Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Books
Brenda Laurel (Ed.), The Art of Human Computer Interface Design (Reading, MA;
Addison-Wesley Professional, 1990)
This is a collection of essays on interaction between digital software and human users
sponsored by the Apple Corporation. The Art of Human Computer Interface Design is,
however, important as it includes texts dealing with cultural, social and semiotic
meanings of digital literature. Design here is positioned not only as material assembling
but as a means of meaning creation.
Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the History of Writing
(Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Bloom and Associates, 1991)
Bolter begins his examination of writing for digital media that is continued by
Remediation in 1999. By looking at the history of what he terms “print culture” he traces
the development of writing media to the point we are at in 1991 which he describes as
“the late age of print”. Writing Space as well introduces the concept of Remediation, here
in the context of print media. This is an important text as it establishes digital literature in
a broader context than only the techno-materialistic, which had been dominant in the
1970’s and 1980’s. Bolter argues that computer based writing is both a cultural product
and producer.
1
account of digital media but it is the beginnings of literary critique of language
constructions in digital texts.
Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995)
Joyce is regarded as an important figure in the development of digital literature as the
author of Afternoon: A Story (Eastgate Systems, 1990). Afternoon has been discussed in
several of the texts listed here; Espen Aarseth, J. Yellowlees Douglas, Jay David Bolter
(along with Joyce a co creator of Storyspace the authoring software developed by
Eastgate), George Landow, Jill Walker and Anna Gunder all critique the work. Joyce’s
own critical style is very personal and poetic but he makes several relevant points
regarding the role of the reader in the digital text. In the chapter A Mephite Topography:
Governance and the City of Text, the reader of a digital text is constructed as participating
in an interactive and spatial topography (Gr. topos: place, graphein: to draw). The
concept of “the city of text” (pp108-109) continues to be relevant with the more visual
and spatial reader driven (‘interactive’) digital texts that began to emerge in the 1990s
and that exist today.
Warren Chernaik, Marilyn Deegan and Andrew Gibson (Eds), Beyond the Book:
Theory, Culture and the Politics of Cyberspace (Oxford: Oxford University
Computing Service, 1996)
The most relevant essays regarding sociology and reception of digital text in this
collection are “Connectionism and Posthumanism” by Sadie Plant and “Interactive
Fiction and Narrative Space” by Andrew Gibson. Plant discusses self-organizing
processes in machine based media and the implications of such processes on the humanist
disciplines and philosophies. Gibson argues for the need for a postmodern understanding
of narrative in light of digital media. Narrative in digital text is argued by Gibson as
developing from hybrid, non-geometrical (non-structural) nodes (distributed in connected
networks) and requiring performance (interactive and participatory) on the part of the
readers. Themes of network or cyborg systems driving interpretation, the relevance of
space and interaction and participation make this a relevant text for the sociology and
reception of digital literature.
2
Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
(Cambridge MASS: MIT Press, 1997)
Murray uses a trope of the bard to describe interaction with digital texts. Each time a
story is retold with reader driven digital media it is done so a little differently but around
a basic formula. Issues of reader and text agency are discussed, with mimesis being the
focus for narrative theory. Another important element of the text is its examination of
narratives being translated across media, such as from book to film to computer game.
Murray introduces the concept of “Procedural authorship” (Murray 152) whereby
authorship is “writing the rules by which the text appears as well as writing the text
themselves”. This is later taken up by Ryan in Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001).
3
Appearance of Theatre in Virtual Spaces by Mathew Causey is important in relation to
the sociology and reception of digital literature. Aarseth writes on the need for new
approaches to digital literature and outlines his own system of ergodic literature as an
example of new critiques for new media. Hayles discusses how Artificial Intelligence
(AI) can be dealt with as a text. The AI attributes of “bottom up” development (from
simple to complex), “complex feedback loops” and “self organization” (Hayles
1999:207-208) combined with pattern/randomness “as a generative dialectic of cultural
forms” (Ibid. 209) are the key concepts for Hayles’ reading of artificial life in the context
of literary culture. Ryan develops a taxonomical approach to the concepts of Narrative,
Virtual and Text, constructing detailed tables for each in comparisons with “postmodern
aesthetics” (Ryan 1999: 103). Finally Causey argues for a Posthuman approach to
narrative by re evaluating the concept of performance. Using visual and cultural theory
Causey examines the sign as occupying and altering both the virtual and the real
simultaneously.
Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge Mass. MIT Press 1999)
Bolter and Grusin’s text is important for its theory of remediation. This is based on the
idea that in order to understand new media (“cultural practices with the computer playing
a central role as the medium for production, storage and distribution” - Wikipedia) it is
necessary to realized that older media forms are “refashioned” through dialogues with
new media. This is a bidirectional process with such practices as reading being learnt
from old media, then altered through exposure to new media, which then in turn alters
reading practices of old media. Remediation theory is very influential and plays a major
role in Katherine Hayles work on Intermediation (Hayles 2006).
J. Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books – Or Books without End? (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2000)
Douglas follows a similar critical path to those taken thus far by Bolter, Joyce, Ryan,
Murray and Aarseth. In regards to the reading paths this approach analyses the digital text
as presented physically by links, chunked text, visual and written content, and the
hierarchy and structure of the whole. Douglas favors the language of traditional narrative
theory and as the title suggests, the digital text is situated in terms of an evolution of
literature as linear from books. According to Douglas digital texts liberate the reader and
4
his or her “convictions, predictions, and interpretations make a difference to the text
itself” (35). The reception theories of Wolfgang Iser are invoked by Douglas, but only in
terms of semiotic indeterminacy, the so-called “gaps”, “blanks” “vacancies” and
“negations” found in the text, to which the reader must contribute their own
understanding to read the text (29). The figure of the implied reader is not mentioned and
reading is reduced to a functional level of direct interpretation by the actual reader.
Sarah Sloane, Digital Fictions: Storytelling in the Material World (Stamford; Ablex
Publishing Group, 2000)
Digital Fictions examines reading and writing by concentrating on the participatory
forms of the MUD (Multi User Dungeon), MOO and MUSH (Mutually Shared
Hallucination) which run in real time with many authors. Sloane takes up a more specific
critical approach beyond the general appeals to post-structuralism that are made in many
of the texts discussed above. Rhetoric, semiotic and feminist theory are the tools of
Sloane. “Storytelling” is the general direction of this text. The reception theories of
Wolfgang Iser are discussed by Sloane. In relation to Iser, Digital Fictions focuses on the
“gaps” which go toward accommodating the implied reader in the text, Sloane judges
these “gaps” as a method “insufficient for the task of encompassing the digital fictions
under discussion in this volume”. By incorporating rhetoric theory and semiotics Sloane
attempts to describe the “widely distributed, idiosyncratic, culturally based audiences
who read digital fictions” (163). The theories of M.M. Bakhtin are judged to be of more
relevance to digital fiction literature. Sloane adapts Bakhtin’s translated terms “horizon”
and “environment” (incidentally from a 1993 translation done by Lev Manovich of a
lesser known essay, “The Spatial Form of Character”) to apply in a semiotic relation of
outside world (environment) as corresponding with an internal concept (horizon) for a
reader.
Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New
York: Palgrave 2001)
The focus for Radiant Textuality is the implications and impacts of digital technology on
the practices, teaching and future directions for the Humanities. McGann primarily
concentrates on English literature and how its study should be developed in light of
digital textuality. In its examination of digital textuality, Radiant Textuality states that
“Texts are like fractal derivations” (151). It is these fractals that McGann is interested in,
or how a digital text has become distributed and transformable (he uses the term
“deformations” for alterations or transformations and the resulting comparative studies
between the pre and post altered text). This practice of deformation is argued as bridging
the material (signifieds) with the imaginative and subsequently cultural meanings of a
text (McGann 2001: 115). McGann breaks his study into three periods; 1993-95, 1995-99
and 1999-2000 and this roughly corresponds to first, second and third generations of
hypertext and to trends in digital critical theory. The first period is summarized as “The
Rational of Hypertext”, the beginning again for the humanities under new technological
regimes and what authors, readers and critics will be as a result. The second period
provides some of the answers posed in the first period and it is here that McGann
explains deformation. Finally the short year of the millennium turn looks at the how book
5
will be situated in relation to new digital technologies. Reading is central to McGann’s
rational for deformation and is described in terms of reading across texts in order to
develop meaning. McGann terms this “reading backward” and gives the example of
needing to be familiar with several of Dante’s poems in order to understand a single text
(Ibid. 107). As well there is, according to McGann, no text that is not marked by cultural
and reader expectations and “normalizations” (Ibid. 204). Reading is a complex network
of practices and interpretations and digital technologies allow us to better examine these
as humanist scholars.
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press 2001)
Manovich’s text is a detailed account of the theories, philosophies and relationships
concerning new media, culture and language. The critique is not restricted to literary
theory but includes visual and film theory, art theory and media specific analysis.
Manovich discusses how cultural forms of understanding feed into digital media, such as
the concept of ‘frame’ and how “as we shift from an industrial society to an information
society, from old media to new media, the overlap between producers and users becomes
significantly larger” (119). Manovich goes on to apply this to the materials of new media
production, the relationship between “typical media objects” and the way they are used.
Analysis of digital text is based very much on intended use as articulated by authors
under regimes of capitalist production and consumption. The difference according to
Manovich with “new” media is that the capitalist system in now post-industrial and
information based. The Language of New Media introduces the ‘cut and paste’ remix
culture that is central to digital textuality today. It is reader/user driven and blurs old
media distinctions between author and text consumer. Manovich argues that digital cut
and paste, fades and manipulations are anti-montage as they create “continuous spaces
out of different elements” that present as coherent wholes (155). The viewer/reader is
included in this seamless whole.
6
2001: Lars Qvortrup (Ed), “Virtual Interaction in Virtual Inhabited Worlds”
Lisa Yaszek, The Self Wired Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative
(New York: Routledge 2003)
Mark Stephen Meadows, Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative
(Indianapolis: New Riders Press, 2003)
Pause and Effect continues the line, begun by Brenda Laurel in The Art of Human
Computer Interface Design, of considering design as a relevant factor in the reception
and sociology of digital literature. Meadows gives a historical account of visual
perspective in the western artistic tradition and proposes an expanded definition of
narrative to accommodate the active participation of the reader in the creation of the
story. Narrative in Pause and Effect is primarily a visual experience and therefore
Meadows spends a lot of pages going over Point of View (POV) and perspective, mostly
in art, comics and commercial forms of media (e.g. advertising). It reads a lot like a
manual on how to write interactive narratives using digital media and Meadows does
include interviews with working designers and writers. The reader is the center for the
type of design that Meadows is proposing, often called “experience design” and it is
described in spatial, symbolic, participatory/performative and cultural/historical terms. In
an interview with “one of the inventors of virtual architecture”, Marcos Novak states that
“The symbolic can only guarantee half the communication – if that. What artists add is
the concern for the other half, all the continuous things…the lighting, and distance and
placement…the balancing act. There are two acts we engage in: discreet and symbolic”
(184). In digital literature it is not only the symbolic that conveys meaning but the
interaction or interplay between the reader/enactor and the text. How the work is
designed directs the reader/enactor to respond in certain ways and this is a primary
concern of the type of design theory discussed by Meadows in Pause and Effect.
7
2003: Jan Van Looy, Jan Baetens, “Close Reading New Media: Analyzing
Electronic Literature”
Before there was Dovey and Kennedy’s Game Cultures (2006) Van Looy and Baetens’
Close Reading New Media provided the closest thing to a manual for the analysis of
digital texts as literature..
2003: Barry Atkins, “More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional From”
N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)
In My Mother was a Computer, Hayles looks at “the entanglement of the bodies of texts
and digital subjects” in a blend of the themes of earlier works, Writing Machines and
How we Became Posthuman (7). This is a major strand in what Hayles describes as
Intermediation, the movements between texts and bodies and between different forms of
media (intermediation). Intermediation makes it necessary “to think in terms of multiple
causalities, complex dynamics and emergent possibilities” (7). In this context language,
whether the words on the page or those processed by computers are all forms of code. In
order to interpret this code it is necessary for the reader to run multiple processes
simultaneously. The reader, in terms of intermediation, is a complex, distributed and
dynamic figure as she is called upon to interpret and respond to symbolic communication
as well as structures and flows between and within media. In discussing the digital art
installation I Have Never Read the Bible, Hayles describes “reading” as “a distributed
activity taking place partly in the articulations of the artist, partly in the “voiced” text,
partly in the Oreo [layered] structures of the scanner, computer and synthesizer and partly
in the perception of the viewer who not only makes words out of the voiced letters but
also makes meaning out of her interpolation into this distributed cognitive environment”
(213). This model of dynamic participation and simultaneous interpretation provides an
image of the reading subject as implied by both the language and the material features of
the text.
2006: George P. Landow, “Hypertext 3.0 Critical Theory and New Media in an Era
of Globalization”
Landow’s third edition of Hypertext is another encyclopedic account of digital textual
forms. There is much in the text which is essential background information for anyone
moving into the subject areas of critical theory and new media. To illustrate Landow’s
approach to theory one example is:
“Wreaders” (p302) “active aggressive readers who can and do add links, comments and
their own subwebs to the larger web into which the print version ahs transformed itself”
The concept of ‘active reader’ is found in Umberto Eco’s work and he adopted in from
Roland Barthes. In this example the general lineage of Landow’s approach can be
8
determined. Hypertext 3.0 is based on critical and pedagogical theory and uses the terms
author, co author, reader and wreader. Materiality is also very central to Landow:
“I tell my students to be prepared for readers who ‘fall in through the living room ceiling
rather than entering through the front door’, and therefore at least consider including
navigation and orientation devices that will give readers some idea of where they have
landed.” (Landow 111)
This is clearly a spatial critique of the text which I have sound is often a helpful way of
working with digital literature. Landow continues on with some of the utopian vision of
digital communication, such as “hypertext blurs the distinction between reader and author
(327). These statements do not necessarily add to the understanding of how hypertext
works. Hypertext 3.0 touches on a plethora of critical theory and theorists; Bakhtin,
Hayles, Derrida and Iser are just a few.
2006 Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures: Computer Games as New
Media (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006)
While much of Dovey and Kennedy’s text is concerned with game theories, there is a
strong focus of how digital artifacts are to be analyzed as new media. Game Cultures
adopts an approach with a sociological flavor. Central to this is the concept of
‘Technicity’; “the new kinds of social and cultural relationships being formed through the
use of technology (Dovey and Kennedy 16). The relationship between the user and the
digital artifact is qualified by Dovey and Kennedy as “games are not static media texts –
they are activities.” (23). What is interactivity is discussed in terms of the interaction with
the material properties of game as texts and in terms of the cultural experience needed to
interpret their meanings. Technicity remains the umbrella term for these investigations,
“the cultural system of determination refers to the ways in which tastes, class, ‘race’, and,
most crucially in this case, gender all generate particular kinds of technicity” (60). Dovey
and Kennedy “proceed from the assumption that the meaning of computer technology,
and by extension computer games, is not embedded in the technology or artifact itself but
is always brought about by a set of cultural processes through which meanings are
generated and contested. “(65) The only practical example of their model of analysis is
performed with a games development company. There is however an “Analytical
Framework for games Studies” set out in Dovey and Kennedy’s text (120-22) This model
proposes a close reading of both the ‘front end’ (the game and how it is played,
addressivity ) and the ‘back end’ (the programming of the game, contexts to play,
feedback, production history). This model for analysis leads to the judgment that
“computer games can be seen as prototypical of new media economies insofar as they are
an excellent example of the shift from a participatory media culture (see Jenkins 1992) to
what games theorist Sue Morris, talking about FPS [First Person Shooters] has termed a
‘co-creative’ media form” (123).
9
Theses
1985: Mary Anne Buckles “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame Adventure”
2000: Raine Koskimaa, “Digital Literature: From Text to Hypertext and Beyond”
2003: Torill Elvira Mortensen, “Pleasures of the Player: Flow and Control in Online
Games”
10