[…]is shot through with commercial values in the content and the data-hoarding platform itself whose code is uninspectable and whose parent company is being boycotted by more than one hundred companies withholding their Facebook ad spend during July 2020 to protest Facebook’s agentic role in attacking civic organizations and discourse. What might “decolonization” look like? Cramer pointedly wonders whether we should “dispense with the notion of literary writing.” Art made from internet “plunderground” such as 4chan image macros, is authentic to democratized access but risks “remaining at a safe distance” that “doesn’t actually question the ontological status of ‘literature’” (366). […]
[…]suggests that what they fear is “that the former objects of their gaze have become self-aware critical agents” (2014; 312). In this characterization, Garneau’s screen objects follow Freud’s description in The Interpretation of Dreams of a “critical agency [that] stands like a screen between the [unconscious] and consciousness,” particularly in dreams, but also “directs our waking life and determines our voluntary, conscious actions” (542). Likewise, Garneau’s screen objects operate within a style of dream-like vision, but one with implications for the waking world as well. Significantly, some of these implications enact a return onto Freud’s own discourse. Rather than being […]
[…]University of Victoria, and in publications like Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) and Literary Studies in the Digital Age (LSDA), to name but a few points of overlap. Additionally, funding for projects related to the archiving and documentation of electronic literature have been provided by the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Moreover, from 2006 to 2011 the Electronic Literature Organization––the hub of activity for electronic literature art and scholarship––was hosted by the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland at College Park, arguably one of the top digital humanities […]
[…]task of basic coding (Shepard 20). Unfortunately, evidence of this coding – and the resultant code that generated The Policeman’s Beard – appears to have been lost to time. The clearest description we have of the system’s functionality comes from a short article from The Wall Street Journal (Miller): Racter’s method is a complicated blend of haphazardness and linguistic savvy. The program basically strings words and phrases together randomly, but it has two important constraints. It contains rules of English, so Racter speaks grammatically. In addition, it contains enough information about each word in its 2,400-word vocabulary to let Racter […]
[…]no input while they run. These systems are open to some types of interaction. One can study the code and can choose to interact with it by making changes; at least one critic has tweeted (@ugly_feelings, May 28, 2020) that he has done this with The Truelist (Klobucar 2019). I don’t know of “remixes” or “forks” of Autopia or The Truelist that have been released. There are many modifications of other simpler text generators of mine, such as “Taroko Gorge,” with several modified versions collected at https://collection.eliterature.org/3/collection-taroko.html. That poetry generator, while often riffed upon, is a more conventional work computationally […]
[…]For all the benefits of asynchronous organization for some aspects of conferences, the networking purpose is harmed rather than helped. This must be balanced. Opportunities to meet and chat should be synchronous, but more time at less intensity could be productive here as well. For example, networking sessions for particular topics or especially for newcomers can make for more intimate spaces more conducive to finding the right people, as well as generally being smaller and less overwhelming. Online conferences also fundamentally alter what kinds of presentations can be included, as we saw with the impossibility of translating installation art. It’s […]
[…]will become cluttered with emoji trees, the text suddenly overgrown by a forest. The precise workings of the “Cadabra” button can be discovered in the online repository of Abra’s code (Hatcher). A text file contains the names of each of the 39 “spells” that the “Cadabra” button can cast. Next to each spell is number that reflects the likelihood that the particular spell will be cast, with higher numbered spells more likely to occur. One function called “AREA_RANDOM” is given the highest number, 28. The second highest number, 7, belongs to the function “RANDOM_ERASE.” The most frequent numbers assigned to […]
[…]Sciences at IIT Jodhpur and a HASTAC scholar (2021-23). His interests lie in and around Literary Studies, Digital Humanities, Remediation, Pedagogy and Promoting Access via Networks. His other roles include filling in as a Technical Advisory Member with Humanities Commons, as the facilitator of ‘Digital Objects and Media’ special interest group with Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations, as a transcriber with The Canterbury Tales Project, as a Liaison with The Association for Computers and the Humanities and as the founding member of Electronic Literature […]
[…]I ended up doing, with the help of a programmer friend of mine Jon Orsi, was to share the editable code using JSFiddle, a “free code-sharing tool that allows you to edit, share, execute and debug Web code within a browser.” Marketed as a “Code Playground,” JSFiddle allowed Orsi to input Montfort’s code into the JSFiddle browser, separating the JavaScript and the CSS stylesheet, and allowing for an in-browser run of the code to see edits in real-time and to check for bugs. The workaround worked, and students were able to take the edited code, “fork” it, and start editing […]
[…]have an idea and we’ll kind of run with it as a group and the idea evolves and it just becomes a group project over time. And so we met as a group last year in May. And then throughout the summer, we met and we were talking about what kind of project can we make now as a lab that is pretty much relegated to meetings on MS Teams. That’s the platform that the school uses. You know, not just socially distanced, but really distanced. I mean, really, like some of our members are isolating in their hometowns, which […]