While my dissertation and my first monograph share a title, little text is shared between them. In general, the book develops the ideas around digital fictions and games significantly further, while some other topics (such as operational logics) are developed more in the dissertation.

This page hosts a PDF of my dissertation Expressive Processing, points to the post I’ve made on Grand Text Auto, and (at the bottom) holds errata. The PDF presents the dissertation just as I turned it in to the university (I resisted the urge to make any additional fixes) so it can be used for citation. The GTxA page can serve as a possible venue for discussion.

This work represents my initial take on a set of topics that I currently wrap up under the heading “expressive processing.” There are two things I particularly mean to get at with this phrase:

• First, I’m pointing toward a sort of generalization of Michael Mateas’s Expressive AI. In essence, by this I mean that the definition of computational processes is an important aspect of the authoring of digital work (it is a site for authorial expression) and that undertaking this definition from an authorial perspective (rather than through a mysticism of the computer or a particular group of techniques) is a powerful approach.
• Second, I’m hoping to make clear that the computational processes of digital works express things about their relationship to the wider society — and, especially, the subcultures and materials of science and technology — that simply aren’t visible on the surface. Given this, interpretation of digital works that focuses only on what is visible to (and experienced by) the audience misses an important avenue of investigation.

I defended my dissertation in May 2006 at Brown University. My committee was chaired by Andy van Dam and included Wendy Chun, Robert Coover, David Durand, and George Landow. My work was done outside traditional departments through Brown’s Special Graduate Study program. The full title is “Expressive Processing: On Process-Intensive Literature and Digital Media.”

Having completed the dissertation, I’m now taking a big step back and thinking things through again, aiming toward a book that oscillates between these two perspectives — as I tend to do in any case, being someone who both creates and studies digital media. Given this, I’d appreciate feedback from as many directions as I can get. If you’d rather not post comments at Grand Text Auto, please just drop me an email or stop me as I’m walking the halls of some conference or other.

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Errata

When writing my dissertation I used a copy of James Meehan’s dissertation (The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer, Yale University, 1976) that was printed as part of Garland Publishing’s series of “Outstanding dissertations in the computer sciences” (1980). This copy belonged to UC Irvine’s library, and they wanted it back. So I recently bit the bullet and paid UMI for a facsimile of the dissertation from their records. When it arrived I discovered that the page numbers were different. As far as I can tell, Garland didn’t re-type Meehan’s dissertation, but they did (it appears) cut and paste to increase the number of lines per page. As a result, none of the page numbers I provide for Meehan’s dissertation will be correct unless you’re working from Garland’s publication. My apologies.