Grand Text Auto

catch it all tomorrow with a Tiltfactor open house 3-6pm hosted by Digital Humanities Professor Mary Flanagan and her student design team in 304 North Fairbanks, Dartmouth College;

followed by  “Rebooting Our Democracy”
a public lecture by Prof. Lawrence Lessig
7:00 p.m.  Thursday, May 27, 2010
Filene Auditorium, Moore Hall  Dartmouth College

Lawrence Lessig is Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics,
and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.  He is the author of Remix (2008),
Code v2 (2007), Free Culture (2004), and The Future of Ideas (2001).  He has won umerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.
This event is free and open to the public.

J.R. Carpenter has taken apart and reassembled my poetry generator Taroko Gorge. (The first to appropriate and rework that piece, as far as I know, was Scott Rettberg, who created Tokyo Garage.) J.R.’s piece – one might call it a tract of sorts – is simply called Gorge. See if you can stomach it, and for how long.

Also, check out J.R.’s project Story Generation(s), which involved reworking two of my 1k Python programs and which launched May 8 at PW10 Performance Writing Weekend. The project includes a JavaScript port of “Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR.” This is generally not a bad idea; I wrote Taroko Gorge originally in Python (a programming language I prefer for when I’m thinking) and converted it to JavaScript for easy web viewing.

My collaborator Mark Marino is putting on a conference at USC which looks to be a great event. (I don’t pimp conferences on the blog here unless I’m involved in organizing them or planning to attend; I’m certainly submitting to this one.) Note that abstracts are due very soon – June 1.

Announcing a 1-Day conference on Critical Code Studies at the University of Southern California

Critical Code Studies @ USC

July 23, 2010
Hosted by The Center for Transformative Scholarship & The Institute for Multimedia Literacy

Keynote: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown University

At Tiltfactor we’re designing a suite of games that inspires users to tag photographs with “expert” data. Using their input, are building a searchable database of terms that users can explore to find the photographs they need. But how should such a database be constructed in order to be searchable? To answer this question we need to decide exactly what we will be sorting.

If you want to sort dates, design a timeline; if you want to sort names, just make an alphabetical list.

Mary Dooms, a middle school teacher in Illinois who has used interactive fiction in her teaching, recently asked me if I knew about any uses of IF in teaching in higher education. That’s a good question.

She had found Utah State’s Voices of Spoon River and Myth Mechanic. I know right off that Jeff Howard has taught The Crying of Lot 49 using IF, and that students read IF and create it as a digital literary practice in two of my classes, Interactive Narrative and The Word Made Digital.

After the Digital Humanities Symposium last week and the visit by Filmmaker Marcin Ramocki, Dartmouth is happy to host this week Helen Nissenbaum
Professor of Media, Culture and Communication and Computer Science. Nissenbaum will be giving a talk on “What’s Wrong with Behavioral Advertising?”

Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication and Computer Science NYU
May 18th at 3pm     105 Thornton Hall
Co-Sponsored by the Philosophy Department, Digital Humanities, and ISTS

We concluded the Spring 2010 21W.750 (Experimental Writing) today by composing a definition of the class’s title phrase, based on what we learned during our studies this semester.

EXPERIMENTAL WRITING (vbl. n., c. 1872)

1. The elephant is tiring. X-raying with yttrium, the pact seems tame, empty. Of yore, a raisin says “nope” to an igloo.

2. The octopus, magnificent, eats a tiger and an elephant. (a) Turn no oblog torpor. Revel! (b) An acrobatic cat, loyal, limp, is politicized.

3. What Twitter rhetoric: lame, incredible, empty. Tomatoes, made sarcastic, ignite both earrings.

Avatars discovered in the tenure process? Mobile spaces for transmedia exhibitions? Ancient manuscripts in MRI machines? Teaching with databases instead of texts? How are technicians, scientists, artists, designers, and humanists pursuing 21st-century research? How are institutions of higher education affected along with the scholars? As witnessed in scientific fields, new technology radically affects the ways in which scholars pursue their research. Digital technologies foster new questions about materials, practices, archives, and networks, and the digital affects the ways in which resources are archived, queried, searched, created, taught, and studied.

On page 141 of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s (excellent) Expressive Processing, there’s discussion of a citation of from Jesper Juul:

Unlike most literary fictions, however, the worlds of many games are, in Juul’s terminology, “incoherent” (which is one of the things that limits Juul’s interest in discussing games in terms of narrative, as opposed to fiction). These are worlds in which significant events take place that cannot be explained without discussing the game rules, such as the many games that feature multiple and extra lives without any element of the game fiction that points towards reincarnation.

Dance lessons not enough? Missing that special something? You lack soul? Feel, at times, like something that happened might remind you of a past life … if you only had one?

There’s a remedy: Hop on over to the Chicago Soul Exchange.

Justin Hall, game designer of various stripes (and internet personality before it was cool), is visiting UCSC this Tuesday (May 11) to give a talk, critique undergrads’ game designs, and discuss with us. The talk’s open to the public, for those of you in the Bay Area, and will take place in Engineering 2, Room 280, at 11am.

Hello from the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction.

The TWIF Comp, a contest for interactive fiction with code of 140 characters or less, recently wrapped up. (We’re playing some of the games at the PR-IF meeting today.) Although it certainly had its in-joke aspects, the competition did bear amusing fruit, and it’s only one example of several recent competitions beyond the traditional big annual IF Comp. Given my interest in tiny literary systems, I certainly gave some thought to entering this one. However, I’ve pledged to spend all of my IF-writing time working on or in Curveship, and 140-character programs in the system weren’t at the top of my to-do list.

Stay tuned — a new PLAYCUBE event at Dartmouth!

Friday, May 7th: AREA+the Playcube present
“This is my World”
The Spring Student Art Exhibition
Gallery opening from 5-7PM, with the Cube serenading the Top of the Hop
Music + refreshments provided!
(in the belly of the the CUBE=digital photography and short films from the Dartmouth community!)