The New Media Reader - a project I’ve been working on for six years - is close to fruition. It’s expected to be out for teaching this Fall, and the signs of its impending arrival are starting to appear. Most recently, this catalog copy from MIT Press:

The New Media Reader
edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort

This reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs–many of them now almost impossible to find–that chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-emerging field of new media. General introductions by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their historical context and explain their significance. The texts were originally published between World War II–when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared–and the emergence of the World Wide Web–when they entered the mainstream of public life.

The texts are by computer scientists, artists, architects, literary writers, interface designers, cultural critics, and individuals working across disciplines. The contributors include (chronologically) Jorge Luis Borges, Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Ivan Sutherland, William S. Burroughs, Ted Nelson, Italo Calvino, Marshall McLuhan, Billy Klüver, Jean Baudrillard, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bill Viola, Sherry Turkle, Richard Stallman, Brenda Laurel, Langdon Winner, Robert Coover, and Tim Berners-Lee. The CD accompanying the book contains examples of early games, digital art, independent literary efforts, software created at universities, and home-computer commercial software. Also on the CD is digitized video, documenting new media programs and artwork for which no operational version exists. One example is a video record of Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 first presentation of the mouse, word processor, hyperlink, computer-supported cooperative work, video conferencing, and the dividing up of the screen we now call non-overlapping windows; another is documentation of Lynn Hershman’s Lorna, the first interactive video art installation.

I’m writing this from Florida, where I’m working with the project’s designer (Michael Crumpton) on the final layouts. Nick and the folks at the press are giving lots of helpful feedback. I feel good about how things are coming together.

Mac users (a society of which I am an OSX-affiliated member) are in luck, because we can experience John Cayley’s new riverIsland, the latest from one of the world’s most interesting electronic writers. Part of what makes riverIsland work is the employment of John’s technique of “transliteral morphing” - which he explains as follows:

If texts are laid out in a regular grid, as a table of letters, one table for the source and one table for the target, to morph transliterally from one text (one table of letters) to another, is to work out, letter-by-letter, how the source letters will become the target ones. Assume your alphabet (including ’space’ and apostrophe, 28 letters in all) is arranged in a special loop where letters considered to be similar in sound are clustered together. The aim is to work out the shortest distance round the loop (clockwise or anti-clockwise) from each source to each target. [From the text file included with the riverIsland download.]

Transliteral morphing is an electronic writing technique that engages the specificity of the computer. (While it would be possible to perform these operations by hand, at the time of reading, it would be a very different experience.) It is a radical departure from the printed page, which is perhaps not the case with all electronic literature. Transliteral morphing doesn’t make people ask, “Is that like a Choose Your Own Adventure book?”

At the same time, transliteral morphing would never have come from traditional work in computer science. Its movements emerge from a simultaneous attention to the sounds of poetry and the specifics of alphabetic characters. Its effects, accomplished via computation, lie in the realm of the literary and visual arts.

And, of course, riverIsland is much more than transliteral morphing. It’s also an amazing text/image space, containing John’s poetic adaptations from Wang Wei’s (701-761) “Wang River Sequence,” and using the Hypercard/QuicktimeVR combination to its fullest.

Here are the download directions from John:

Download the standalone version of riverIsland and its associated files from http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof (this can be done from a PC but the resulting files will be useless unless you can transfer them, intact, to a Macintosh).

The riverIsland application and associated files are packed into the archive ‘riverIsland.sit’, and this text is in ‘riverIsland.txt’.

You can also use Apple’s iDisk facilities (now also configurable for PC although I have no direct experience of this):

- Go to http:/iTools.mac.com - click on iDisk - get yourself an account (worth it: gives you 20 free Mb on a server that can be mounted as if it was a hard disk on your desktop) - open the public folder of ’shadoof’ - copy the material you require to your hard disk.

The download is approximately 15 Mb.

When I say “hyper(text)fiction thoughts, links, and bits” what I mean by the last of these words is that I hope to post some pieces of fictions here, while I’m working/thinking through them. That’s to say, I don’t want this space to just be for the nonfiction part of my hyperfiction thinking.

At Attica the uniforms were orange. Long sniper rifles on the rooftops overlooking D-yard. Oiled assault rifles in the tunnels under Times Square, where the prison’s quandrants came together. Dangling snout nosed gas masks.

I’m developing an undergraduate electronic writing workshop for spring 2003 at Brown. I want the workshop to engage electronic writing on three levels, while also being workshop (rather than curriculum) sized, and not stealing the thunder (aka all the ideas) from Bobby Arellano’s graduate workshop.

The three aforementioned levels are:

• as text. Primarily alphabetic text, as one would find in a “normal” fiction or poetry workshop - but with the door open to text meant for recorded performance.
• as plans. Theatre, film, and game design all produce documents that are plans for larger collaborative productions - and I hope students in the workshop can do some of this for electronic writing projects.
• as material. Just as potters and painters and electronic artists engage with their material, so electronic writers need to engage with available technologies and technologic possibilities - aesthetically, practically, and theoretically. I hope this can happen in the workshop without devolving into “how to” or taking too much time from writing.

Obviously, this is going to involve some juggling. While thinking through these things, I’m going to try to develop some pointers to useful recent - as well as classic (e.g., Coover, Joyce) - ideas on electronic writing pedagogy, and related topics, and post them here. Some of them I’ll certainly be lifting from the ELO chat on the topic. If you have any pointers to offer, please drop a line (en double-u ef @brown.edu).

for any blog-like document (though I do not expect to write here with blog speed or reliability) there must be an initial post. usually this looks forward, to what the document might become. but I feel a need to begin this composite document - hyperfiction - with the quotation I kept on my old web page, and in that way honor it as I put it to rest:

there are two ways to take care of your life. you can develop yourself as an artist, or you can forget yourself and devote your life to art. that’s a big difference. the first is to enslave yourself in your ego. it feels good for a while, but it doesn’t last for long. this is to become a host for the guest. the second way is to become a host for the host. you must turn your ego into fuel and burn your life for the benefit of all beings. you will become a kind of fool. but this is the way to find peace. just climb the mountain every day.
- dainin katagiri