me

fictional
nonfictional

others

baraita
bhikku
calamondin
caterina
cheesedip
city of sound
consumptive
dear internet abyss
eclogues
f train
geegaw
hands free
idiopathic
lacunae
melting object
sad salvation
snarkout
subterranean notes
synthetic zero
william fields

FORMS OF ELECTRONIC LITERATURE ::

a list-in-progress by Jeremy P. Bushnell

Saturday, October 19, 2002

:: V: command-line literature

I haven't added to my "forms of electronic literature" list since July. At this rate it'll be a year-long project. Actually maybe not, as I only have one more big category left to deal with after this one.

Command-Line Literature

Command-line literature is a textual system that you navigate by entering prompts at regular intervals. Usually you and the system "take turns," creating a kind of dialogic effect. These sorts of systems were popularized by a series of interactive games produced by companies like Infocom, of which Zork is the best well-known.

Many pieces of command-line literature, including the Infocom works, are essentially hypertextual: that is to say, they are primarily composed of large units of pre-existing text (lexia) that the user navigates their way through. One key difference, however, is the nature of the user interface: most widely-known conceptions of hypertext take the link as the primary means of naviagation, rather than the address-driven mode that characterizes command-line literature.

An additional difference is that most command-line works use at least some generative element. No writer can possibly compose responses to cover every possible user input, and so generally certain computer subroutines are employed to handle statements that the system reads as nonsensical, yielding responses like the familiar "I see no X here."

When the generative element is foregrounded, the hypertextual element is correspondingly reduced, and the experience becomes less like navigating a text (less "literary," one could argue) and more like having a conversation. The key text to think of here is Michal Wallace's notorious ELIZA, and the generation of chatbots born in her wake.

Forerunners of command-line literature: the Turing Test, early AI research, early command-line-driven computer langauges, Will Crowther's ADVENT.

url for this entry | Comments []

Wednesday, July 03, 2002

:: IV: hypertext & hypermedia

To many of you this one will be old hat.

A hypertext is a text broken up into several chunks. Traditionally the various "chunks" are textual in nature, although they can be images or sounds as well (only then you'd properly use the term hypermedia). George Landow, probably hypertext's most important academic booster, uses Roland Barthes' term lexia to describe these chunks, although they're also referred to frequently as "nodes," and the Deleuze and Guattari fans out there might prefer "rhizomes."

These chunks can be traversed in a variety of ways, and the traversing mechanisms are generally refered to as links. The various connections between the nodes and links can be represented as a web. If you're reading this page, all of these terms are no doubt familiar to you, and one could argue that the World Wide Web is in fact a single gigantic multi-authored hypermedia work.

To qualify as hypertext, there should ideally be a degree of interactivity involved, and the work should ideally have a certain nonlinear dimension. After all, one could argue that a traditional novel, broken into chapters, is organized into lexia, but since those lexia are designed to be read in a linear manner (links are notably absent) any interactive element is essentially negligible.

Some people treat hypertext and electronic literature as essentially interchangeable. Early attention given to hypertextual electronic authoring tools such as StorySpace or HyperCard helped to cement this conception. But I think it's inaccurate, and certainly some of the other types of electronic writing that I've outlined in the past, such as computer-generated narrative or language films lack one or more of the key elements of hypertext.

Examples of hypertext abound, but well-known hypertext narratives include Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story, Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl, and Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden. (All three of these were written using Storyspace, and require a CD-ROM to experience, although an abridged version of Victory Garden has been adapted for the Web, here).

Forerunners include: Choose Your Own Adventure books; Robert Grenier's Sentences; B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates; Robert Coover's nonlinear short stories (such as "The Babysitter"); Cortazar's Hopscotch; Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths;" Ted Nelson's Literary Machines, Dream Machines, and Project Xanadu; Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think"; tools for non-linear access of traditional texts, such as indexes, page numbers, concordances; early ergodic or non-linear texts such as the I Ching.

url for this entry

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

:: III: temporal writing

The ability to change Web texts through time (to create "time-shifted" media, to borrow a phrase from this essay) is one of the fundamental, unique properties of Web-writing, and thus it should be a key consideration for current practicioners of electronic writing. And yet I find myself surprised that so few of the current crop of electronic writers are producing work that makes use of the temporal dimension. I'm also surprised that none of the web journals that publish electronic writing make allowances for time-shifted work (to the best of my knowledge).

There's certainly a huge populist explosion of this type of writing, however. Tens of thousands of people use content management systems like Blogger and LiveJournal: these systems essentially automate the organization of material into chronological streams. I wouldn't generally consider most weblogs or LiveJournals to be "electronic literature," but there's a contiunuum here, with the hyperlinked brevity of Robot Wisdom on one end. On the other end we find the literate, essay-like entries of, say, Michael Barrish's Oblivio, Steve Cook's Snarkout, or Paul Ford's FTrain (this last also includes things that apear to be personal essays but which are actually fiction). Are these sites still weblogs? Arguable, but the important point is that these sites make use of temporality: the sites are not static, and this makes us read them differently from how we would read, say, a book of short nonfiction pieces.

When applied to fiction, temporal writing often takes the form of serialized narrative, such as Phantomnation or my own Imaginary Year. A key related text is Michael Stutz's piece, "Episodic Writing."

Forerunners of temporal writing: content-management applications, syndicated newspaper columnists, periodical narratives (such as comic books), Thomas Wolfe's episodic novels, film serials, Victorian-era serializations / series novels.

url for this entry

Monday, May 20, 2002

:: II: language toys & computer-generated narrative

I've been trying to decide how to classify this Storyland website, and I've decided that it falls neatly at the intersection of two different categories of electronic literature.

It is part computer-generated narrative, of the sort assembled by programs like James Meehan's Tale-Spin. But its frivolousness aligns it with sites like They Have Blogs!, or the Random Bar Joke Generator. I think of these sorts of sites language toys: they're entertaining enough, but they don't, to my mind, produce anything that takes on the status of literature. (The possible exception being the sites that are dedicated to the William Burroughs' cut-up technique, a technique which arguably possesses both a cultural critique and an occult potency.)

Forerunners of computer-generated narrative: Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, Georges Polti's The 36 Dramatic Situations, S. Klein's plot generating software (1973).

Forerunners of language toys: Mad Libs, random number generators, Raymond Queneau's 100,000,000,000,000 Sonnets, Tristan Tzara's Dada cut-ups, surrealist games.

url for this entry

Tuesday, April 16, 2002

:: I: language films

OK. I'm going to attempt, over the next few weeks, to get a grip on some of the current trends in electronic literature, in part by reading my way through the index of work presented at the Electronic Literature State of the Art Symposium.

The first grouping that I can clearly identify encompasses short animations, generally designed in Flash, that use the written word as a central component, and have little or no interactive element (beyond possibly clicking "start" or performing some other basic navigational tasks, like scrolling). I'd call these "kinetic poems," except kinetic poems is too broad a designation: for instance, a kinetic poem can be interactive or non-interactive. Since the language-based content is the only thing that significantly distinguishes these from other short experimental web-based films, I'm going to call them language films.

Examples include: Miekal And's SEEDSIGNS for Philadelpho, or The Dreamlife of Letters by Brian Kim Stefans.

Forerunners: concrete poetry, language poetry, experimental film, Sesame Street animation segments.

More to come.

url for this entry

other raccoon entries >>