If you teach, and you might want to use The New Media Reader in a future semester, the book has now appeared in the MIT Press’s online catalog, and with that it now becomes possible to request examination copies online. (The catalog gives March as the publication date, however it’s my understanding that there will be books in January for Spring 2003 classes. The Booksense listing has a January pub date, but still lists “Brams, Steven J.” as the author.)

(This was posted two days ago, but revealed a problem that crashed certain IE browsers. I’ve tried adjustments to account for IE’s CSS problems, with much testing help from Talan and Andrew, and we’ll see how it goes.)

Erik has made some great changes to All Consuming – which put to rest all my reservations of a week ago. First (as both he and Jill have blogged) it now understands links that include “isbn=0123456789″ as references to books – expanding the book comments it can aggregate to include people linking to any site that uses such a formulation (such as Booksense, B&N, and All Consuming itself). Second, All Consuming now doesn’t just send people to Amazon to buy books – but also offers links to Booksense (as one can see on any book detail page ).

Bravo! Now, how do we get others to follow this example?

Also, of course, there’s that bigger issue we’ve been discussing: “How do we know we’re all talking about the same thing?” (the same book, the same news item, etc). As Erik alluded in a comment on Jill’s blog, when we ask this question we’re headed toward the territory of the Semantic Web efforts (W3C, SemanticWeb.org). Given this, here are some further questions: How does the Semantic Web intersect with issues of link politics? Can we agree on an ontology even if we have quite different values?

I think these are interesting issues. I’m not the Semantic Web detractor I’ve sometimes been made out as (and sometimes misquoted as), though I do think the hype has distorted the presentation of the research. Frankly, I think efforts like All Consuming are closer to being the Semantic Web than many projects that bear the name. Why? Because All Consuming is actually web-centric, whereas most SM projects are about hooking databases up to each other (with the web as a human-read medium largely extraneous or even uninvolved). And I think it was Michael Mateas (who’s collaborating with Andrew on Facade) who pointed out to me that, as in other areas of AI, statistical approaches to understanding the Web (e.g., Google) keep clobbering human attempts at classification (e.g., Yahoo). Not to say the Open Directory isn’t useful – or that SM technologies won’t be useful – on the human-read web. I think we’re likely to see interesting hybrids as the SM efforts gain traction: the next steps beyond the single-database-driven sites we have now. In the meantime, people like Erik will keep doing an impressive job without SM tech, using the information encoded in our links to a multiplicity (hopefully) of those database-driven sites.

There’s a new issue of Cauldron & Net for folks to check out. Among lots of interesting-looking stuff (I’ve barely had time to take a peek myself) it includes documentation of Talking Cure, my in-process installation project with Camille Utterback, Clilly Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin.

Well, I should have known better than to mention car crashes. Had one a few hours ago. No one hurt, and the police say I had the right of way, but it’s still going to be a huge time sink. So I think my pace here is going to slow down (or at least my posts are going to get shorter). I initially imagined posting occasionally in this space – rather than the silence of the summer, or the every day of late – and maybe I’m about to get on something like a five-times-a-month schedule.

I realize this is my first explicitly personal post. A milestone? An aberration?

You might have noticed that the blog software I’m using for this page doesn’t support comments. Andrew Stern, Stephanie Strickland, Scott Rettberg, Lisbeth Klastrup, and Jessica Pressman (Associate Director of the Electronic Literature Organization – can’t find a good link for her) have all written in recently via email with various-length responses to my post proposing a definition of electronic writing. Andrew also responded to the one about what I called “dynamic text” (and proposed some better names – see below).

To recap the initial post briefly, my proposed definition of electronic writing was: “Writing that requires computation at the time of reading.” Andrew’s response was basically positive – saying it was concise and appropriately inclusive. The others prodded me in a number of ways. Here are a few that I’ll respond to in the next paragraph: Stepanie and Scott both asked me to further consider the case of things like computer-manipulated poems that end up printed on paper, Lisbeth asked how my definition is different from Espen’s, and Jessica asked what my definition accomplished.

So, in response, here’s what I’ve been thinking the last couple days. There seem to be three interesting categories of work here:

1. Espen’s “ergodic” – which doesn’t have to be electronic, but requires certain types of non-trivial reader actions and a text-producing machine.
2. My “electronic” – which requires electronic computation at the time of reading, but may require no greater reader activity (or even less) than print writing.
3. [the case that Stephanie and Scott discussed] – which includes writings that are non-electronic but in their production have used computational technologies non-trivially.

What do these accomplish? Well:

1. Espen’s, to me, seems designed for analyzing texts – and creating types of analysis that don’t get confused by whether there’s a CPU involved.
2. Mine is probably a little more prosaic. Mine is for figuring out what to teach in an electronic writing class, or what an organization like the ELO should be working to support and promote.
3. Stephanie and Scott’s category draws interesting attention to a group of works that Espen’s definition and mine marginalize. The tradition of things that connect with Burroughs or Jackson Mac Low or many of the Oulipian projects.

Stephanie and I also talked about the fact that my definition might be improved if the term “requires” was replaced by the words “written for.” When I mentioned what I thought my definition might accomplish in an email to Scott, he wrote back and agreed – saying perhaps it should guide what is included in the ELO’s Directory. Jessica also pointed out that I should be clear that I mean electronic (not extraordinary human) computation. (Nick and Markku also have a useful, controversial introductions to Espen’s part of this. However, I’m disappointed that both write as though the term “hypertext” was defined by George Landow rather than Ted Nelson. Not that this is uncommon…)

On a different topic, Andrew wrote at more length about my “What is Dynamic Text?” post:

In Facade we’re attaching pieces of text/content (a sentence or part of a sentence, facial expression/gesture, arm/body gesture, a short bit of action) to particular places in performative, reactive, responsive behavior code/plans, of which there are a large variety. Each of these behaviors+text are intertwined together into collections at varying levels of granularity (“beatgoals”, “beats”, “beat clusters”), each of which are annotated with preconditions and effects — effectively a hierarchy of story content, dynamically sequenceable at all levels. These preconditions and effects end up defining a partial ordering — that is, not allowing any and every piece of content to happen at anytime, but to allow a sizeable subset of the total number of pieces to happen at any one time. In effect, the architecture of story content allows the system to assemble individual phrases, sentences and sentence collections in a coherent (narrative) way in many possible orders, coherently intermixed with the player’s own text (which is natural spoken language + gesture, such as looking at a character and saying “why did you marry this guy?”, not interactive-fiction command language like “open door”). The system’s text pieces and the behaviors they are attached to are authorially crafted in such a way as to allow for coherent assembly in many different orders. So, yes, that’s dynamic, but dynamic is too general of a word…? More specifically it’s “assembled text”, or “constructed text”, or “recombinant text”, implying that small-grain-size (human written) pieces are being assembled on the fly, intermixed with the player’s text.

Of course this is good clarification regarding Facade – but I think it’s also good clarification for all the things in that post. Not that all of them (from John’s transliteral morphing to Mark’s Card Shark and Thespis) operate in the same way – but a term like “dynamic” doesn’t capture what’s interesting about what they do have in common. It almost sounds like the important thing about them is that they’re made with Flash and jiggle. Maybe “recombinant” is the word? Any comments on the comments?

On a related note, Andrew will be speaking at MIT on December 2, from 12-2pm (Building E51-275). He’ll be presenting Facade at one of the “(Evocative) Objects” Lunches put together by the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self (which is directed by Sherry Turkle). It’s open to the public, according to the email I saw.

Finally, this manual response-management is helping me understand the need to work with some blog software that supports comments, and probably trackback (two-way links – it feels almost like Literary Machines). Maybe I should switch to Moveable Type for this blog – as that appears to be what I’ll be using for my electronic writing workshop next semester.

More on other topics soon, but for today a post about something actually related to electronic writing. There’s a Mini-Festival of (so-called*) Digital Poetry on November 23rd as part of NYC’s Segue Reading Series at the Bowery Poetry Club. I’ll be reading there, along with a collection of fun folk. (* As organizer Brian Stefans writes: The use of the phrase “so-called” prior to an aesthetic categorization is an old experimental poetry tradition; please disregard if it causes you unusual discomfort.)

As I wrote in my last post, it would be relatively easy for aggregation sites to understand when many people are talking about the same book – though the people are linking, based on their values, to different booksellers. This is because books have a unique identifier (the ISBN) that appears in the URLs for many online booksellers.

The problem gets stickier when we’re trying to aggregate something that doesn’t have unique identifiers: like news. What if three of us are talking about the recent (to me depressing) U.S. elections, and one of us links to ZNet, one to The Onion, and one to The New American? There’s no unique identifier for this, and I don’t think the solution would be for us to all link to “the paper of record” (in the U.S., The New York Times) because it wouldn’t fit with our values. Also, depending on our values, we may not even think the same things are news (certainly the Times and I often disagree on this front).

Of course, Google is trying to do news aggregation as we speak. . .

I’m very glad to see how this conversation (initiated with the post about All Consuming below) is starting to grow. Since my post yesterday there’s been another post from Jill, a post from Torill, then another post from Torill.

However, the conversation I hoped to start was not about who is lucky enough to live somewhere with a good, independent bookstore. I think the important issue here is link politics.

Specifically, I think:

• We should choose where to link based on our values. As I described at the end of my post yesterday, this may lead to all of us linking different places for different reasons (and would be unlikely to lead to us all linking one place – Amazon or anywhere – by default).
• We should work toward aggregation efforts that support this heterogeneity of linking. Jill points out rightly that this will require some common identifier, which for books is the ISBN. As Erik Benson (who created All Consuming) pointed out when I was emailing with him, both Amazon and Booksense use the ISBN in book URLs (even if Amazon calls it the ASIN, and then extends the system for non-book items) so this should be easy for book-oriented sites. That is to say, the problem isn’t primarily technical.

Well, I’ve been emailing with Jill Walker a bit on the same topic as my post about All Consuming. It looks like she recently posted to her blog on this topic, but before she got the most recent email from yours truly – so I guess we can take the conversation out in public (where it probably belongs). The following paragraphs are an adaptation of my email to Jill:

When I was a kid, we used to drive long stretches of California (between the San Francisco area and the Los Angeles area) several times a year to visit family. At first we would stop at places with names like “Burger Pit” where the ingredients were often local (I remember some of the ice cream fondly) and the people seemed pretty happy. Those places are all gone now – were gone some years ago – completely swallowed by the fast food franchises. (I understand there’s a relatively-recent book about how this happened, that I haven’t read, called Fast Food Nation. [or non-U.S. link]) Anyway, the arguments for Amazon often seem to me like the arguments for McDonald’s: it’s cheap, it’s convenient, it’s the future. But what about how McDonald’s changed agriculture? What about the jobs people end up with at McDonald’s as opposed to local, independent restaurants?

Anyway, the McDonald’s battle is lost. And we look to be losing the Wal-Mart one as well (the final end of the old downtowns of much of the U.S.). And maybe we’ll lose it for bookstores too. But convenience, price, and seeming to be the future can’t be the only criteria by which we decide how to live, where to link.

All that said, my perspective is very much shaped by having spent most of the last decade in New York City, where the great independent bookstores were dying one by one. Each time another one went it created this sick-to-my-stomach feeling. Now there are just a handful left. Jill, on the other hand, has been living somewhere without great independent bookstores to die. Very different. (Or so I wrote to Jill before her post and Mark’s. Has Mark also been living somewhere without great independent bookstores, or did they just never matter much to him?)

It seems like there are three issues:

• Can people like me point link-followers to a place that will help the bookstores I care about stay around – and still get included in aggregation efforts like All Consuming?
• Can people like Jill (and Mark) point link-followers to whatever online bookstore(s) they prefer, chosen by whatever criteria they please (how well stores treat their workers, how they interact with small publishers, how much information they give on their pages, whether they have an affiliate program the linker likes, etc.) – and still get included in aggregation efforts like All Consuming?
• If we think the answer is yes to the questions above (and I think it certainly is on a technical level) then how do we start to work toward this multiplicity (and deliberate, rather than default, choice on this topic)? I think talking about these issues explicitly and publicly is one step.

And so ended my email to Jill. And here we are having that explicit, public conversation – which makes me happy. And it’s already spread a bit. I just saw in the comments for Jill’s post a link to Elizabeth Lane Lawley’s extension of the conversation.

It’s just been confirmed that Brown’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing is announcing an ongoing fellowship in Electronic Writing. As far as I know, this is the first in the world. Here’s the text of the initial (casual in tone) announcement that’s going out to the Electronic Literature Organization website today. Announcements for other venues to follow in coming weeks.

When the award-winning digital artist Talan Memmott came to the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Brown University this fall as an MFA candidate in electronic writing, something new was happening. He followed upon such previous e-lit luminaries as Bobby Arellano, Shelley Jackson, Mary Kim Arnold, Mark Amerika, Matt Derby, Judd Morrissey, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, but all of these writers were accepted as graduate fiction writers, not electronic writers.

And now the unique fellowship awarded to Memmott has been converted into a permanent annual Creative Writing graduate fellowship in electronic writing, perhaps the first of its kind in the world (any challenges?). It offers tuition and a stipend, partly earned in the second year by teaching workshops, which in the case of those holding this new fellowship will be electronic writing courses, thereby expanding the university’s course offerings in the digital arts.

Applicants should follow the existing Creative Writing guidelines, applying to the genre of choice (fiction, poetry, or playwriting) with a clear indication of interest in the digital field. Although there is only one such fellowship at this time, it is hoped that other electronic writers might, through the quality of their writing, be accepted within the traditional genres, thus augmenting the digital community here.

In addition to providing print writing samples in one of the three genres (the electronic fellowship is not genre-specific), applicants should submit examples (or documentation) of their electronic writing by way of DVD, CD-ROM, videotape, or web address (URL).

What is it about new media an amnesia? Maybe someone needs to write about this the way Stuart Moulthrop did about car crashes in his essay for The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext 1:2. Probably this hypothetical essay should include liberal references to the writings excerpted in The Vintage Book of Amnesia edited by Jonathan Lethem (outside the U.S., follow this link). Perhaps the essay could speculate about the way that amnesia attracts new media authors by simultaneously being a proven artistic trope (however difficult to do well) and mirroring something of what is often the reader/user’s experience of such pieces.

Anyway, I’m working on my semi-obligatory amnesia project, and since I haven’t posted any “bits” here in a while I thought I’d produce another short paragraph:

I have in fact ceased to age. Under the bandages, wrapped in scars. The aging parts of my body torn off, burned away. I will live forever. The aging parts of me. Skin. The right hand. Memory. Remove these from anyone and he will live forever.

I read over at Jill’s about All Consuming. I thought it was an exciting project (you can read Jill’s post to find out why) but I was disappointed to discover that it was so Amazon-centric. I prefer to point people toward Booksense, which is working to keep small, independent bookstores (which have been a lifeblood of our culture) alive.

Well, the Web can (still) be a great place sometimes. I wrote to Erik Benson, who created All Consuming, and asked if it might be possible to alter the site’s infrastructure so that links to Booksense would be interpreted the same way as links to Amazon. He responded almost immediately, and said that he would look into it in the next couple days and get back to me. Feels encouraging.

Of course, I feel slightly sheepish for my advocacy of Booksense at the moment. When I first noticed the incorrect mystery author in the New Media Reader listing at Amazon, I went to check Booksense’s NMR listing and saw they had the right editors listed – Nick and yours truly. However, my most recent check shows Booksense only listing the mystery author, with my name and Nick’s removed. I wonder where this erroneous information has come from, and why it’s spreading…

After another delay (we didn’t have permission for a piece of French text, and didn’t realize it until the book was done) The New Media Reader is finally being printed as I write. The delay hasn’t kept some folks from using it to teach courses this Fall using loose pages (at Brown, Texas A&M, UC San Diego, Simon Fraser), and I’m hoping it won’t diminish too much the number who choose to use it in the Spring as a real book.

Now that the book is nearly, finally, a purchasable physical object it’s starting to show up in databases. But with some odd deviations from the correct information. My favorite error so far is Amazon’s listing for The New Media Reader which currently includes an author who wasn’t involved in the project at all: Steven J. Brams.

I told Amazon about the error more than a week ago, and no response, so I’m guessing it’ll be up for general amusement for a while.

Perhaps, having said something specific about the general area of electronic writing, I should say something general about the specific area of electronic writing I’ve been thinking about. Dynamic text hyperfiction is what I currently call the area of electronic writing that interests me the most (warnings: this area is not (yet?) rigorously defined, and it needs a better name than “dynamic text”). My interest comes, in part, because dynamic text works can skirt what I see as serious limitations in two now-current approaches to electronic fiction. The first of these to-my-mind limited approaches grows out of an artificial intelligence (AI) tradition. It attempts to create systems that understand stories, so that they can be generated (or, more modestly, adjusted) automatically. One might say that these systems attempt to “operationalize” storytelling. The primary problem with systems of this sort is that they tend to “black box” the actual production of the story text itself – to regard this as a natural language generation (NLG) problem to be solved by other researchers. However, this attempt at operationalization is not simply problematic (for those with an interest in literary electronic fiction) because it depends on the idea that NLG will eventually be good enough to produce writing of literary quality. It is also problematic because few who write fiction of literary interest view the writing process as beginning with a story specification that is made progressively more detailed until it can be used to generate language for the reader. It is, in fact, probably more widely believed that good fiction tends to begin with language, with specific passages of writing. And while literary fiction audiences have in general had little interest in the possibilities of story permutation (e.g., as in the Choose Your Own Adventure fictions) much greater interest has been evoked by work that involves permutation at the level of language (e.g., the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs). I call systems for story generation which assume later NLG will produce the text atextual electronic fiction systems.

Another major approach to electronic fiction grows out of a print writing tradition. In this approach writers create passages of text (sometimes combined with images or sounds – or made imagelike themselves through animation and typography) that are then accessed in different orders depending on the reader’s actions (or depending on even more aleatory factors). While this work is generally more satisfying as literature than anything yet produced by NLG, this is partially due to the fact that as text it represents no great departure from print literature – its screens of text nearly as fixed as a book’s pages. The algorithms at work don’t move much beyond what Raymond Queneau accomplished in print in the 1960s with works such as “One Hundred Thousand Million Poems” and “Yours for the Telling.” I call works with relatively unchanging, page-like chunks of text fixed text electronic fiction systems.

I believe it is possible to go further than fixed-text systems do. I believe it is possible to introduce literarily-interesting dynamism at the level of text in manners impossible for print writing. Let me return to Burroughs for a potentially-helpful analogy. While Burroughs distributed his completed cut-up writings, he also distributed instructions for cut-ups – so that the new cut-up, the cut-up of the reader’s particular time and place, could also be produced. At the simplest level, this is where a dynamic text approach differs from most electronic fiction work now coming from traditional writing communities – it aims to occupy a space between Burroughs’s cut-ups and his instructions, employing both text written in the past and algorithms executed in the present.

In summary, the dynamic text approach differs from atextual electronic fiction systems in that it begins with text produced by a human author. It differs from fixed text electronic fiction systems in that it tends to address text with finer granularity and use more complex algorithms in its manipulation. Given this, the current research area that is closest to a dynamic text approach is hypertext, which (as I understand it) focuses on the interconnection, combination, and presentation of human-authored materials. Prior work in what I call dynamic text has taken place in the hypertext community, though often on (or just across) its borders – including those borders adjoining the artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), poetry, and game communities. Here are some examples of prior work that I consider dynamic text. The Terminal Time project includes a “style preserving” natural language system that customizes pre-written texts according to the preferences expressed by a live audience, creating an ideologically-loaded history of the last millennium that is different at every viewing. The Façade system presents a real-time interactive drama using both AI techniques of the sort pioneered at CMU’s Oz Project and pre-written text that is dynamically sequenced (and organized according to “dramatic beats”). The computer game Black and White is perhaps the most popular piece of electronic writing since Infocom’s heyday in the 1980s – within its multi-act story structure it contains over 60,000 lines of dialogue (written by James Leach) of which the reader experiences a subset, in fine-grained variations, and involving different characters and settings depending on the interactions up to that point. (Façade and Black and White were discussed at the SIGGRAPH 2002 panel that Andrew Stern and I organized.) The work of poet and translator John Cayley involves a dynamic text technique that he calls transliteral morphing – moving via sound-organized letter transformation chains from one pre-written text to another (as discussed a bit in my post about riverIsland). The Card Shark and Thespis systems combine hypertext concepts with emergent behavior (through the buildup and alteration of constraints) for the purposes of electronic fiction, and are appropriate for use with texts of a relatively fine granularity.

As a few might recognize, I first started writing about this in the article Brion Moss and I wrote (with sidebars by Adam Chapman) about The Impermanence Agent for Cybertext Yearbook 2001. I should really get around to posting that somewhere around here…

I’ve been thinking about a definition of electronic writing, and talking it over with some folks (Talan Memmott, Robert Coover, David Durand, Elli Mylonas), and it seems to work pretty well – so I thought I’d propose it semi-publicly:

“Writing that requires computation at the time of reading.”

This excludes: novels written by computer programs, text-bearing Photoshop collages printed on paper, traditional stories distributed on web pages.

This can include work presented via: blogs and wikis, web pages and Flash animations, cellphones and PDAs, newsgroups and search engines, robotic sculptures and virtual reality chambers, email and calendar programs, chats and MOOs, video games and interactive fictions.

An important aspect of the definition is the word requires. An email narrative such as Blue Company requires computation at the time of reading because being sent and read as email is part of its material as an artwork. Emailing a friend a Poe story doesn’t turn it into electronic writing.