Querying the Literary Machine
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Querying the Literary Machine: Methods towards Software Studies
Overview
This is the working draft leading up to submission 2006-03-31
Rita's initial idea: "This strikes me as the perfect opportunity to organize a special session: your abstracts are in hand and all that remains to be done is to write the proposal. I can tell you from experience that it is good to be clear about the contribution the session makes. This year you would have the oppotunity to note that there are two related sessions, that organized by the Media and Literature group and that organized by the Literature and Science group (the topic of the latter is cyphernetics). The proposal could note that the three are aligned, overlap only in a general sense, and together provide many different perspectives on the issue of code."
Page 1
Session Title: Querying the Literary Machine: Methods towards Software Studies
Organizer Name [proposed]: Rita Raley
Page 2 - Session Description
Introduction
This session brings together three specialists in literary and new media studies to expand the rising field of software studies, a methodology articulated by Lev Manovich and refined by Matthew Kirchenbaum, Matthew Fuller, and others. Software studies, Kirschenbaum argues, involves "meticulous documentary research to recover and stabilize the material traces of new media." Software is a machine, often - to borrow a phrase from Theodore Nelson - a literary machine that computes data and generates textual and visual output in the form of hypertexts, interactive fictions, poetic spam bots, generative text machines, chatter bots, and computer games. Their "traces" include the mechanisms that provide for their procedural nature (the software packages, operating systems, and interfaces that shape their reception), code history (the history of reception, translation, and emulation), and the popular and critical responses to its distribution. Drawing upon narratology, textual studies, and rhetorical analysis, the papers query the political, historical, and cultural context of a digital object and its underlying software, which is itself an encoded textuality hovering between Hayles' "flickering signifiers" on the screen and Kirschenbaum's "extreme inscriptions" marking the surface of the hard drive.
Crucially, this session is timely, joining a critical conversation at MLA'06 between the Media & Literature discussion group's panel, "Reading Code," and the Division for Literature and Science's panel "Cyphernetics." All take different perspectives on the broad problematic of code, with this session focusing on literary machines and situating that shared object of study both historically and culturally.
Jeremy Douglass
In "The Politics of Text Generator Art," Jeremy Douglass considers what the Humanities has at stake in text generation by reading a history of passings and hoaxes - both machines passing as human (Strachey's "Love Letter Generator," Weizenbaum's ELIZA) and humans hiding within machines (the 'Mechanical Turk' ouija, Chamberlain & Racter's "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed" scandal). Following Hofstadter?s concern in "G?del, Escher, Bach" that critical theory may resemble randomly generated text, our contemporary anxieties over how languages pass as authentically human have transformed from theoretical concerns into the vernacular of daily spam filtering. Text generator artworks follow a grand traditional of publisher hoaxes (Doris Lessing 1984, Voici 2000) by parodying and critiquing Humanities institutions and their gatekeeping functions. By reading the software of Bulhak?s ?Postmodernism Generator? in relation to two hoaxes, the Sokal ?Social Text? hoax and the SciGen ?Rooter? hoax, Douglass argues that neither academy nor login page can protect human meaning if mechanistic languages or codes already pervade our cultural practices. The politics of text generator art begin in the possibility of gatekeeping ?the human? ? and the potential of failing to do so.
Dennis G. Jerz
In "'Colossal Cave Adventure' at 30: Tracing Variations from the Recovered Original Source Code," Dennis G. Jerz examines Will Crowther?s original FORTRAN program for ?Colossal Cave Adventure,? which was presumed lost for 30 years. Popular lore has it that Crowther created a map-like caving simulation, and that several years later Stanford University student Don Woods found an abandoned copy and turned it into a whimsical game. But examining Crowther?s source code shows that the original was indeed a game, with puzzles, treasures, humor, and a fantastical/realistic setting. Buckles?s groundbreaking 1985 dissertation on the ?computer storygame ?Adventure?,? written during the commercial peak of the text-adventure genre, focuses on player reactions and genre comparisons. This paper, instead, examines the software ? the modular chunks of narrative prose arranged according to logical rules, which together generate the player?s encounter with textual variance. Even as the rules enforced by the code call to mind the judgmental authority of a ?dungeon master,? the computer?s textual description of the player?s simulated journey adopts a voice akin to that of the benevolent omniscient Victorian narrator. While Montfort's book Twisty Little Passages neatly corrects most of the uncertainties surrounding scholarly treatments of ?Adventure,? the discovery of the original source code opens the door to many new lines of inquiry.
Jason Rhody
In "The Quest as Query: Game Fiction and Operational Narrative Texts," Jason Rhody examines riddles, quests, and queries. All are quite literally about reading and parsing code, an aesthetic exchange of power and interpretive act in a game of knowledge control. Building from a tradition of riddles and romances, this paper turns to the doubled code - a programmed aporia - of the modern computer game, and posits the game quest as analogous to the database query. Through an examination of the software and structural organization of two games, Adventure (Crowther, Woods 1977) and Neverwinter Nights (Bioware 2002), he shows how the staging of a setting drawn from elements in a database, the design of a quest system, and the provision for their interaction provides the context for the actualization of a narrative event. Database and narrative, then, are not "natural enemies... competing for the same territory of human culture" as asserted by Lev Manovich (Language of New Media 225), but rather complementary structures, the examination of which can inform our cultural inclination to view a dichotomy, rather than a dialectic, in form and content.
Coda
[The coda 1-2 lines will gesture towards the larger benefit for the audience (whole object approach to digital text, demonstration of code study towards many critical goals, etc.)]
Page 3 - Participants
Rita Raley
Rita Raley is an Assistant Professor of English at University of California at Santa Barbara. Her research includes the digital humanities and global studies. She is currently working on two books, Global English and the Academy and eEmpires, a study of new media writing and art in relation to neoliberal globalization. Raley's recent articles on digital textuality include "eEmpires" in Cultural Critique, "Machine Translation and Global English," in The Yale Journal of Criticism, and "Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework" in the Electronic Book Review. She is affiliated with the UCSB Transcriptions project and the Literature and Culture of Information specialization.
Jeremy Douglass
Jeremy Douglass is a doctoral candidate in English at U. of California Santa Barbara. His research on digital text art includes chapters, articles, conferences, and interviews. Forthcoming in "Second Person" (MIT Press) is his chapter "Enlightening Interactive Fiction." Douglass co-chaired the 2004 UC system conference "Narr@tive: Digital Reading." Relevant papers include "Implied Code" and "Architecture of Disability"; presentations include "Humane Text, Markdown, and Reading Machines" and "The Experience of Error." A founder of the digital research group "WriterResponseTheory.org," he presented a paper on their adaptation-criticism techniques at Digital Arts and Culture 2005. His most recent interview was e-lit author Nick Montfort for The Iowa Review Web. Douglass' dissertation, "Command Lines," interprets literary interactive fiction using reader response and source code.
Dennis G. Jerz
Dennis G. Jerz is Associate Professor of English at Seton Hill University. He was guest editor for a special interactive fiction issue of TEXT Technology, which included his ?Annotated Bibliography of Interactive Fiction Scholarship." His forthcoming work includes "You are Standing at the Beginning of a Road: Examining Will Crowther's 'Adventure'," for New Paths for Computing Humanists, and co-authorship of "Cave Gave Game: The Subterranean as Game," for Playing with Mother Nature: Video Games, Space, and Ecology. Jerz edited The Inform Beginner's Guide (an interactive fiction programming tutorial). He has published interactive fiction reviews, articles on weblogs, and his University of Toronto dissertation, Technology in American Drama, 1920-50: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine (Greenwood Press).
Jason Rhody
Jason Rhody is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His dissertation, "Game Fiction: Perspective, Narrativity, and Fiction in Computer Games," is a study of genre, code, and narrative in computer games that create a guided narrative experience for a player in an imagined world. He has presented his work on electronic textuality and games at several international conferences, including the annual conventions for Academic Computing in the Humanities, the Digital Games Research Association, and the Association of Internet Researchers. Rhody contributed to and designed over a dozen digital humanities projects in his four year tenure at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) before taking a position with the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2003.
Page 4
Title of special session: "Querying the Literary Machine: Methods towards Software Studies"
Session leader: Raley, Rita
Affiliation: University of California at Santa Barbara, CA
Meeting Information
Expected attendance:
[X] Formal session
For copies of papers, go to http://wrt.ucr.edu/wordpress/mla06/ after December 1.
1
The Politics of Text Generator Art: The Postmodernism Generator and the Sokal Affair
Douglass, Jeremy
University of California at Santa Barbara, CA
2
"Colossal Cave Adventure" at 30: Tracing Variations from the Recovered Original Source Code
Jerz, Dennis G.
Seton Hill University, Greensburg, PA
3
The Quest as Query: Game Fiction and Operational Narrative Texts
Rhody, Jason C.
University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Respondent
None
Page 5
Audiovisual equipment:
[x] Projection equipment for a computer
Best way to reach presenter who is using computer projection:
Name: Jeremy Douglass
Tel. no., fax no., or e-mail address: [...]
Contact Person:
Jeremy Douglass University of California at Santa Barbara, CA [...]
Summer address: same
Request for Funding: none
Page 6
Accessibility: No special needs
References
Misc Notes
[DJ]:
I was just at the 4Cs (composition and communication) and my sense is that organization is ripe for a good paper or panel on IF. In the mid-90s, the 4Cs awarded its best dissertation award to a paper on IF. But, as Jeremy asked, I wonder if a whole paper on IF is, indeed, strategic. If so, we'd need to add something to account for the fact that some people who encounter this proposal will be thinking of literary hypertext, and others will think of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels. I like talking up the post-commercial, indie atmosphere of the culture of IF, and noting that IF is a new media genre that lends itself easily to experiment, yet it's still a medium where the romanticized cult of the solitary author seems to survive (despite the fact the IF games rely on pre-existing coding libraries and the services of playtesters).
So... Would an IF-specific panel be appropriate for the MLA, or should the topic be on a more general topic, and all the contributors use IF as one way into solving a particular problem? I realize we don't have that much time, but I'd rather ask this question now than have the panel be rejected and leave me wondering whether I should have spoken up.
[DJ]:
There's nothing preventing us from proposing a special issue on interactive fiction. A few years ago, Text/Technology did a special issue on IF, but perhaps a more specialist journal like Games Studies or a more mainstream journal might be interested this time around.
