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A Third Culture

De Witt Douglas Kilgore reviews Technoscience and Cyberculture. Almost forty years ago C.P. Snow set the terms for a struggle between science and the humanities which yet shows little sign of resolution. In the mid-1950s Snow found that scientific and literary intellectuals lived in two cultures, watching each other with either “frozen smiles” or “hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.” By 1963 he discerned the emergence of a third culture in the universities of the United States as American academies strove to bring together the disarticulated halves of the intellectual culture. Subsequent events suggest that his […]

Hypertext ’97

Apologies: This is not a ‘balanced’ review of the Hypertext ’97 conference, but only, as Ted Nelson would put it, one particular, packaged, ‘point of view’. I haven’t named all the names I should have or even many and I have not explicitly acknowledged the herculean efforts of the many organizers. Readers are referred to the full published conference proceedings, The Eighth ACM Conference on Hypertext, edited by Mark Bernstein, Leslie Carr, and Casper Osterbye (New York: ACM, 1997). My perspective is that of a practitioner of literary cybertext. This piece was written quickly as a draft towards a (probably […]

Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying

Considering hypertext as a subset of cybertexts, Markku Eskelinen offers seven examples of how to implement Espen Aarseth’s seven-fold typology. Still, what would theory be worth if it were not also good for inventing practice? – Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited introduction There’s at least one serious downside to Espen Aarseth’s cybertext theory: reviewed by Nick Montfort in ebr winter 00/01 it puts, or is very capable of putting, an end to hype in the rapidly expanding field of digital textuality, where it seems there are always newcomers who can’t make a living without fashionable exaggerations and homebred buzzwords (like […]
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The Museum of Hyphenated Media

New media in a book, metafiction in hypertext: the printed book, as yet, is the more hospitable medium. (The New Media Reader; Figurski at Findhorn on Acid.) 1 If there is a bound codex that writers of hypertext and new media artists have been waiting for, The New Media Reader is it. In its 823 pages the editors sample the work of a stunning array of writers, designers, programmers, scientists, and artists. Italo Calvino and Robert Coover stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Jan L. Bordewjik and Ben van Kaam, authors of “Towards a New Classification of Tele-Information Services” and, for less surprising […]

Positioning Hypertext in Chomsky’s Hierarchy of Grammars

Jim Rosenberg sends a shot of grammar straight across the bow of Nick Montfort’s controversial Cybertext review, adding volume to a volley already in progress Nick Montfort’s review of Espen Aarseth’s book Cybertext, “Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star,” ebr 11, has much to say about cybertext which is useful. I have found the concept of cybertext to be a useful generalization of hypertext and many other forms of electronic writing, and have taken to using the term a good deal myself. I’m not sure I disagree with Montfort on the fundamentals of cybertext. However, Montfort’s essay contains numerous assertions on […]
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The Contour of a Contour

One “is no longer maintaining a public online presence” (as if you could ever really be “present” on the Web). The other blogs away like it’s going out of style (and some can only hope). The first time I used the word blog I was walking through a park long ago and I needed a word to describe what I had just stepped in. At their worst, weblogs promise to be reality television’s revenge on literature; at their best, they are a digital art form that promises to keep us extraordinarily human. I intend to keep my mind open. And […]

Electronic Books?

Stuart Moulthrop re-opens the debate on the “electronic book” and its continued marginalization vis-a vis print. Dear Editors: Praise to Dave Ciccoricco for a thoughtful, comprehensive, and notably open-minded essay on the contours of “contour” and other vicissitudes of Joyce-Bolter-Bernstein hypertext. I welcome an account that gives both eros and engineering their due; and for all the iconography of cairns and monuments, I’m glad to read something that isn’t a premature death notice. I do take friendly objection to one point the author makes in closing, citing my opposition to the concept of “electronic books.” Mr. Ciccoricco writes: “Clearly, ‘electronic […]

L’Affaire PMC: The Postmodern Culture-Johns Hopkins University Press Conversation

Joel Felix listens in on Postmodern Culture’s privatization debate. The Pitch Postmodern Culture , the gray old lady of electronic discourse just a link away from ebr and all other web-based journals, I emphasize this non-geographical proximity for several reasons: Web-based journals and e-zines are subjected to the same economic and rhetorical laws by nature of their material (or, non-material, as this case entails) expression. Internet based forums for “critical inquiry” (whether from ebr, PMC, C-Theory, Salon, Suck) may differ in content/rhetorical modes (academic/peer-reviewed or expressly public sphere/ political or simply parodic/sarcastic), yet are materially examples of electronic discourse. What […]
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Towards Computer Game Studies

Introduction: LudologyA concept introduced to computer game studies by Gonzalo Frasca in 1998.and Narratology It is relatively stress-free to write about computer games, as nothing too much has been said yet, and almost anything goes. The situation is pretty much the same in what comes to writing about games and gaming in general. The sad fact, with alarming cumulative consequences, is that they are under-theorized; there are Huizinga (1950), Caillois (1979), Ehrmann (1969), and Sutton-Smith (1997, Avedon and Sutton-Smith 1971) of course, and libraries full of board-game studies, in addition to game theory and bits and pieces of philosophy — […]

Card Shark and Thespis

Hypertext Fiction and Its Critics Although games, visual art, and textual experiments had long been areas of academic research, the first artistically convincing explorations of literary computing appeared in the late 1980s. It was only in these years that computers became sufficiently commonplace that a computational creation could realistically hope to find an audience. Of equal importance was the gradual acceptance of Ted Nelson’s thesis (Nelson 1976) that computers could be tools for artistic expression, for even in 1982 the title of Nelson’s Literary Machines was meant to shock and surprise. The final and critical step, first taken by an […]