Fall Teaching: Digital Humanities

My colleague Ed Whitley and I are co-teaching an Introduction to Digital Humanities course for the first time this fall.

In some ways the course looks a little like other Intro to DH courses taught by colleagues elsewhere (and we consulted syllabi by people like Johanna Drucker and Alan Liu while designing our own). But we're also diverging in some significant ways from traditional Intro to DH courses. For one thing, Ed in particular has a great deal of experience building digital archives, and we'll emphasize digital archives and digital collections a great deal in the first weeks of the course. (I am also working on a digital archive project on "The Kiplings and India," as I mentioned in a previous post). 

Secondly, we have put in a pretty robust social justice emphasis in our approach to DH, not as an afterthought or token presence, but in the front and center. The first major project we'll work on together is a collaborative edition of Claude McKay's 1922 book of poetry, Harlem Shadows. And we'll come back to social justice, #TransformDH, and #DHPoco types of issues regularly in other units. We're especially pleased to integrate our class with a couple of visiting speakers to campus, including Johanna Drucker (September 15), and Vincent Brown (November 12). 

Finally, in lieu of final projects (conventional research papers), we'll ask students to do four smaller projects and then revise and extend those projects at the end of the term in the form of final portfolios. 

All that said, the syllabus below is still pretty experimental -- we're not sure yet which essays will "work" and which might be less effective in connecting with students. If and when we do this again, it might look different. Feedback, suggestions, and criticisms welcome (including the "how can you *not* have X?! variety). 

Preliminary Calendar Introduction
Tu August 25	Basic Introduction  --Readings-- -Matt Gold, “Digital Humanities” (CourseSite) -Miriam Posner, “How Did They Make That?” -Lisa Spiro, “Getting Started in the Digital Humanities”
Th August 27	Defining the Field   --Websites-- -DH Commons -CenterNet -Digital Humanities Now -Lehigh DH Resources -Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations -The Association for Computers and the Humanities --Readings-- -Susan Schriebman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, “The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction” in A Companion to Digital Humanities -Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline” -Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” -Lisa Spiro, “This is Why We Fight” in Debates in Digital Humanities -Meredith Hindley, "The Rise of the Machines: NEH and the Digital Humanities"
Tu September 1	Debating the Field   --Readings-- -Alan Liu, “Where is Cultural Criticism in Digital Humanities?” -David Golumbia, “Death of a Discipline” -John Unsworth , "What's Digital Humanities and How Did it Get Here?" -Julia Flanders, “The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship” -Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Lisa Marie Rhody, “Working the Digital Humanities: Uncovering Shadows between the Dark and the Light” -Johanna Drucker, “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship”
Unit I: Digitally Curated Texts
Th September 3	Textual Scholarship and Editorial Theory  --Readings-- -G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Varieties of Scholarly Editing” (CourseSite) -D. F. McKenzie, “Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts” (CourseSite) -Jerome McGann, from A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (CourseSite) -Jerome McGann, “The Rationale of Hypertext” Due: DH Stakes paper (3-5 pages)
Tu September 8	Digital Archives: Theory and Practice  --Websites-- -Scholarly Editing --Readings-- -Martha Nell Smith, “Electronic Scholarly Editing” -Kenneth Price, “Electronic Scholarly Editions” -Susan Schreibman, “Digital Scholarly Editing” -Dino Buzzetti and Jerome McGann, “Electronic Textual Editing: Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon” -Kenneth Price, “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What's in a Name?”
Th September 10	Digital Archives: Case Studies I   -- Websites -- -The William Blake Archive -The Walt Whitman Archive -The Emily Dickinson Archive, Emily Dickinson Collection at the Amherst College Digital Collections, and Dickinson Electronic Archives -The Rossetti Archive --Readings -- -Lev Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media” -Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives” (see also these responses to Folsom’s article, particularly those by McGann and McGill) -Ed Folsom and Ken Price, from Re-Scripting Walt Whitman (“Intimate Script and the New American Bible” and “What Whitman Left Us”) -Roger Whitson and Jason Whitaker, chapter 1 from William Blake and the Digital Humanities (CourseSite) -Lisa Spiro and Jane Segal, “Scholars’ Usage of Digital Archives in American Literature” -Mark Sample, “Unseen or Unremarked On: Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities”
Tu September 15	Johanna Drucker visit. 1:10-2pm: Regular class. 2-3:30pm: conversation with Johanna Drucker (please review her DH 101 Coursebook). 4pm Drucker lecture in Linderman 200, “Should Humanists Visualize Knowledge?” (required -- she is a major figure in Digital Humanities scholarship!) Digital Archives: Case Studies II    --Websites-- -Claude McKay’s “Harlem Shadows” (Digital Edition by Chris Forster & Roopika Risam). We’ll be doing collaborative hands-on work to expand and improve on this archive (contributions due September 29). Visit the site, visit Chris Forster’s Github site containing XML/TEI version of the McKay text, read Deep’s lecture notes on Claude McKay. -Colored Conventions Project -Digital Diversity Timeline -Charles Chesnutt Archive -Digital Schomburg -Clotel electronic edition (review here) -Documenting the American South --Readings-- -Stephanie P. Browner, “Digital Humanities and the Study of Race and Ethnicity” -Tara McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation” -Moya Z. Bailey, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave”
Th September 17	Continue discussion of Digital Archives Case Studies II from Tuesday (40 minutes)  -Pocahontas Archive -Timothy B. Powell and Larry P. Aitken, “Encoding Culture: Building a Digital Archive Based on Traditional Ojibwe Teachings” TEI and XML (30 minutes)  --Videos-- -TEI: An Overview --Websites-- -GitHub --Readings-- -The Text Encoding Initiative, “A Gentle Introduction to XML” -Sarah Ficke, “From Text to Tags: The Digital Humanities in an Introductory Literature Course” Short Assignment: Analyze small chunks of XML from the Whitman Archive and Harlem Shadows and compare what this reveals about the editorial practice of each site. Assignment due Tuesday 9/22.
Tu September 22	Work on Projects  We will do a hands-on session focusing on individual student contributions related  to the digital edition of Claude McKay’s “Harlem Shadows” for this session. Depending on what you’re working on, you may need to read critical or biographical materials related to McKay’s life and work and write up short contextual or interpretive essays that will eventually be included in a version of the site that will later go ‘live’ (possibly on Tuesday 9/29). (A large amount of scholarly and biographical material has been scanned and posted on CourseSite.) The expectation is that students will have read relevant material related to their subtopic vis a vis McKay before this session, and have ideas and questions about how to proceed. (Or a draft) We will talk more about “building” on Thursday 9/24 and on Tuesday 9/29.
Th September 24	Content Management Systems  Hands-on introduction to WordPress (Annie Johnson) Before coming to class complete the prework listed here. --Websites-- -The Vault at Pfaff’s (Drupal + CONTENTdm) -Digital Dos Passos (Omeka) -Identities: Understanding Islam in a Cross-Cultural Context (Omeka) -Freedom’s Ring (Scalar) -The Nicest Kids in Town (Scalar) --Other Platforms to discuss/explore-- -Omeka -Drupal -Scalar -CONTENTdm
Tu September 29	Contributions to “Harlem Shadows” digital edition due -- in-class presentations. Student presentation and collaborative / group self-critique of our collaborative version of “Harlem Shadows.” What value have we been able to add to the site? What else could we add / what are we missing? How could we improve architecture / user experience? What do we hope different kinds of visitors  to this site might learn from their experience? Based on feedback you receive from your peers and from us, plan to revise your contributions for the final portfolios due in December.
Unit II: Digitally Manipulated Texts
Th October 1	Reading, Scale, Text-as-Data   --Readings-- -Ted Underwood, “Seven Ways Humanists Are Using Computers to Understand Text” -Katherine Hayles, “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine” -Alan Liu, “From Reading to Social Computing” -Michael Witmore, “Text: A Massively Addressable Object” -Trevor Owens, “Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information, or Evidence?”
Tu October 6	Distant Reading and Data Mining  --Websites-- -NEH Digging Into Data Challenge --Readings-- -David L. Hoover, “Textual Analysis” -Stephen Ramsay, “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or, What You Do With a Million Books” -Ted Underwood, “We Don’t Already Understand the Broad Outlines of Literary History” - Stephen Ramsay, “An Algorithmic Criticism," in Reading Machines (CourseSite) -Franco Moretti, chapter(s) # from Distant Reading (CourseSite) -Matthew Jockers, chapter(s) #from Macroanalysis (CourseSite)
Th October 8	Topic Modeling  --Websites-- -TOME and its NEH application --Readings-- -Ted Underwood, “Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough” -Lisa M. Rhody, “Topic Modeling and Figurative Language” -Lauren Klein, “TOME” at DH 2014 -J. Eisenstein and L. Klein. “Reading Thomas Jefferson with TopicViz: Towards a Thematic Method for Exploring Large Cultural Archives”
Tu October 13	Pacing Break: No class
Th October 15	Stylometry   --Readings-- -Hugh Craig, “Stylistic Analysis and Authorship Studies” -Stephen Ramsay, Introduction to Reading Machines (CourseSite) --Tools-- Signature (http://www.philocomp.net/humanities/signature.htm) Jstylo (https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth) --Case Study 1: Syuzhet Controversy-- -Matthew Jockers, “Syuzhet” Announcement: http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/) -Annie Swafford,  “Problems with the Syuzhet Package” https://annieswafford.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/syuzhet/ --Case Study 2: JK Rowling and “Cuckoo’s Calling” --             http://www.npr.org/2013/07/26/205794448/uncovering-the-mystery-of-j-k-rowlings-latest-novel (newspaper article)                         http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/software-helps-identify-anonymous-writers-or-helps-them-stay-that-way/ (newspaper article)
Tu October 20	Visualization  --Websites-- -Visualizing Data -Visual Complexity -Mapping the Republic of Letters -Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-61    -Paige Morgan, “Visible Prices” --Tools-- -Palladio -Timeglider -Thinglink -CartoDB --Readings-- -Stefan Sinclar et al, “Information Visualization for Humanities Scholars” -Tanya Clement, “Text Analysis, Data Mining, and Visualizations in Literary Scholarship” -Lauren Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings”
Th October 22	Maps  --Projects-- -The 19th-Century Concord Digital Archive (and this poster presentation) -Digital Yoknapatawpha (watch demonstration videos) -Salem Witch Trials -Spatial Humanities --Readings-- -William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., “GIS for Language and Literary Study” -Jo Guldi, ”What Is the Spatial Turn?” (especially “The Spatial Turn in Literature” and “The Spatial Turn in History”) -David J. Bodenhamer, “The Potential of Spatial Humanities” -Bethany Nowviskie, “Neatline and Visualization as Interpretation” -Matthew Wilkens, “The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction”
Tu October 27	Networks  --Websites-- -Viral Texts -Mapping the Republic of Letters -The Modernist Journals Project and The MJP Lab -Linked Data -The Vault at Pfaff’s network visualization prototype --Tools-- -vis.js -Gephi --Readings-- -Scott B. Weingart, “Demystifying Networks” -Elijah Meeks, “More Networks in the Humanities, or Did Books Have DNA?” -Ryan Cordell, “Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers” (with accompanying methodology essay) -Dan Edelstein, “Networks in History: Data-driven tools for analyzing relationships across time” NEH application (CourseSite) -Franco Moretti, "Network Theory, Plot Analysis" (CourseSite) -NEH grant (CourseSite)
Th October 29	Hands-on session on text analysis. Collaboration on student work in progress.  --Readings-- -Lauren F. Klein, “Hacking the Field: Teaching Digital Humanities with Off-the-Shelf Tools” (CourseSite)
Tu November 3	Small scale text analysis project due: in-class presentations. We will ask you to use one of the “off the shelf” text analysis tools we discussed over the preceding three weeks. Create a useable body of text (i.e., a text file) and run either a statistical or visual analysis of that text oriented towards answering a particular question you wish to answer about that text. Give us your results, and a short essay describing your goals and assessment of the results.
Unit III: Born-Digital Texts
Th November 5	Social Media and New Scholarly Forms  --Websites-- -Digital Humanities Now -MLA Commons -CommentPress -Explore Twitter hashtags: #DH, #transformDH, #dhpoco --Readings-- -Kathleen Fitzpatrick, from Planned Obsolescence (CourseSite) -Edward Ayers, "Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?" -Johanna Drucker, “Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing” -Mark Sample, “What’s Wrong with Writing Essays”
Tu November 10	Electronic Literature I  --Primary Texts-- -Sasha West, “Zoology” -Christine Wilks, “Underbelly” -J.R. Carpenter, “Entre Ville” -“Even Cowgirls Bleed” -Stephanie Strickland, True North --Platforms and Tools-- -Storyspace (no longer viable) -Twine: http://twinery.org -Inklewriter: http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/ --Secondary Readings-- -N. Katherine Hayles, “What Is Electronic Literature?” -Margie Luesebrink & Stephanie Strickland, “Seven Types of Interface” (CourseSite) -Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Digital Media Archaeology: Interpreting Computational  Processes” -Matt Soar and Monika Gagnon, “D/N/A: Seven Interactive Essays on Nonlinear Storytelling”
Th November 12	Vincent Brown visit  (Alison Kanosky’s class will join us) --Website-- -Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-61 --Readings-- Carefully read the project description: http://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html Vincent Brown: Lecture at 4:00 pm in Linderman 200. (Required!)
Tu November 17	Electronic Literature II  --Primary Texts-- -J.R. Carpenter, In Absentia -Jim Andrews, “Stir Fry Texts” -Possibly other authors:  Michael Joyce, MD Coverley, Stuart Moulthrop, Deena Larsen, Steve Tomasula, Donna Leishman, Stephanie Strickland, John Cayley, Juliet Davis. --Secondary Readings-- -Christopher Funkhouser, “IBM Poetry” -Eugenio Tisselli, “Why I have stopped creating E-Lit” -Sandy Baldwin, “Ping Poetics” -Florian Cramer, “Digital Code and Literary Text” -Florian Cramer, “Post-Digital Writing”
Th November 19	Electronic Literature III  James McAdams: Guest lecture/ class leader --Primary Texts-- -Zoe Quinn, “Depression Quest” -Robin Sloan, “Fish: A Tap Essay” -Sharon Daniel, “Public Secrets” -Mark Marino, “Living Will” -Reiner Strasser, “In the White Darkness”
Tu November 24	Hands-on collaborative session devoted to student electronic literature projects: interpretive essay (for the I Love E-poetry site) or a work of creative electronic literature using Twine, Stir Fry Poetry code, or other tools.
Th November 26	Thanksgiving: No class
Tu December 1	Presentations of student work on electronic literature.
Th December 3	Hands-on session
Fr December 11	Final portfolios due

The Kiplings and India: Announcing a Digital Archive Project

"The Kiplings and India" is a digital collection containing documents related to British India between 1870 and 1890. 

The core of this collection will consist of materials by and about the Kipling family – especially John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling, and Alice Kipling Fleming (who published novels as Beatrice Grange and Mrs. J.M. Fleming). Primary source texts related to the Kiplings will include clippings from John Lockwood Kipling and Rudyard Kipling’s journalistic writings (1870-1890), and primary source texts in the form of digital editions of texts by the three authors named. Many texts by Rudyard Kipling are already readily available online through sites like Project Gutenberg, but some of his early Indian writings have never been presented digitally. Texts by Rudyard's sister Alice MacDonald Fleming (born Alice Kipling) and his father, John Lockwood Kipling, are much less widely available, and this archive will make several of their works available online for the first time.

I will also include in the archive materials published in newspapers for which the Kiplings wrote (especially the Allahabad-based Pioneer Mail and Weekly News and the Lahore-based Civil and Military Gazette), but which were not authored by the Kiplings themselves. These “non-Kipling” clippings pertain especially to the lives and experiences of Indian people under British rule. In some cases, the materials chosen for inclusion do in fact have a direct connection to the fiction and verse authored by the Kiplings and will be tagged as such. In other cases, the clippings selected for inclusion here may have no direct connection to the Kiplings at all – but they are now recognized as historically important events. These clippings refer to nascent political movements (the rise of the Indian National Congress); religious reform movements such as the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, and the Singh Sabha movement; ongoing conversations about the status of Indian women, especially vis a vis widowhood and child marriage; historical events such as the Famines of the 1870s; the steady expansion of the railways all around India; and the growth and development of the British educational infrastructure in Punjab. The Kiplings produced an extraordinary range of texts of great value to our documentary understanding of British India, but their writings nevertheless reflect a limited understanding of the world they inhabited. Their archive can be supplemented with documents giving evidence about the lives of Indians whom the Kiplings did not know. By foregrounding those supplementary texts in this archive, this archive aims to demonstrate and perform its own limit – to recognize the Kiplings, but also go beyond them.   

An Account of David Hoover's DHSI 2015 Keynote: Performance, Deformance, Apology

David L. Hoover of NYU gave the opening keynote during week 2 at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (#dhsi2015) this year. It was an intense event, partly because Hoover used certain euphemisms about the poet Joyce Kilmer that some members of the audience perceived as homophobic or transphobic. Another issue was perhaps a bit less urgent, but certainly at least one audience member noted it publicly and it struck home for me as well: Professor Hoover, throughout his lecture, adopted a somewhat comic and facetious tone when describing the ideas and methods of scholars whose work he was criticizing: Jerome McGann, Stephen Ramsay, and Stanley Fish.

As a service to those who weren't in the room, I'll try and summarize the controversy a bit briefly here. I did take notes at the event, but there were limits as to what I was able to record on the spot and my memory of some of what happened may be imperfect. (If anyone reading this wishes to correct my account or offer an alternative version of events, please do so in the comments below -- or send me an email at amardeep at gmail dot com.)

I should also say upfront that despite its flaws, I actually learned a lot from Hoover's lecture; it was, in fact, the first time I had ever seen a lecture strongly oriented towards this type of stylistic analysis. I have been thinking quite a bit about the contentious parts of the lecture, but the more 'bread and butter' arguments and analyses have been thought-provoking for me as well, as I'll describe below.

Hoover has a really impressive CV and extensive credentials in the stylistics (stylometry) subfield in the digital humanities. Here is his page at NYU: among other things, he recently edited a volume for Routledge called Digital Literary Studies: Corpus Approaches to Poetry, Prose and Drama, with two of his own essays in that collection. He also published an essay using cluster analysis to analyze the evolution of Henry James' style in an issue of Henry James Review (accessible via Project Muse presently). Most directly salient for our purposes, however, I would recommend readers look at his essay "Hot Air Textuality: Literature After Jerome McGann." Many of the rhetorical moves Hoover made in the talk he gave are worked out at greater length and with greater care in that published paper (indeed, one of my biggest problems with Hoover's talk is that he seemed to be skipping important steps in his critique of McGann in particular -- he at times came across as contemptuous of McGann; the published critique is actually more respectful of McGann's main arguments).

DHSI Notes Part 3: Electronic Literature and the Problem of Platform Obsolescence

Let me begin by thanking the excellent teachers of the course on Electronic Literature I took at the DHSI last week, Dene Grigar and Davin Hickman. Dene and Davin, I learned a lot from you -- thank you so much for volunteering so much of your time and intellectual energy to help a "noobie" like me get grounded in your field.

I'll organize my thoughts into three sections below, roughly corresponding to the three parallel things that were happening in my head last week as I took this course: 1) the problem of Platform Obsolescence and closed platforms in general, 2) Whoa, some of this stuff is really cool!, and 3) many of the participants in this community are pretty invested in an experimental, postmodernist aesthetic -- not so much the social issues that I tend to gravitate towards in my own research and teaching.

Issue #1: Platform Obsolescence

One of the most thought-provoking elements of my experience in the Electronic Literature seminar at DHSI last week was the revelation that large amounts of material considered important to the genre is actually no longer playable on many devices. Projects completed as Java applets (popular a decade ago) are banned by modern browsers like Chrome, making them extremely difficult to access. Other projects are in Flash, which is still technially 'alive' -- but not accessible on mobile devices. It's highly possible -- likely even -- that since Flash is no longer being updated by Adobe, it will eventually also eventually fall into the category of a disallowed plugin.

Moreover, many of the influential works of "hypertext" literature from the late 1980s and 1990s are no longer readily accessible. Works such as Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995 -- a queer, feminist Frankenstein adaptation) were published as Storyspace texts. Storyspace is, of course, out of business, and Eastgate systems, which owns the rights to the text, have refused to modernize its mode of distribution. The text cannot be purchased for digital-to-digital reading; rather, the only way we can access it is through purchasing a USB drive that is delivered via conventional mail -- for the rather absurd price of $24.95.

Let's spend a moment longer talking about platform obsolescence. In the past decade, the Electronic Literature organization has made two major collections, first in 2006, and then in 2011. A third collection is currently being compiled and is scheduled for release in 2016. The first collection can be found here:

http://collection.eliterature.org/1/

The second here:

http://collection.eliterature.org/2/

From these collections, quite a number of works are either difficult to access or already non-functional. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's Facade is, for instance, currently non-playable. Other texts, like Emily Short's Galatea, require the user to download and install proprietary software that many contemporary users might find discouraging.

These texts seem to be a minority; most texts are still accessible with a little patience. Still, the vast majority of the works in the two ELO collections should probably be seen as "endangered" since they were programmed in Flash -- a platform that has been slowly dying since about 2007.  So we may one day soon lose the ability to "play" Jason Nelson's intriguing anti-game, Game, Game, Game, and Again Game. The same for Juliet Davis' feminist work Pieces of Herself. And for Kerry Lawrynovicz's Girls' Day Out. And Sasha West's gorgeous kinetic poem, Zoology.

So one lesson from this is that platform matters. A large number of participants in the electronic literature movement have found the potential reach of their works stymied by technological changes and by their reliance on closed platform systems. With Google's new Swiffy tool, there is some scope to make Flash projects accessible on mobile devices and the next generation of web browsers, but it's not clear how effective that will be at preserving these works.

For the long run, it seems imperative that Elit practitioners going forward make an effort to find open platforms that are at least non-proprietary. So we aren't subject to the vagaries of negotiations between large corporations like Apple and Adobe -- neither of whom really care much about fringe artists using their technology.

Issue #2: Here are some things I really liked.

Just in terms of technical accomplishment, it's hard to beat Sasha West's Zoology, though I don't feel that the text of this kinetic poem is as compelling as the stunning visuals and sound (assembled by Ernesto Lavendera).

Another work of Elit that I thought was pretty magnificent is Christine Wilks' Underbelly (this one really requires sound: you can't find the text any other way). Wilks' project explores the early 19th century history of women working in British coal mines, using a mix of poetic speculative imagination and actors reading aloud scripts derived from testimony of actual women who worked in the mines in the 19th century.

A third project I think is wonderful is Jason Nelson's "Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise." While Nelson's other anti-game project (mentioned above) has an abrasive, confrontational feel, this game is a commentary on the user's emotional investment in the simple sprite that moves across the screen. What makes the user of simple arcade games feel satisfied and happy? Often it's performing something tricky or difficult (a jump that has to be timed just so...).

Finally, I was really impressed by the work of J.R. Carpenter, particularly her two major Montreal-oriented works, Entre Ville and In Absentia. "In Absentia" uses parallel narratives and a Google Maps API interface to tell a story about gentrification in Montreal. As part of a class assignment, I wrote a blog post about the lovely urban poetry of Entre Ville here.

We did explore a couple of Ipad Elit projects that look really interesting. One is Jason Edward Lewis' P.O.E.M.M. Another is Erik Loyer's Upgrade Soul, which is a kind of mobile-oriented graphic novel. I haven't downloaded Upgrade Soul myself yet, but hope to spend some time with it soon. (As a side note: these apps., which are only playable via Apple's Itunes store, are exactly the kind of approach to Elit I cautioned against above: will they still work in five years on the version of IOS Apple will then be using?)

We also read some pretty interesting theoretical essays over the course of the week. One was Sandy Baldwin's "Ping Poetics." This essay begins with a look at the metaphorics of the Ping -- a basic command that can connect any two points in the internet -- and the Traceroute command that can be used to track the path of a Ping.  Later, Baldwin discusses the workings of other fundamental elements of internet architecture, including TCP. About TCP, he writes:

TCP is writing that implies a textual model of reading order and hierarchy, of packet segmentation as annotation, and packet length and format as closure of the book. The writing of TCP is a contractual relation. The segments and packets, addresses and check digits, are dedicated and written towards the other. TCP creates virtual circuits between nodes that are listening and ready for association. It is a philosophy of alterity, where “I write” means “I listen for the other, I wait for your reply.” 

"Ping Poetics" inspired me to develop my own project, using Jim Andrews' "Stir Fry" poetry concept in Javascript.  Jim Andrews was kind enough to come to the Thursday session of our class and talk about his project. He also stuck around for the afternoon part of the session while several of the students in the class made modified versions of his Stir Fry poem; this required us to go into his Javascript code and make some modifications in the file to reflect our own particular interests and ideas.

My project was called "Seven Layers"; it imagines a troubled internet romance and uses the architecture of the internet (there are seven layers) as a metaphor for the different levels of connectedness in the digital media / social networking era. You can see the Stir Fry version of the poem here: http://dtc-wsuv.org/dhsi2015-elit/b/index.html. I also posted a linear version of the poem here. That said, I am still trying to decide how I feel about the stir fry version of the poem -- and Andrews' general embrace of cut-up aesthetics, non-linear narrative, and postmodern play. (More about that below.)

Issue #3: The Elit Aesthetic vs. Social Realism (Thematics of Race/Class/Gender/etc.)

As I mentioned immediately above, I am not sure how I feel about some of the more esoteric works in the Elit genre. Works like Jim Andrews' Enigma N do not, I must admit, do very much for me. I have a similar reaction to many of the "sound poems" of Joerg Piringer. These are often clever little text/sound/graphics experiments, but their lack of investment in narrative is something I find limiting.

Taking this class reminded me just how much I am -- despite my occasional noises about being a postmodernist - invested in works of literature that have some investment in social realism. That isn't to say that I will only engage works that are strictly linear and conventionally framed and plotted. But I do feel the strongest connection to literature that explicitly engages with social issues, whether they are instantly recognizable themes (race, class, gender), or complex social and multi-tiered phenomena like gentrification.

(That said, I did find Andrews' work "The Club", which uses his DBCinema visual synthesizer tool, quite haunting and beautiful. Of course, this is one of the few works by Andrews that is clearly representational -- and that seems to have a clear politics behind it. And I admire his willingness to develop advanced tools and then open them to other artists and writers to play with -- whether with the StirFry idea, or with DBCinema.)

In our in-class discussions we went back and forth about some of these issues a couple of times. A couple of students in the class noted their disappointment that the big Elit repositories and the developing search engines (The Cell, ELMCIP) do not have thematic organization. Thus, it is currently impossible to use these state of the art databases to find works authored by, say, black women, just as it is impossible to search by geographical information (i.e., works just by Elit authors in the Philadelphia area, or which thematize the city of Philadelphia in some way).

That isn't to say that no Elit writers are concerned about these issues. There has certainly been a long and sustained group of Elit writers who have been interested in issues of gender and sexuality (starting with Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, and continuing through a very recent project like the Twine project Even Cowgirls Bleed). Another social justice oriented work of Elit might by Sharon Daniel and Erik Loyer's Public Secrets.

But what does strike one about the dominant aesthetic of Elit as it has developed is that it is 1) clearly deeply committed to avant-garde, postmodernist aesthetics, including non-linear narrative frameworks, linguistic cut-ups, and pastiche, 2) the practitioners and theorists of Elit have been most interested in formal and technological aspects of Elit work up to this point. The social "message" of particular works is seen as somewhat secondary in determining value to the question of a work's formal innovations and investment in experimentation.

Along those lines, the manifesto by Eugenio Tisselli, "Why I Have Stopped Creating E-Lit," is required reading. Another important work that strikes a critical chord is Florian Cramer's "Post-Digital Writing."

If it is possible for me in the coming months and years to write more about Elit and perhaps aim to publish something in one of the journals devoted to criticism and  theory related to Eliterature and Net Art, I will probably be interested in trying to talk about what I have been calling the "message" of particular works of Elit that I find powerful. (A starting point might for me well be a full-length essay on the works of J.R. Carpenter...)