first person

Reading subjectivity into the software interface, N. Katherine Hayles offers a compelling case for computational authorship.

Jill Walker's encounter with a participatory, and vaguely sinister, online narrative.

Which alias best fits interactive fiction?
The nominees are:
"Story," "Game," "Storygame," "Novel," "World,"
"Literature," "Puzzle," "Problem," "Riddle," and "Machine."
Read, and decide.

Warren Sack uses The Conversation Map, a "graphical interface" that analyzes newsgroups and listservs, to analyze the possibilities of discourse analysis itself.

The subtitle - "Using Voice Chips and Speech Recognition Chips to Explore Structures of Participation in Sociotechnical Scripts" - tells the story, partly. But there's more in store.

For all the talk of cyber-difference, screens still behave like pages. The contributors in section six have developed, in response, a digital aesthetics unlike that of print.

John Cayley dadas up the digital, revealing similarities of type across two normally separate, unequal categories: image and text. "Neither lines nor pixels but letters," finally, unite.

Camille Utterback exposits "embodied interaction with symbolic spaces" – the body and language of digital art.

In this series of "media-element field explorations," Bill Seaman suggests configurations for the shape of the virtual artist-author to come.

The parallels (and oppositions) between hypertext and AI are brought out in section five.