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12:00
noon–1:15 p.m., Missouri, Sheraton Chicago
Program
arranged by the Association for Computers and the Humanities
1. Jeremy Douglass,
“Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface,” Univ. of
California, San Diego
2. Joseph Tabbi,
“Toward a Semantic Literary Web: Three Case Histories,”
Univ. of Illinois, Chicago
3. Elizabeth
Swanstrom, “Reading Shaw’s Legible City,” Univ. of
California, Santa Barbara
4. Sarah
Jane Sloane, “Reading the Margins of The Magic Book,”
Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins
5. Victoria Szabo,
“Texts in Virtual Contexts: Reading Scholarly Work in 3-D
Environments,” Duke Univ.
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Jeremy
Douglass, “Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface” In "Tag
Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface," Jeremy Douglass theorizes tag
clouds: web reading interfaces formed from dense clusters 'clouds' of weighted keyword links, or 'tags'. The poetics of tag clouds are best
understood when situated in a history of spatially distributed text art, from
contemporary visualization and net.art (e.g. "TextArc," Legrady's
"Making the Visible Invisible," Fischer's "Word News,"
Khan's "Net Worth," Jean V_(c)ronis' "-ogue") back
through earlier typographic experiments (e.g. the concrete poetry of Augusto
de Campos and the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis). While interfaces have become
emblamatic of the contemporary 'web 2.0' internet era, tag clouds have been
fundamentally misunderstood in recent scholarship. Both the close association
of tag clouds with 'folksonomy' website communities (e.g. del.icio.us,
Flickr) and the popularity of the misleading term 'cloud' have created a
stereotype of tag clouds as reflecting a kind of aesthetics of prolific
chaos. Yet, as a special kind of list (the aggregately weighed dense list),
tag cloud interfaces are both highly utilitarian (in the Tuftian sense of
information richness) and deeply poetic (in their superimposition of
constraining order over a set of evocative juxtapositions). In tag cloud
poetry, the poetics of proliferation and the system of software meet at the
reading interface.
Joe
Tabbi, “Toward a Semantic Literary Web: Three Case Histories” In this talk, I introduce
a new literary and arts collective, electronic text +
textiles, whose members are exploring the convergence
of written and material practices. While some associates create actual electronic textiles (the 'smart fabrics'
produced by textile artist Zane
Berzina in collaboration with materials scientists based in Greiz, Germany ), I myself have explored the text/textile
connection as it manifests itself
in writing produced within electronic environments. My online
laboratory consists of two literary web sites, ebr
(www.electronicbookreview.com), a literary journal in
continuous production since 1995,
and the Electronic Literature Directory
(www.eliterature.org), a project that seeks
not just to list works but to define an emerging
field. Rather than regard these sites as
independent
or free-standing projects, I present their development in combination with the current (and similarly halting) development
of semantically driven content on the Internet
(e.g., The Semantic Web, or Internet 2.0). Elizabeth
Swanstrom, “Reading Shaw’s Legible City” Jeffrey
Shaw’s “Legible City” is an immersive art installation comprised of an
interactive reading interface that requires active, physical participation
from its viewers. To make
the installation function, a “rider” sits on a stationery bicycle, pedals,
and navigates through city streets and architectural structures made of
letters, words, and sentences that are projected onto a large screen. In this manner, the viewer both rides
and reads as she navigates through this text-based virtual space. Requiring as it does the active
participation of the reader/rider, Shaw’s “Legible City” provides a very
interesting expression of the act of reading. I suggest that Shaw’s interface offers a way for us to
imagine reading as a fully embodied, social, and shared experience and
physical activity in which the human body is well integrated into its surrounding
environment and in which the text is literally configured through the
readers’ physical interaction with the reading interface. Sarah
Jane Sloane, “Reading the Margins of The Magic Book” Researchers
at the Human Interface Technology Laboratories (HITL) at University of
Washington in Seattle and University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New
Zealand have designed a mixed reality (MR) interface that amplifies the
conventional experience of reading by creating books that mix real and
virtual content. Using an
interface known as “The Magic Book,” readers encounter “physical markers”
within a traditional two-dimensional book that signal the text’s overlaid
virtual content. Like a pop-up
book read through a handheld display, physical markers within the tangible
text allow readers to move around three-dimensional illustrations of a
story’s physical setting, encounter other readers in collaborative displays,
and move objects. In 2006-2007,
Director Mark Billinghurst and other researchers at the NZ HITL worked with a
traditional children’s book illustrator to use the Magic Book technology to
recreate a Maori story about the effects of colonial powers on New Zealand’s
native cultures. (That illustrator had to answer questions such as, “What
does your character look like from the back?” to aid the design.) The
first half of my presentation offers slides and video of the reading
experience of the Magic Book interface. The second half theorizes how our understanding of the “inside” and
“outside” of texts shifts when confronted by Magic Book technology and other
MR-mediated environments. When
NZ postdoc Raphael Grasset extends the setting of a text so that a reader can
take a god’s-eye view down at the clouds and other weather over a scene, for
example, what are the margins of that text? How does perception change when users (readers) navigate
two different environments simultaneously, the real and the virtual? What happens to the margins of a
book, literally and figuratively, when they are constructed in MR? Using current definitions of immersion
(Biocca and Delaney), interactivity (Stever), and virtual environments and
teleoperation (Sayers), as well as Nedra Reynolds’ (2004) discussions of the
geographies of writing, this presentation ultimately extends our
understanding of the edges of reading.
Victoria Szabo, “Texts in Virtual Contexts: Reading Scholarly
Work in 3-D Environments” How
does (re)presentation in a 3D virtual environment affect the production and
reception of scholarly student projects in an academic course setting? To
what extent can we distinguish process from medium or product when assigning
students to do work with new media tools and modalities? What rubrics of
evaluation apply to individual or group projects whose virtual presence exceeds
the bounds of the conventional course structure, classroom space, and
university setting? What do these opportunities mean for our standard
literary notions of what constitutes a “text” or even a “context”? These
questions will be discussed in relation to courses and projects in Duke
University’s highly interdisciplinary Information Science + Information
Studies Program. In Fall 2006, first-year students in the Focus cluster of
courses (four courses around a common theme) created a virtual replica of the
university’s museum in SecondLife in order to exhibit their own final class
projects to the public. In Fall 2007 the next generation of students in the
course expanded upon this beginning not only by expanding their SecondLife
presence as a site for display, reception, and real-time critical
communication, but also by exploring the collaborative authoring potential of
the open-source 3d communal workspace in Croquet. The results of these
interventions will in turn persist and propagate throughout the curriculum
and research practices of those involved. How
do such texts generated in this new medium bear the traces of their
production? What kinds of scholarly reading practices become necessary to
understanding—and evaluating-- a multimodal, digitally native online
production as a critical and analytical assignment that strives to critique
the medium of its own production? At what point does the interface pf a 3D
environment itself become invisible, naturalized as a consistently obvious
characteristic of the medium (as has so often been the case with the printed
text.) |