems.

This presentation is based on a paper Juan B. Gutierrez and I presented at the III Congreso of the Observatorio para la Cyber Sociedad.

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[Blogging from the ELO event, Visionary Landscapes]

“Provocation by Program”
Imagining a Next-Revolution ELIZA
Nick Montfort and Andrew Stern
http://grandtextauto.org

(This is an unusual post. I’m using a very different blog voice with a very different goal in mind. I am writing this blog post as a set of notes framed as a dialogue with all the members of GrandTextAuto with my fellow WRT authors as my other audience. That doesn’t mean that you are not my audience if you are not one of these people. But I need to hear back from these people in particular. The post may also have an unfinished quality with the interest of quick posting)

In this presentation, these boys from GTxA argue that ELIZA is a paradigm of Elit. (There are 4 or more papers about ELIZA at this conference. Really!) Doing so they draw upon Nick’s one-time adviser Janet Murray who identifies ELIZA as the first work of elit (keeping in mind that Noah has identified Chris Strachey’s Love Letter Generator as the first — oh, and Noah is sitting behind me).

Beginning with ELIZA, the fellows think about what ELIZA is:

Continue reading ‘Andrew Stern and Nick Montfort have a provocation from ELIZA’