Benchmark DAC proposal
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Benchmark Fiction: A Framework for Comparative New Media Studies
Abstract
THE NEWEST WORKING VERSION OF THIS PAPER IS Benchmark DAC Proposal 2
How do we compare eliterature forms? The Benchmark Fiction Project began as a proposal to adapt the same short story into many elit forms (hypertext, IF, wikifiction, etc.) with the goal of creating a set of elit editions for critical and pedagogical purposes. This quixotic process of ‘benchmarking’ highlights issues of adaption and remediation, reveals form/content assumptions, and facilates understanding of emerging elit types for both the designers and experiencers of the works created. Work on the first story to be benchmarked, "The Lady or the Tiger" (1882) by Frank R. Stockton, inspired a lightweight software framework for displaying source texts through interchangeable display modules. The resultant "benchfics" provide lessons in adaptation in a variety of digital forms. An overview of the project, theoretical background, and practical design decisions are described here.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.4 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Hypertext/Hypermedia - architectures
or J.5 [Computer Applications]: Arts and Humanities - literature
or K.3.1 [Computers and Education]: Computer Uses in Education - collaborative learning
[The ACM Computing Classification Scheme]
General Terms
Design, Experimentation, Theory
Keywords
Benchmark fiction, benchfic, eliterature, adaptation, crossmedia, hypertext, interactive fiction, wikifiction, chatbot fiction, remediation, transmedial worlds, transmedial narrative,
Introduction
How are the multitudinous forms of eliterature similar, and how are they different? How do we critically compare these forms?
A benchmark fiction, or 'benchfic,' is an elit adaptation for the purposes of comparing the underlying media forms. The term 'benchmark' here is playfully repurposed from the fields of computer science and strategic management in order to emphasize the focus on utility and standards. While 'benchmark' originated as a surveying term for a point of reference, in contemporary computer science, 'benchmarking' has come to mean the execution of a software test in order to ascertain the relative performance of underlying hardware.
The production and comparison of benchfic is analogous to this process of testing hardware via software. With benchfic, the soft 'content' of a story might be 'run' on the hard 'form' of two different systems of elit implementation in order to examine differences in those two specific forms. Thus, Frank R. Stockton's short story "The Lady, or the Tiger" might be adapted as a Storyspace hypertext fiction as well as an Inform interactive fiction. Alternately, the content of a work of elit (e.g. "Afternoon: a story' by Michael Joyce") might be separated from that form (Storyspace) and then re-implemented on some other form (HTML). A benchfic compares, therefore, on three levels: between elit types, between software implementations, and between media channels.
The central method of producing benchfic - the separation of 'form' from 'content' - is highly problematic. It is often difficult or impossible to pinpoint where form ends and content begins in a given work, particularly artistic work designed to be experienced as a unified whole. Yet, with benchfic as with other processes of adaptation, translation and remediation, the problem of determining which elements to hold constant and which to vary is in large part the value of the undertaking. In the process of producing benchfic, one's concept of 'form' is formalized.
These formalization may have no greater power than to make explicit and thus reveal their own limitations. There is no one correct approach - rather, the Benchmark Fiction Project proposes the ongoing aggregation of a multitude of parallel elit adaptations, each with their own claim to what in translation studies is termed 'equivalence.' Rather than creating simple assumptions about how elit forms operate, benchmark fiction creates an opportunity to critically examine the assumptions and arguments we already make.
Wikipedia:Benchmark Wikipedia:Benchmark (computing) Wikipedia:Translation unit
Benchfic as a Practice
Benchmarking Elit
The comparison of adaptations is common in criticism and in the classroom - for example, considering the text of a Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" side-by-side with the Kubrick film.
By contrast, the more writerly comparison of adaptations is not a common practice in the creative world. This is especially unfortunate as it coincides with the areas such as new media which are particularly characterized by astounding variation, formal innovation, and multiplicity. Here first-time authoring and first-time reading in new forms is the norm, and claims about the best-latest-smartest-freest medium are common. Yet, in precisely the area of culture where authors and readers both need some sense of the comparative capacities of digital art forms, actual examples of broad adaptation sets (such "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams) are significantly less common.
That analysis of adaptations is enlightening seems self-evident from centuries of critical tradition. Yet how practical is the production of elit adaptations as a critical practice - and is the real potential for pragmatic lessons learned? The Benchmark Fiction Project directly addresses the debates over the transmedial nature of narrative and the ludic qualities of a work. On the former, we consider there to be both transmedial and media-specific qualities of the selected text to be benchmarked, and seek to explore their difference. In this regard, our research hypothesis is akin to narratologist David Herman’s:
- Although narratives in different media exploit a common stock of narrative design principles, they exploit them in different, media-specific ways, or, rather, in a certain range of ways determined by the properties of each medium [1].
We extend this hypothesis to include ludic design principles. The aims, therefore, are to investigate the properties of the medium that “determine” the narrative and ludic features, and the nature of the effect. This investigation is both process and product oriented. First, through the process of attempting adaptation into a target elit form, we hope to identify different writing practices that emerge while trying to render similar effects in different new media. Second, we hope to generate example products which allow critical communities more opportunities to make apples-to-apples comparisons of new media fiction implementations - similar matter can be pulled up in two different applications and read closely side by side.
Ultimately, these experiments may prove more interpretive than empirical, in that we will not constrain ourselves to attempting pedantic remediations of the text into each form. In order to accentuate the strengths and limitations of each form, the story will be adapted. The results then will reflect particular readings of the source text as well as interpretations of the nature of the forms themselves. The individual reader or interactor will apply their own heuristics to the benchfic in its various editions. Furthermore, the process creating a benchfic does not foreclose the possibility of creating supplemental or even counter-adaptations. There can always be more benchfic.
Benchmarking and Cross-media Storytelling
When a set of benchfic are created, what is their critical relationship to each other? The entire work -- the sum of all the texts - is a rendition of "cross-media storytelling". In 2001, media theorist Henry Jenkins observed the occurance of increasing media channels and the introduction of stories that are delivered over multiple channels [2]. Through an analysis of The Matrix franchise, Jenkins posited the notion of "transmedia storytelling":
- "In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best—so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption. That is, you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa."
More recently, the notion of "distributed narrative" has been explored by Jill Walker [4], while Lizbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca have investigated the qualities of a work that can persist over multiple channels and time through the notion of "transmedial worlds" [5]. All of these approaches require the 'text' to be viewed in a multi-text, and multi-channel environment, what Christy Dena conceives as "polymorphic works: texts in many forms" [6]. Polymorphic works are an extension of literary theorist Itamar Even-Zohar's "polysystem studies". Even-Zohar adopted systems studies and specifically ‘polysystem studies’ or PST in the early 1970s to assist with the complex socio-semiotic phenomena surrounding translations. For the last three decades Even-Zohar has been developing the approach of "polysystem studies" [7]. Semiotician Jay Lempke has also recognised the critical approaches needed to capture the peculiar instances of multi-text environments:
- "Not only do we not have adequate models of semiotic effects and inter-discursivity for each of these media individually, but many of the discursive and ideological effects of interest in inter-media franchises depend on inter-relations among presentations in coordinated, multiple semiotic media." [8]
Benchmarking, therefore, is creative and critical approach that recognises the phenomenon of cross-media storytelling and assists in the development of new media by providing a concentrated collection of texts with various inter-text relations.
Benchmarking and Media Specific Analysis
By our definition, a set of benchfic must vary while retaining some equivalence. How to we conceive of this specific difference and this general commonality?
In Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles writes of Media Specific Analysis (MSA), "a mode of critical interrogation alert to the ways in which the medium constructs the work and the work constructs the medium... MSA attends both to the specificity of form...and to citations and imitations of one medium in another. MSA moves from the language of text to a more precise vocabulary of screen and page, digital program and analogue interface, code and link, mutable image and durable mark, computer and book" [9]. Characteristically of Hayles' work, the emphasis here is on the specifics of materiality, rather than transcendent terms such as work or text.
Our analysis works towards this more precise vocabulary, even while it treats a work transcendentally. We propose that not only does the physical medium define the final product, but that the specific software has an influence over defining the parameters of all works that are produced using it. A simple example might be the use of Storyspace, the hypertext authoring and publishing system developed by Jay Bolter, John Smith, and Michael Joyce, published by Eastgate Systems. Joyce recounts wanting to develop a system that would allow him to tell a story in a way that the codex book could not (personal interview). Later hypertexts, such as Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) explore the limits of that system, but remain expressions of the capacities and constraints present in the software package. Macromedia Flash presents another example. Flash movies vary widely in their characteristics, but they all exist as expressions of what Flash permits.
This view of elit authoring as existing within a certain scope of available formal experimentation recalls Lev Manovich's claim that "the greatest avant-garde film is software such as Final Cut Pro or After Effects" [10]. Such a piece of software, in Manovich's terms, "contains the possibilities to combining together thousands of separate tracks into a single movie, as well as setting various relationships between all these different tracks – and thus it develops the avant-garde idea of film as an abstract visual score to its logical end." We take this notion further, to explore the ways in which pieces of authoring software come to shape their fields, or perhaps, to use Deleuze and Guattari's model, their plateaus of art objects.
At some point it becomes difficult to separate the software from the material systems that run them, and we do not want to gloss over the differences in user experiences based on the machines they use to view these systems. Media Specific Analysis warns against believing in an easy equivalence that floats above material difference. For our purposes, where we differ is in a greater emphasis on the more generalizeable idea of representation and structure in digital text (e.g. the html H1 tag) as opposed to the screen instance (e.g. 24pt Arial Bold). This balances attending the specificity of presentation with the specificity of the code.
Benchfic Prehistory
Has the been anything like benchfic before? Any set of works including an original and several adaptations might be considered benchfic when considered together for the purpose of comparing media - regardless of how it was created. Yet identifying previous creation or use communities is difficult. Here are a few possible examples.
Lorem Ipsum
The convention of lorem ipsum, for example, is a tradition of invarient placeholder content, used by graphic designers in order to avoid destraction from the 'form' of the design (layout, typography, etc.) Lorum ipsum it too transparent to create interesting interactions, however - it is not meant to be read differently in each context, but rather not to be read at all. It is not structured content (with an outline, footnotes, etc.) that interacts with the constraints of a particular design, but rather unstructured content which fills it.
Hello World
The tradition of writing "Hello World" programs in computer science holds the behavior of the sample program invarient - to output the text string "Hello World" - in order to highlight the different syntactical means whereby various programming languages achieve the end of similar behavior. "Hello World" is a minimalist case rather than a full program implemented in the features of various langauges. Like lorem ipsum, the emphasis is on explicating underlying design of the language itself. Unlike lorem ipsum, here equivalence requires variation in the texture of the text itself.
Interactive Fiction
If there is a precedent to benchfic in software, it is probably the ur-text of Interactive Fiction, "Adventure," a text whose history is described by IF scholar Nick Montfort as intimately tied to the rise of the internet, computer culture, and the game industry [11]. In particular, "Adventure" gave rise to the IF interpreter, a kind of virtual machine abstracted from that first text and subsequently implemented on countless hardware platforms, to the point where its inclusion in even minimalist UNIX/POSIX distributions has become a point of pride. With IF interpreters however, much like the significantly simpler "Hello World," the goal was not to examine variations in behavior, but rather to attempt nearly identical behavior by means of widely varying code. Today, simple z-code interpreters are available as everything from command-line applications to Firefox browser plug-ins, however their behavior remains (largely) the same.
It is perhaps not surprising that IF's culture of portability gave rise to another project with the specific purpose of providing a kind of benchmark or comparative metric. Roger Firth's "Cloak of Darkness" website implements the same short scenario about a mysterious message through a variety of interactive fiction langauges, with some discussion of the varying capabilities and limits of each langauge. [12]
- This site tries to help in your evaluation, by presenting the same (very small) game using a range of authoring systems. The implementations have been made reasonably consistent, so as to facilitate comparison. As well as the game source... we sometimes provide information on how it was compiled, present a transcript showing it being run, and try to mention some real games that you might also like to try.
As with "Hello World" the emphasis in "Cloak of Darkness" is on achieving similar behavior - yet the purpose is also to reveal dissimilarity of effect. However, substantial differences from Benchmark Fiction remain. The target audience is primarily authors looking to evaluate potential langauges for use in their projects, rather than for critical readers to consider how reading/playing in each langauge works. In addition, Cloak conceives of itself as operating within a genres (IF) rather than across genres (IF, Hypertext Fiction, Chatbots, etc.). To that end, it provides not just a source, but what it terms a 'specification' - a descriptive list of component features to be included in the scenario. A retelling of the same Cloak scenario in other forms would expand the comparative focus from varieties of IF to the limits of IF, its characteristics, and beyond.
Gabriella Infinita
Whereas "Cloak of Darkness" is a collective work proceeding from a specification towards a concept, other sets of adaptations have been the work of a single author, proceeding from concept into specificity.
One useful example is Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez Ruiz's Gabriella Infinita [13] a set of crossmedia works which are available as ebook (pdf), hypertext, and hypermedia. For Rodríguez Ruiz, a professor of electronic literature the Pontificial Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, the various intermedia iterations of the tale follow his own eductation in hypertext and hypermedia. He refers to the work as an obra "metamorfico" or metamorphic, and indeed the story has had various formal incarnations. He began with a novel, or as he puts it, "It began as a bud, greedy about its body, realizing its fragility and contingency and in the end realizing that it was destined for volatility." (Of course, this translation of Rodríguez Ruiz's words also possesses such volatility.) Indeed Gabriella Infinita seems to yearn for an infinite, boundless state. The novel begins with Gabriella arriving at the scene of her now missing lover, Frederico, a tormented genius author. On that note of the author gone missing, the text uses multiple points of view, metafictional twists, and all the self-reflexivity and narrative complexity of the works of postmodernismo. It is a book very much add odds with or in contest with its form. In 1997, Rodríguez Ruiz encountered hypertext as a literary form at a conference about "novela y posmodernidad." As his book seemed to be yearning for this new form, he adapted the work. Following the current of technology, he adapted the hypertext to hypermedia with the collaboration of voice actors, visual artist Clara Inés Silva, and programmer Carlos Roberto Torres.
Although Rodríguez Ruiz presents his works as moving towards hypermedia, by posting all of the forms with commentary, his work begs for comparative analysis. In many ways, the fixed sequence text form of the story presents more versatility than the later forms. Its pages can be accessed in any order, its voices and images supplied by the user. Also, as a PDF, the full text is searchable. On the other hand, the addition of film and voice clips adds layers of information and intonation that cannot be found in the print-only text. In any case, this work in its current online form stands as the archeological strata of cities built upon each other, retaining basic infrastructures, while adding new technology. Though presented in a narrative of progress, these proto-benchfics offer valuable lessons in creative adaptations and revisions in different electronic forms.
Our First Source Text: The Lady, or the Tiger
When selecting a first text for the Benchmark Fiction Project to experiment with, we had a number of criteria. To enrich the introspective process, we hoped for a story which demonstrated thematic resonances with new media or eliterature. To make the process of producing benchfics accessible, we wanted a piece that was short, yet to keep them rich we wanted one that was thematically substantial. A range of characters, times, locations, thoughts, and physical actions were desirable, but again that range needed to be limited. Finally, we wanted one that was free and clear of all the sundry complications of international copyright law - and, if possible, available in some widely disseminated electronic text form such as via the Guttenberg project. In practice, this meant either published under a recent and explicit copyleft license (such as Creative Commons) or else something so old as to have lapsed into the public domain.
In the history of the short story, "The Lady, or the Tiger?" (LOTT) by Frank Richard Stockton stands as a kind of anomaly [14]. It is the tale of a "semi-barbaric" kingdom with a uniquely quantum system of justice. Any alleged criminal is brought into the arena and faced with two doors. Behind one waits a beautiful woman whom he will marry (as all criminals are either men or marry women, presumably). Behind the other paces a hungry and ferocious tiger. On a bed or on a plate, justice is served.
Unfortunately, for the princess, who is also "semi-barbaric," her lover is caught in a crime. She finds out what is behind each door, and when the criminal looks up to her before choosing, she gestures to the right. But we do not know that she has gestured towards the door with the woman, because the Princess knows the lady behind the door and suspects that she is no lady. To be sure, the Princess suspects that that woman has had designs on her lover. But how could she feed her lover to a tiger? The story ends as coyly, and we are left in the world of the indeterminate.
In writing workshops, instructors routinely tell their students, "There can only be one 'Lady, or the Tiger.'" These instructors are trying to stave off a tide of open ended stories. That said, with the rise of post-mosternism, indeterminacy has become a hallmark of fiction itself.
In the parlance of electronic literature, LOTT has become shorthand for indeterminacy in storytelling and is often seen as precursor to the multiple paths realized in multilinear storytelling. Indeed, Michael Joyce wrote LOTT into hypertext history, by refrencing it in afternoon. His lexia labeled "The Lady or the Tiger" teases:
- It comes down to that, doesn't it? Despite what we think of our techno-philosophical advancement? Love or death. Risk with two faces. Go on, press the button, treat it all as if it were real. The lady? or the tiger?
Choosing "the lady" sends you to a lexia labeled, "you have no choice." Joyce's invocation of LOTT at the inception of literary hypertext, establishes the tale as one of the literary influences while "techno-philosophical advancement" questions any illusions of progress in storytelling through electronic forms.
Benchfic Catalog
- front matter material taken from benchmark catalog introduction
- link? Benchfic Catalog
- database images? rename _lexias to _units? (as per translation studies, Noah's objection to overuse of the term)
- purpose
- design - LAMP (MAMP), database diagram, mention of translation_unit
Example modules and editions:
Chatbots: Turing or the Tiger
(possibly move earlier in list of adaptations)
The choice of how to adapt the chatbot to the tale is almost as perilous as the choice within the LOTT itself. Shoudl the chatbot tell the story when questioned? Should the chatbot be one of the characters (e.g. the Princess or the King)? This case proves a fundamental difficulty in benchmarking fiction. The question becomes how much license should the author take when adapting the story to new media forms that are structurally differnt (not based on linear print text) than the original.
To an extent, we have currenly dealt with this question by allowing ourselves the maximum freedom within each form, realizing that the merely using one medium like another does not do the testing justice. Just as early film makers learned that merely positioning a camera before a dramatic scene was not the best use of the camera, new media artists ultimately investigate the unique properties of the medium rather than constantly remediating. For example, a chatbot could tell the entire story in one response to any given input, but that would not be using the chatbot's functionality. Nonetheless, we realize that this freedom may contaminate our benchmarking process on some literal level that is frankly outside of our aesthetic interests in new media. In effect, we have added many more doors in the process of adapting LOTT.
In one adaptation of a chatbot to LOTT, the text on the HTML page presents the user with a variation on the prisoner's dillema. ( http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=f92e9ba34e35ea30).
The text reads:
- "Behind the door lies a lady, pacing the floor in anticipation or a tiger, cleaning its teeth for its close up. The king has offered you the chance to pass notes scrawled on scraps back and forth between you and one of the doors. The king's mage has cast a spell allowing the tiger, for the moment, the powers of speech. From your interactions and questions, you must decide who is behind this door. The Lady or the Tiger...
The user can then attempt to discern which one is behind the door. Asking "What is your gender," yields the reply, "My gender is Tigress." Asking "What color is your hair," elicits, "My hair is striped." The playful ambiguity of the answers returns to the indeterminacy of the story and its infamous ending. The adaptation uses the situation of the questions to challenge the interactor's position. Asking, "Are you a lady," elicits "You wouldn't ask a lady a question like that." The piece also refers to its own quantum state. Asking about the King elicits, "The King, who made this system of divine justice, making the captive choose between Schrodinger and the Cat, taught his daughter every thing she knows." With the answers, the chatbot becomes more of a complement to the tale than a strict adaptation, but that is an aspect of new media as well. (We'll need supporting theory on this: Bolter and Grusin)
This chatbot is an AIML Alicebot, using a customized version of Dr. Richard Wallace's 2002 ALICE code and hosted on the Pandorabots site. Much of ALICE's responses have been left, and , more importantly, ALICE's response algroithm has not been changed except in the routine customization of responses. This proves to be one chatbot edition of LOTT and other chatbots, whether from scratch or using another authorware system, such as UltraHal, would have to be benchmarked separately.
Google Fight
Google Fight is a website that uses the search engine to put two search terms against each other in the context of a physical battle. After the terms have been entered, a brief flash animation plays of stick figures battling. The resulting number of found pages are represented as bar graphs, with one search term crowned as winner.
In out Lady Vs. the Tiger implementation of LOTT in Google fights, we searched for "The Lady" and "The Tiger." More precisely, we set the work as a link to that particular fight, so that each user who accesses it witnesses the most up to date fight. This Google search battle will presumably fluxuate throughout the life of the internet (and the site). As of 6/23/05 at 12:24 pm, PST, the lady was ahead by a slight margin (34,200,000) to the tiger’s (33,500,000). After watching these battles, we began to question whether LOTT was really about a choice between the Lady and the Tiger or between Trust and Suspicion in which case, as of this writing, Trust wins by a landslide.
Google Fight allows for variability in each instantiation and keeps the story in flux as the internet is. Of course, it might work better integrated into a more contextual adaptation of the tale, as the two search terms offer no backstory, exposition, or narrative outside of combat. Nonetheless, the central indeterminacy of the story as well as an accentuation of chance have been brought out in this adaptation.
Life vs. Life
Life vs. Life Text vs. Text: The Lady or the Tiger tests which of these two textual propositions overcomes the other when they compete as cellular automata.
Life vs. Life is a head-to-head rendition of the Life algorithm in which a red and a blue pattern compete - like in the game Othello, the color with the most dots wins. The system is set up with a pattern authoring environment and a competition rankings board where any two patterns may compete. With a fixed grid and a limit of 60 units per pattern, a few simple aesthetics of warrior-patterns have emerged to dominate the rankings.
Rather than design killer geometric forms, I’ve repurposed the interface to run bitmap text fonts, and I’m allowing the rules of Life to determine which text succeeds and which fails. Here my creation “Text vs. Life” defeats another life pattern which is the currently 2cnd out of ~1000 on the board.
How to adapt The Lady or the Tiger, and what do we learn from the adaptation? We could leave the “or” out as in Mark’s Google Fight. We could emphasize symmetry through one form of mirroring or another. We could different size font units (3x3, 3x4…), or really make any change at all: even changing the alignment with respect to each other by one pixel will alter the outcome. The situation is precarious indeed.
One of the interesting things about Life vs. Life is the metaphor of bacteria which are not only reproducing and competing (as in the original Life) but also consuming one another. “The Lady” defeats “The Tiger” in these examples, but she does so by being that which consumes….
Wiki
Hypertext
Comparisons
Our early results prove some interesting lessons about LOTT. One outcome has been the evolution of our understanding of the story. As with any form of adaptation, the original must be boiled down to essential elements. Through even the Google Fight or Life Vs. Life adaptations, we have come to examine what is at stake.
Indeterminacy plays out differently in the different forms. In Google Fights, the seemingly random evolution of the networked pages of the internet come to substitute for Fate and Chance. In Life Vs. Life, a model of cellular replication. In chatbots, that indeterminacy is the question of the unknown entity behind the interface and the play of the guessing game that started with Turing's "Imitation Game." While this last example does not directly match the situation of LOTT, it does put the user in the same position of the interrogator in a situation where (in Turing's proposal) choosing the wrong door may diminish his/her own life. The choice of the Tiger may very well match mistaking the man for a woman, or a computer for a human. It is a problem of ontology that by merely being posed can be fatal to a world view.
Already this analysis begins to move away from the analysis of form and back towards the analysis of the content of the story. This reciprocal relationship will be fruitful. Further, the story has helped point out some of the essential characteristics of the form, such as the unknowability of the entire internet, or the experience of risk and chance when Googling, or the computational universe that underlies Life Vs. Life. That this commentary seems to be a kind of meta-analysis, involving layering on significance to the forms, also distinguishes this process from benchmarking in the computer science sense. Benchmarking Fiction is a creative and interpretive activity that will yield different results to different heuristics, even when examining the same edition.
Future directions
On a pragmatic level, the works will be accessible through a website, along with essays on their creation. It is envisioned that others can upload creative and theoretical contributions too. Hopefully, our Benchmark Fiction will stand as an initial methodology towards systematic evaluation of the electronic forms available to authors of electronic literature. No doubt, choosing other texts, other forms, or even other implementations of those forms would yield valuable results. Further, these results can serve as lessons to theorists and practitioners of new media who wish to understand the limitations and strengths of the various forms. In our example, benchmarking is applied creatively, as each adaptation reinterpreted this story. Benchmarking thus may also prove to be a source for re-examination of the story itself, much in the way adaptation and revision have operated in oral, print, and other artistic milleu for centuries.
References
[1] Herman, D. (2004) 'Toward a Transmedial Narratology' in Narrative Across Media: the languages of storytelling (Ed, Ryan, M.-L.) University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, pp. 47-75.
[2] Jenkins, H. (2001) 'Convergence? I Diverge' in Technology Review, June, Cambridge, MA, pp. 93. [Online] Available at: http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/converge.pdf
[3] Jenkins, H. (2003) 'Transmedia Storytelling' in Digital Renaissance section of Technology Review, 15 January, Cambridge, MA. [Online] Available at: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/03/01/wo_jenkins011503.asp?p=1
[4] Walker, J. (2004) 'Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks' presented at Association of Internet Researchers 5th Annual Conference, Brighton, 21 Sept, published by jill/txt [Online] Available at: http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/txt/AoIR-distributednarrative.pdf
[5] Klastrup, L. and S. Tosca (2004) 'Transmedial Worlds: Rethinking Cyberworld Design', Proceedings International Conference on Cyberworlds 2004, IEEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, California, published by Klastrup Cataclysms [Online] Available at: http://www.itu.dk/people/klastrup/klastruptosca_transworlds.pdf
[6] Dena, C. (2005) 'Texts, Worlds, Realms and Channels: Towards a Taxonomy of Polymorphic Works' presented at SCAtharsis Monthly Seminar Series, University of Melbourne, Victoria, 17 Aug, published by SCAtharsis [Online] Available at: http://www.sca.unimelb.edu.au/scatharsis/Events/Seminars2.htm
[7] Even-Zohar, I. (1990) 'Polysystem Theory' in Polysystem Studies, Poetics Today, Vol. 11, 1, pp:9-26 [Online] Available at: http://www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez/works/books/ez-pss1990.pdf
[8] Lemke, J. (2004) 'Critical Analysis across Media: Games, Franchises, and the New Cultural Order' presented at First International Conference on Critical Discourse Analysis, Valencia, published by Jay Lemke's Personal Webpage [Online] Available at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke/papers/Franchises/Valencia-CDA-Franchises.htm
[9] Hayles, N.K. (2002) Writing Machines, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
[10] Manovich, L. (2003) 'New Media from Borges to HTML' in "The New Media Reader" (Eds, Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Montfort, N.) MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 13-25.
[11] Montfort, N. (2003) "Twisty Little Passages", MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
[12] Firth, R. (2002) "Cloak of Darkness" http://www.firthworks.com/roger/cloak/
[13] Rodríguez Ruiz, J. (2002) "Sobre el proyecto." Gabriella Infinita. http://www.javeriana.edu.co/gabriella_infinita/proyecto/historia.htm
[14] Stockton, F.R. (1882) 'The Lady, or the Tiger' in "Century Magazine." Project Gutenberg, Etext#396. [Online] Available at: http://www.gutenberg.lib.md.us/index/by-title/xx849.html
[15] Bakker, Jan-Hendrik. "Hypertext and the human factor. Narrativity after Modernism: Jan-Hendrik Bakker in conversation with Michael Joyce." Kunsten/Literatur. 2001. http://www2.eur.nl/fw/cfk/kunsten/hypertext.shtml.
[16] Joyce, M. (1987, 1991) afternoon: a story. Eastgate Systems.
Draft Thoughts
Jerome McGann. "Radiant Textuality." Palgrave, 2001.
Jerome McGann spends a good deal of time talking about the Ivanhoe Game and the attempt to creating a "langauge game" environment around a single text as a way of allowing performative, collaborative, 'writerly' readings by a group of critics or an instructor and a class. Ivanhoe is single-source, and rather than assembling parallel 'editions' it sequences changes to the text as 'moves' - but it shares with Benchmark Fiction some of the learn-through-doing attitude.
In "Deformance and Interpretation (with Lisa Samuels)," (105) he meditates on the way versioning and the application of difference offer revelations about the original art through imagining it differently - he is particularly taken with the application of photoshop filters (Mark, the application and layering of filters in Photoshop session memory is our "micro-versioning" conversation all over again)
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. "Remediation" MIT Press, 2002.
talk about the transparent immediacy / opaque hypermediacy oscillation, and the way the new media child tries to kill the old media father :) It might be worth mentioning that Benchmark Fiction is a move towards opaque hypermediacy - that is, it looks at the (translation studies) 'target' in terms of the 'source,' de-naturalizing the target, rather than accepting it on its own terms, with all that entails. In particular, their definition of a medium (65) as "a medium is that which remediates" emphasizes the idea that individual media forms enter the mediasphere and are understood through difference - thus, in elit media forms, wikifiction is that which is not for example hypertext fiction, in specific ways, (which we can then try to elucidate)
To include: [Database Design Diagram] Also screencaps of wikifiction, chatbot interfaces?
MARK AND JEREMY - it is important that adaptations are not confused with 'cross-media' works. I know the term is all over the place, but, like 'interactive fiction' it has a specific meaning too, for a particular sub-set of arts types. Cross-media is within the paradigm of multi-text works, that I call 'polymorphic works'. I don't think this needs to be in this paper -- it is another issue of the many that this project triggers. A cross-media work is a work that moves a 'user' to texts delivered both within and between media channels to produce a progeny that is the result of the sum experience. This is different to an adaptation. Though the benchfic site could be read as a cross-media work it shouldn't be bound up with adaptation directly. Just be careful when you invoke 'cross-media'! I've removed alot of references to it (especially since 'cross-media adaptation' is redundant), but this point is important for understanding the concepts involved.
This appears to be an example of benchmarking by Lizbeth Klastrup and Jesper Juul: StoryMoo
