 say one general preliminary thing about this wonderful event. And it is that we had Nick Monford and I at MIT had been thinking about a forum devoted to electronic embodiments, to electronic experiment, digital experiments in literature. As we began to speak about that, of course the speakers who are on today's panel jumped to our minds first. And originally the plan was simply to have a forum devoted to the topic of our final session this afternoon, electronic literature and future books. But when I got word of the existence within MIT of these gifted and wonderful young colleagues, our wonderful organizers of this conference, we got together and we began to talk about expanding the event. And that's the event that's come here. And I wanted to mention this in part because both Rita and Kate Hales were very accommodating to us by agreeing for one thing at a fairly late stage after plans had been made to postpone their arrival by a day and to take part in the full day's discussion. My hope and my expectation is that you'll find today this final forum in some degree returning to some of the themes that have already arisen in our discussion today and also to extend them into areas that we haven't yet touched upon. As many of you surely know, our speakers today are among the pioneers in the territory of digital creativity, digital literature. They will speak in the order in which I will introduce them. Each speaker will follow the format we've been using earlier, although all three of my speakers have promised me that they will stay within their time limits to give us time for a rousing discussion. And I hope we will have that. They will each speak for a brief time and then we will open the conversation to all of you. Our first speaker is one of the great figures in this emerging field, Catherine Hales. She's a professor of literature and co-director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke, where she's taught for some time. And her distinguished books include Electronic Literature, New Horizons for the Literary. My mother was a computer, digital subjects, and literary texts. And most recently, How We Think, Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Catherine will open the discussion with a presentation. And she will be followed by Rita Rayleigh, who was associate professor of English at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where she directs transcriptions, an online publication devoted to the digital humanities. She's the author of Tactical Media, Electronic Mediations, and co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, with several other co-editors. And as anyone who's interested in the field knows, both Kate's work and Rita's work is very widely cited and has been already very influential. Our final speaker is one of MIT's most luminous, newly tenured young faculty members, Nick Monfort. And Nick's imaginative work has already, in some respects, transformed comparative media studies at MIT. He's an associate professor of digital media here and president of the Electronic Literature Organization. He's written widely about and created many digital media projects, and among his publications are Reem, a 500-page poem written amazingly in one day. His latest book, Riddle and Bind, contains literary riddles and constrained poems, as he describes them. He's also the author of twisty little passages and approach to interactive fiction. We'll begin then with Kate. Thank you, David, for that introduction, and I, too, wish to thank the organizers of our conference. Apophynia, a lovely word that means finding patterns in random data. It marks the territory of conspiracy theories. It defines the province of paranoia, and it names the risks endemic to literary criticism. On occasion, it can also serve as a stimulus for artistic creativity, as it did with William Gibson in his book, Pattern Recognitions. And as it has for David Clark in his net art piece, 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein. This is the opening screen. You can see it's a mercator-like projection of constellations. As you mouse over the various constellations, threads appear, defining the threads that connect the different stars, and then you can click on one of those stars to enter the constellation. Constellation is an interesting metaphor here because ancient peoples looked in the sky and thought that the groupings of stars define mythical figures. But astronomers know that the stars named in those constellations have no necessary spatial contiguity nor do they have any necessary relationship. So constellations are a very ancient form of finding patterns that the data themselves do not justify. So among the patterns that David Clark suggests in his work are these. The number 88, there are 88 constellations, but also there are 88 piano keys. Wittgenstein's brother lost his right arm in World War I, and he previously to that was a concert pianist. After losing his right arm, he began to commission pieces for the left hand. And you can trigger some animations in this work using your left hand on the computer. Eight also names H as the eighth letter of the alphabet. One of the episodes is about the fact that German soccer teams don't use the number 88 on their jerseys because 88 could be read as HH, which in Nazi circles would mean Heil Hitler. And then imagine 88 lying on its side, it now becomes infinity doubled. So this gives you an example of how different facts are being put together into threads with a suggestion of patterns. So let's take a look at one of these eights, April 1889. And you'll see this constellation includes stars on Charlie Chaplin, Adolf Hitler, and so forth. These are five animations. Count your lucky stars. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Charlie Chaplin, and Adolf Hitler were all born in April 1889 within days of each other. The tramp, the dictator, and the thinker. Three stars to set the compass of 20th century history by. Ludwig was born into one of the richest families in Europe, but he gave all his money away. Charlie was born into a poor theater family in London and made his enormous fortune in the flicks. Hitler was middle class all the way. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Hitler went to school together in 1904. After two of his older brothers committed suicide, it was decided that Ludwig should be allowed to venture outside the confines of the glittering Fendici Eccler Wittgenstein Palace and into the real world. And that is how he came to the real school in Linz, a technical high school that allowed him to pursue his enthusiasm for engineering and all things of mechanical. And as it happened, the young Adolf Hitler was attending the same school, the school where he would whet his appetite for anti-Semitism. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, at the real school to be sure I did meet one Jewish boy who was treated by all of us with caution. And perhaps, just perhaps this Jewish boy was Ludwig Wittgenstein, a stuttering, assimilated Jew, the son of wealth and privilege who had a propensity even then for indiscriminately confessing his sins. Other episodes here point out the fact that Charlie Chaplin made the film The Great Dictator in which he played both the surrogate for Hitler and the Jewish barber who stands in as a double for Hitler. And the Chaplin had a particular grudge against Hitler because he felt that he had stolen his mustache. Another episode points out that Hitler's grandfather or grandmother served as a maid in the Baron Rothschild household. She discovered that she was pregnant so there's the suggestion that there may in fact have been Jewish blood in Hitler's own family line. He was concerned enough about that to send a detective to find out if it was true. So you can see here the way that the episodes work. There's a voiceover which mostly relays facts and then the cultural context is largely given to us through the images and the annotations. 8-8 is of course a double number and we'll see the interplay between those facts and the way the images work in this playful punning episode called doubles. Oops, sorry, I need to play this. Double cross, double negative, double positive, double trouble, one and one, one plus one, one thing and another, one thing next to another, same thing but different, sameness and difference together, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating and repeating. Science is repeating, repeating, science is repeating. Science is repetition and you can say that again. You have to say that again, say that again. I can't hear you, show me, show me one thing and another thing, same or different. First one could be an accident. Second one was a conformation, proof, repetition, repetition and proof. Body doubles, double time, doubles in your dreams. Freud tells us that a double in a dream is the phallus. The double is the phallus, the phallus is one thing. One thing and not another thing, one and zero, zeros and ones. Double positive, double negative. Logic is a double negative. Things are not true and false, they are merely false and not, not true. There are knowns and there are unknowns. There are unknown knowns and there are unknown unknowns. After the first one could still believe it was an accident. Only the second attack confirmed the terrorist attack. W, W, W, two U's. You are always at least two people, perhaps more. Once when Wittgenstein was working in his cottage in Ireland, the neighbor came by and was surprised to find him alone after hearing talking. I replied, I was talking to a very dear friend of mine, myself. The act was about Wittgenstein. So there are too many illusions in this episode to Wittgenstein's work for me to completely elucidate them. But you may have noticed in those double squares that appear in the center, in the background is the famous shower scene from Psycho. We see Janet Lay who had a double in that scene taking the shower and then Anthony Perkins approaching vaguely, we can see him through the shower curtain. Another episode is on Anthony Perkins and points out the fact that he had a double life in a double sense that he was identified with Norman Bates, his most famous role and in that sense he was double. But he had another double life because in an age of homophobia, he was gay and he had to try to project the image of a heterosexual leading man. In 1991, Anthony Perkins died of AIDS. 10 years later, his widow is on the plane that flies into the Twin Towers. So the Twin Towers also appear in this episode. In another episode, they're linked to the obelisk in 2001. What's the difference between coincidence and science repetition? But here we have a focus only on the double so we're riding along the edge of apophenia and proof. In this equivocal figure that you see here, the two female faces animated to appear to be talking to one another, we get that linked with the Wittgenstein anecdote and in philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of a word is in its use. So broadly construed, we could say that Clark here is working with the voiceover as facts but it's the contextualization of the images and the animations that give those facts specific meanings within this work. Now let's go to a star in another galaxy far far away, David Markson's print novel, Wittgenstein's Mistress. The sole character in this novel is a protagonist we know only as Kate and Kate believes that she is the last person in the world and she sits day after day typing sentences that occur to her on her typewriter and these sentences constitute the novel. Here's a sample. The young woman is asleep in a painting in the Metropolitan Museum. She's thinking of a painting by Vermeer, she saw. There's something wrong with that sentence too, of course. There being no young woman either but only a representation of one which is again why I'm generally delighted to see the tennis balls. So you can see the radical disjunctions here between these paragraphs that seem to make no sense and yet as we continue to read this narrative we begin to get some hints about why Kate is in this condition either as a fantasy or as an actuality. Seems to have something to do with the death of her son and her subsequent separation from her husband whose name she can only intermittently remember. So from a certain point of view we could say that Kate is trapped in the Traktatus, Wittgenstein's first early work. Wittgenstein later came to doubt the wisdom of the positions he argued in the Traktatus which proposed that logic could be used to solve most philosophical problems. Much later and posthumously Wittgenstein wrote philosophical investigations in which he argued that there were only language games and that these language games acquired meaning only in their social and biological contexts. So Kate's belief that she's the only person in the world literalizes the impossibility of a private language that Wittgenstein asserted in philosophical investigations. If the meaning of language is in fact in social context and there was no social context, there was only a single person, then language could not have any meaning at all. But of course we as readers recuperate that language as a reading community and we struggle to find a pattern amidst Kate's meditations. So now putting constellations and mistresses together what kinds of patterns might we see? Well in the constellations images serve as context in the novel they're represented through ectfrasis, the verbal representation of visual phenomena. In constellations it's primarily the animations that create connections between these coincidental events and therefore suggest patterns. In mistress the paragraphs are disconnections and it's only as we read on through the narrative that we ourselves as readers begin to construct the threads that might constitute a pattern. So we can say that constellations begins with fragments and builds towards some elusive whole while the novel, being a novel begins with the presumption of some kind of coherent whole but shatters that by breaking the text into fragments. So my conclusion is this, that each of these works becomes resistant and experimental within the tradition they have located themselves. So for David Clark working in the tradition of net art which is often fragmentary, viewed for a few minutes by visitors to a museum installation for example. He begins with fragments but he rewards readers who stayed with him by suggesting there is an elusive whole that we nevertheless can't grasp or articulate. Markson working in the tradition of the novel defeats that tradition by breaking it into fragments but then allowing readers to imagine these threads do connect into some kind of explanation of Kate's condition. In other words we can understand these works as resistant experimental works only within the traditions in which they work, a mode of analysis that I've elsewhere called media specific analysis. That's the pattern that I see but then again perhaps I myself am suffering from apophemia. Thank you. Sorry I just have to find my PowerPoint actually. It was loaded for me but I don't know where. Do you, is the person who did the loading available? Sorry to cut into our time. Well while this is happening let me just start by thanking. You have to use the mic. Sorry. While this is happening let me start by thanking David for including me on this panel. I'm honored to join such illustrious company as Catherine Hales and Nick Monfort. And of course let me thank Amarith and Gretchen for their hard work on what is not only a well organized conference but a well designed conference. So I'm going to start, now I lost, sorry I needed also my, well okay. What I was going to do to start was actually just read or navigate this text, Ian Hatcher's signal to noise so that my initial remarks would be more meaningful. So what you could imagine is that if I were reading I would be mousing over these highlighted words and what would be revealed to me are paths options that I could take, pursue and so forth and then the narrative would start to unfold at the bottom of the screen. Okay, I begin to read, explore, play with, Ian Hatcher's signal to noise, part vignette, part interactive fiction, clicking the highlighted keywords, bottle, cobweb and exploring the bifurcated paths each makes available. Open it, leave it. Before noticing what seems to be the result of a scripting error at the bottom of what is demarcated as page space. A mishmash of letters and partially realized words in the darkest shades of gray is barely perceptible. Upon closer inspection almost immediately fading into the black background. Suddenly however the error seems to be an actual glitch. The ghostly characters become unmoored, animated, the letter forms multiplying and more quickly oscillating between states of visibility and invisibility, fading, shifting position, dissolving the words that might have been back into letter forms. The schematic structure of the text, move the mouse, reveal the readerly choices, is unsettled by these textual ripples. Something is happening to the text, something has disturbed it. It takes a few seconds and a scan of the info page to realize that it is not something but someone who has entered into and is now directly affecting my reading space, which is no longer mine alone. I did not elect to listen to the radio but someone has, someone not present but telepresent. If on the initial passage through the text, I looked out the window onto a horizon to find an empty sea, the solitary aspect of my work confirmed by the mirrored surface that reflects only my own image. Now I am in the presence of another reader. The sea is no longer empty and another boat, another reader is moored not far away. This person and I are in short reading together, concurrently in real time. I have not encountered a text that bears the vestiges of readings past, marks both discursive and physical, vestiges or footprints left by those who have come before. My reading is instead synchronized with another's, less in the sense of coordination than liveness, a liveness that as Philip Auslander reminds us, cannot be stabilized practically or ontologically as either live or media-tized but is rather both and. There is an improvisational quality to the textual encounter and hatch or signal to noise. What will happen if I open the suitcase? But the encounter of the other reader of other readers is a script that once identified can itself be read. What is coded into the text then, the structural logic that has to be materially recognized before a successful reading can be accomplished is the sociality of reading. But the question is how or to what extent is it differently social from print reading practices from the whole host of clubs, associations and interpretive communities that have been developed to decode, make sense of and importantly to share the experience of reading books and other documents. On the face of it, the message of signal to noise, reading is an inherently social practice, might be regarded as familiar and even reiterative enacting and thereby materializing an idea that is already known to us. But I think it is rather the case that absent a live socket connection, the simulation of concurrence and simultaneity such that they are experienced as actual is itself generative. It's one thing to encounter the traces of prior readers and quite another to recognize the co-presence of other readers, unexpected, unseen, but not unfelt. In such moments, latency, the temporal lag that we accept as axiomatic for our online engagements seems to have been eliminated. The gap between action and response closed and the potential for strange, disturbing and otherwise wonderful, intersubjective encounters opened. More concretely, consider the Narca system, Talon Mehmet's neologistic formulation for our fetishistic attachment to the enclosed circuits linking the human subject and the computational apparatus. The interface here is mirrored surface. Narca systems, as Mehmet explains, privilege local space over emotional attachment, selfish constructs that position the subject as island rather than nodal point of networked communication circuits. If there has been a conceptual turn in electronic literature at all within the last decade, my suggestion is that it has been from the lamentation, celebration, and critique of such Narca systems, human and machine coupled in a terminal embrace, to an articulation of systems writ large, matrices of distributed but interconnected nodes, entities, bodies, devices, that are as much about the nodes themselves as they are about the flows among them, matrices then that are at once mediated and lively. In contradistinction to the Narca system then, signal to noise, foregrounds, emotional attachments, those formed as a consequence of recognizing, making oneself available, and responding to the other readers, the other entities contained within it. Liveness as I'm outlining it here is one of at least three aspects of the sociality of reading in our contemporary media ecology. Another would be the social book, so it's fortuitous that I'm following Bob Stein, the social book collaborative production or distributed authorship, network novels in which it is not simply the case that user contributions are mined as source text, but that the temporal frame of collaboration is continuous. Sender and receiver remain spatially and temporally distinct, but there is a sense in which the textual contributions do not lie inert, waiting to be used, but are rather part of an ongoing dynamic exchange among readers and authors. The third aspect of reading as contemporary social practice more directly bridges electronic literature and the book, and so here I will note that I'm tracing a path rather from electronic literature to the unbound book. The development of online reader forums such as those for Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves and Only Revolutions and Stephen Hall's raw shark text, these forums in which the books are quite rigorously discussed, collaboratively interpreted and collectively produced as cultural totems. In this context, a discussion thread is no mere guide or map with which to navigate a distinct textual object. The forums are not conceptually stationed outside the book proper, not belated or posterior to, but are in no small measure mutually constitutive. In other words, they're not parasitic, but rather symbiotic. Indeed, it's not for nothing that Danielewski should have a dedicated atelier to assist with his present project, the familiar. For all of the care devoted to the production of these books, House of Leaves, Only Revolutions, raw shark text, et cetera, for all the care devoted to the production of these books that I note as singular material objects, their layout and design, their incorporation of visual elements, their exploitations of the resources of codex, they are in fact expanded books, their discursive fields extending beyond page and spine, unbound in this other sense, books that encompass negative chapters, books that encompass negative chapters still to be produced much less discovered, translations and adaptations to film or even opera that are themselves enfolded within the expanded field of the book. The expanded book is not codex, not digital, not game, not conversation, not collaborative content creation, but that which is situated in the interstitial field. Rosalind Krauss in her definitive statement on sculpture in the expanded field notes that, quote, we had thought to use a universal category to authenticate a group of particulars, but the category has now been forced to cover such a heterogeneity that it is itself in danger of collapsing, end quote. No such diffusion or definitional collapse results from the articulation of the expanded book because its imagined expansion as well as its imagined destruction is dependent on the idea of the book as its very condition of possibility. The expanded book, the cumulative effect of that which it is not, the not codex, not digital, not game, not conversation, not collaborative content creation, is already an abstraction even as it maintains a tenuous flexible link to the material substrate out of which it emerges. The expanded book is an abstraction, but I would say a productive one because it allows us to think across media, platforms, genres, modes, and to conceive of the expanded book in terms of reading and writing practices. Put another way, the unbound book, here reformulated as expanded, is not about ordinary rending or exclusively about transcription or remediation, but it is also importantly about another kind of unbinding, a categorical untethering and opening up toward the sheer variety of reading and writing practices that are not formalizable as either book or electronic literature. We know well that codex like cinema and the single screen theater is no longer the exclusive or even proprietary vehicle for the transmission of its content. The book then is one component part of our contemporary textual environments, the book in its expanded field, but no less significant or singular for being such. Pache, the new aesthetic, the book, codex, like other analog media, such as cassette tapes and super eight film, is a richly productive site for creative experimentation and play. The expanded book on the other hand is a richly productive site for critical exploration. Like the shadow text of signal to noise, it is ephemeral, lively and vernacular, both common and held in common. It is in short, where reading and writing is actually taking place. Thank you. Whatever's easiest for you. That didn't seem to improve, thanks, great deal. Can you hear me? I apologize for the technical glitch but I forgot to make a technical announcement when I first introduced our speakers. I'd like to do it now while Nick is trying to fix his computer. Someone in our group has lost an olive green LL bean hooded raincoat. If you see it, pick it up and take it to the registration desk out in the atrium. Thank you. Extended desktop would be fine. Let me go ahead and do this. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm gonna try, attempt to my fate, okay. All right, I apologize for the delay. Freedom sometimes has its price. I'm gonna speak about this project. 10 print chart string 205.5 plus round one. Go to 10. It's a project that I've collaborated on with two others at MIT, Patsy Bedouin and Novator and the other individuals named here. There's 10 of us that have written a book about this one line basic program for the Commodore 64. What does it do? This is the cover of the book that's coming from MIT Press in November. So to figure out what this program does, it's helpful to know what the characters at 205 and 206 look like. They're the left-leaning and right-leaning diagonal line. And then, oh, that's great. Let's see here. If we actually were to start an instance of the Commodore 64 and run it, we would see what happens in response, which is a production of a pattern that looks like a random maze. And so you can see that complex rhizomatic networks of textuality might be the topic that Rita Rayleigh is discussing and the 88 constellations related to Wittgenstein might be what Kate Hales has talked about. I can't do 88 constellations, but I can do 38 characters of code for the Commodore 64 if I get nine other people to help me. So this is a program that you're invited in the original sources where it is disseminated to modify, to change. And this program is running on a Commodore 64 out in the lobby and you're invited to come and do that yourself with it. Let me return to this project and there's just the two major things about it that seem unusual to other people for some reason, that it is focusing on a single line of code. Why would one write about a single line of basic? And that it's a project by 10 authors written in a single voice. So to try to give a context for what programming was like around 1982, I wish to share with you an Australian commercial, actually just the first nine seconds of it. So please don't blink as I start it. That is a commercial for the Commodore 64. And I think wish to share was the right way to put that. So that's a big disappointment, but the context of this program that I'm looking at, that my collaborators are looking at, is that of creative computing, a category that includes video gaming, electronic literature, digital art, but also these things that don't even have a term or a name, hobbyist programming and recreational computing, a term that was in use here at MIT in the late 1950s and early 1960s. So this is a program that it's difficult to sort of categorize what it is. I think the best common answer, the one that I've heard today, I mean, it's not a piece of productivity software. It's not a video game, you can't play it, you can't interact with it. It looks sort of like a screensaver, but that's a good answer, but it's one that is ahistorical because the screensaver hadn't been developed in 1982. No one ever suggested that this was a program to preserve the phosphor display of your system and it wouldn't be a very good one because it's putting one of two characters in every position on the screen. So what might it be? I like the answer concrete poem, but I haven't heard that one yet. It's some type of aesthetic production that's being generated automatically and it's a very, very concise program to do this. It's a way to think about what our categories, conceptual categories about computing are, how people got involved with computers. If people hadn't been doing things like this with computers at any point in history, no one would have thought to create ebooks. It just wouldn't have occurred to anyone because computers would be used for military, scientific, billing purposes, but not for cultural purposes, not for aesthetic and not for literary purposes. So that's one of the ways that the system is engaged with specifically the issue of the book. Here you see two different emulators with a program has been started and a screenshot has been taken in both cases. And one of the things you might notice is that the pattern is exactly the same, even though it's a random maze, it's one that is actually deterministic. The program does not change the seed at the beginning. You can reseed the generator off the timer, but it doesn't do that. So you get actually the same thing and this question of randomness is one that we can examine in this system. We can also think about questions of the material artifact of the Commodore 64 out in the lobby versus the emulator. And what does it mean to have an emulator? In what ways are emulators useful or not? I think of the emulator as a software addition of a computer and I find that a useful way to think about it because there are additions that are good for different sorts of things. Some of them are scholarly, critical, variorum. There'd be reasons that you would want to have a particular addition for use in teaching and then reasons that you wanna actually look at the material artifact of an early system just as you would an early book. Here's a great book. This is Million Random Digits by the Rand Corporation. Very appropriate name for the corporation that produced this influential document. Very important document to providing a source of randomness when it was not easily available. Random number generation was not easily available otherwise. So I also recommend... There's some really good reviews of this on Amazon and I suggest you read them. But the thing about this that you can see here in the book itself is it doesn't look like... You'd say, well, is this entirely random? Well, no, it's arranged in a grid. I mean everything, it's actually in a framework of regularity and 10-print the program that we've examined uses randomness to select a right-leaning or left-leaning diagonal line. But the fact of the grid, the way that everything is framed is very essential to its overall effect and the fact that the computer runs at the same speed and that this process moves ahead regularly is also important to this effect. So the balance between randomness and regularity and the play between those two is significant in 10-print and it's something that occurs again and again in non-computational art, all sorts of digital art and literature, gaming and other sorts of uses of computing. So this line is a way into all of that. This is the first occurrence of a program that functions like the 10-print program of the title in print. I'm brandishing the book now in which it is printed, the Commodore 64 User's Guide from 1982. And one of the things that's interesting about this is that you're encouraged to modify the program and this is a book that comes with every Commodore 64 that is sold early on. It's not something special for programmers or the elite. This is another occurrence of this 10-print program. 8-print, this is a little item that runs in the magic section of Run Magazine, July 1984 and this is the magazine. And here you can see it circulates, the way this one line program gets out to people is in print, in a magazine, in a book. That's the way people learn about code like this and it would be quite obvious for someone to keep this in mind, go to school or another context and share the program from memory as well. These aren't ways that we think of programs being circulated. We think of people memorizing poems and we think of people printing and circulating literary texts but not computer programs. And yet, it did happen and we can see the same thing with Pro One Liners and other short programs that continues to happen today. So here's a program that isn't interactive. It does not accept input from the user during execution. It does not have comments or even variables that might be named significantly by a user if we wanted to interpret someone's intention based on that, we can't do it in this case. It doesn't have a known author, it just has a corporate author of Commodore. It has no clear obvious purpose or category that we could identify in terms of the way we think of computing nowadays. But all of the things that it allows us to engage the process of iteration and how that works and what influence it has in computing, how to generate two-dimensional effects from an essentially one-dimensional process that's just going and wrapping around the screen. Randomness and its counterpart regularity, as I mentioned, the use of character graphics and specific character sets, in this case, an extended version of ASCII called Petski, unofficially called Petski, that was present on several different Commodore computers. Basic and high-level languages. Basic developed at Dartmouth in 1964 by John Kimmany and Thomas Kurtz and then implemented by Microsoft for the Altair. And actually the version of Basic that you were just seeing work and that is going on out in the lobby is one written by Bill Gates himself. And actually specifically adapted from his 6502 code by Rick Whelan. So that's how this reached people who were Commodore 64 users, users of the most popular best-selling single model of computer ever used, ever made. And the role of the C64 on platforms is also something we can investigate through looking at this. As I mentioned, the transmission of programs and questions about mazes and patterns and their use in computing and in various places in the arts. So that's why we're doing the project to sort of excuse it, even though I can't deploy a great insight about it. The book is coming in November and it hopefully will satisfy that need. Why have 10 authors get together and write in a single voice? So one of the things that I would say about this is there's plenty of sort of massively authored books or 10 authored books, but they're edited collections generally. And what happens then is you get a bunch of people together who know a great deal about a topic. They're experts in the field. They know the scholarly history, but they don't talk to each other as they do their work. They go off to stereotypically a library carol and they work individually. And after the book comes out, then they say, oh, you wrote something for that too, didn't you? And we wanna do something different. We wanna actually have people converse and bring their expertise together in the project. So that's part of the idea. How we did it specifically was using some very conventional means and some slightly more recent means. We had a mailing list and we did a lot of communication on email. And here we had a lot of the higher level discussion that we're sort of musing about topics which may not have manifested themselves at all in the final book, but we're part of our thinking process about it. We also used a media wiki and I should mention that we didn't use this in the sort of free for all, in the sort of imagined free for all Wikipedia mode of put this up and let people from the public come in and say whatever they like and do things, work in whatever order. Of course, Wikipedia has its own hierarchies, but we did have plenty of ad hoc hierarchies in this project to assign particular people to be the lead writer for a chapter. Other people to review a chapter that was being worked on. So we had internal stages of review. And other types of attention on specific details within particular chapters, particular sections and particular remarks as some of our interstitial chapters are called. So my work has involved both academically and in my creative practice, a great deal of collaboration. I'm not even including the editorial collaboration which is more conventional, but I've worked with several people, including Kate Hales and Noah Wardup-Fruin and others on editorial projects collaboratively, but actually co-creating a text and working to produce a single article or book or project. I've done in a variety of different ways with different collaborators and different configurations. And there have been many productive things about this personally and I think in terms of the quality of the work and particularly whether one's looking at specific technical details of the Atari 2600 which would be very difficult to find someone to fact check. If you didn't have another collaborator who is working through that with you or if you're writing for instance a 2002 word palindrome and the ability individually to fall into insanity in doing this is very great, but with a collaborator you can figure out which of the text is actually meaningful, should be pursued, should be revised, it should be worked on, should be worked into the final text. This isn't the only project that has many writers producing a book in a single voice. In fact, it's not the only one in the current MIT Press catalog. So I wanted to mention this as a topic for conversation and as something related to the way that books might be produced in the future, not just academic books but other sorts of books that perhaps there's a range of collaborative practices not only the massive and crowdsourced sorts of practices and not only the typical romantic individualistic model but many things in between that might be productive ways to think together and write together. Thanks very much. So we're now going to throw the conversation open to the audience and I hope you'll draw on your experience this afternoon earlier sessions as well as you pose your questions. Many of the speakers who spoke earlier also should be available here some place and I hope many of you will kick in as well. We'll take part as well. While we're waiting for questions, let me start with a very naive and perhaps simple-minded one, Nick, about the project you described. It was hard for me to understand why I would want to read your book. What's it about? What's its subject? So, yeah, the rough start there probably hindered me in explaining what might in fact not interest you in any case but the project is to look at creative computing and to do that through the example of this one-line program to understand how it was transmitted, how it was typed in, understood by programmers, why people were pleased with the effect that it produced. And each of the contributors is doing the equivalent of a kind of close reading of the... Well, all of us are doing that together although it wouldn't be a close reading in the sense of bracketing off historical and biographical and technical contexts. So we're doing an intensive reading but not a new critical close reading. Meaning for a thick description of the code. Yes, yes. So, and it's the type of book that, you know, we see books about single works of art. In fact, there's a series that, one work series that MIT Press distributes about single works of art. Here we have something that we don't even know what its name is. When we see a work of art, we know what a gallery is, we know what a museum is, we know what the art world is. We have actually much more to describe about the context of hobbyist computing. So there's even more of a reason to take that close focus. Are we ready for questions? Yes. Hi, this question is for Catherine. A little louder. Be sure you use the mic and identify yourself, please. My name is Matthew Ruber. I teach at the University of London. And this question is for Catherine. I've been thinking about how many print books have had a lively afterlife through their adaptation into other media. So taking a 90th century novel and turning it into a film, a stage play, or an audiobook. And I wondered if the electronic text you're working with are equally susceptible to adaptation, or is their intensely media-specific nature somehow changed that question, or even the fact that they're using so many different media? It's hard to think about work like 88 constellations, for example, being made into a book because the animations are so much a part of the work. It's also hard to imagine it being made into a movie because the fragmentation of the various episodes is so intrinsic to its effect. But I would draw here on Rita's idea of the expanded book or the expanded field for works like this. There is a lot of commentary on the web, for example, on this work, and it may ripple out into various trans-media narratives that aren't this work as such, but are alluding to this work. That's the way I would see it propagating. The perfect example here would be a work of net art, Olia Lealina, as my boyfriend came back for the war, which becomes remediated even in the form of a t-shirt. Yeah, and there's projects like Jeff Reimann's 253, which is originally on the web and then publishes a novel. I mean, that's not very unusual overall to see certain web works, whether they're electronic literature or blog-based nonfiction, things like that. But there are some examples. Photopia and interactive fiction work, actually, they began work on doing a film version of that, but it didn't continue. Don't be shy. In the meanwhile, I have a sort of general question to pose to our panel while we're waiting for other questioners. One way to describe at least my experience of today's events is to say that we began sort of elegiacally with references to the decaying beauty of this old dead tree technology and some of the complexities of the haptic or the tactile dimension of books, the aura that comes upon when one picks up an old volume and feels the force of history in it or the force of particular authors in it. So there was a kind of partly elegiac note in the beginning, and now we've moved into a kind of utopian mode in which what we're thinking about are future possibilities and new forms of expression that are now fundamentally enabled by digital technologies. And I'm wondering if there's a way for us to identify these two strains in the discourse about the book and whether the panelists think this is a useful distinction. What I have in mind is the way in which we can use digital technology, and I think this has been implied in some of the things that were said earlier today, the ways in which we can use digital technologies to enhance, save, and preserve what we might call the print inheritance, the way in which these new technologies either give us new ways for saving and transmitting the old culture as one sort of side of the equation. And I sometimes feel that this aspect of it is somehow, because it's not sort of exciting for technologists that maybe less attention is paid to it, but there were certainly discussions of that kind of tendency this afternoon. And the other tendency is to talk about the kind of thing that I think is implicit in what both Kate and Rita were saying today, that the new technologies create possibilities, have affordances, as they say, that create unique possibilities for different forms of creativity. My question is, do you think we need to choose between the two? Because very often you hear the utopians being impatient with the old humanists who want to sort of be sure that we should discover new ways of recovering, preserving, and studying Melville's marginalia. Both enterprises seem to me valuable, but I'm wondering how the panel feels about it, or whether the formulation is too reductive to be useful. Don't be afraid to say that. Well, one thing that I see happening in contemporary literature are writers like Daniel Lefsky, I think Stephen Hall could fall in this category as well, who are reasserting the possibilities of the codex in the digital age. So Daniel Lefsky is very adamant that he is writing a codex. He has had multiple film offers for House of Leaves, for example, all of which he's turned down, because he sees himself as a print author. But in situating his work within context, cultural context dominated by digital media, his work is also transforming. So, for example, Only Revolutions, which Rita mentioned, is in part a database novel. And so you can see the imprint of digital technologies on that. Same thing is true of House of Leaves. So even those writers who are reasserting the importance, the centrality, and the endless possibilities of the codex are also transforming the form in the very act of engaging the context in which they want to say that codex is still important. So we shouldn't embrace this rigid distinction, but recognize that both sides of the equation can come together in certain practices. I think that was Rita's point in talking about the expanded field. My own term for that phenomenon is a distributed literary system. Distributed literary system that includes a print codex, but has many other aspects as well, some of which are digital. No question. One aspect of what you're saying has to do with the, I guess for me, or maybe another way of saying what you're saying is the idea of open-endedness. One way we think of older books is that they come to a conclusion that they're over. And the implication of even an older book being put in these new platforms and having all this discourse around it is to say that even that text is no longer singular or completed as if it has not just an afterlife, but an ongoing continuing life. I think one wants to be cautious about the polarization of that conversation in terms of print on the one hand and digital on the other such that they're imagined to be self-same and identical to each other and almost an isomorphic relation. I think the textual field is much more complex than that. And in fact, the volume that Catherine Hills is editing with Jessica Pressman on comparative textual media speaks to the whole range of textual formats from Papyrus, I believe, to print. What I notice about the conversations about the crisis, so to speak, of the book is that they tend to be anecdotal and indeed we saw a lot about this morning, about subjective impressions, subjective experiences of the loss of the book or the disappearance of the library and so forth. And I think the anecdotal is very good for practice. It helps us decide what we want to do with our libraries or our card catalogs. I think it's not as good for theory. It's not as good for understanding what's actually happening. Well, to just speak to the dichotomy of printed digital, which we hear so much about now, I think it's useful to recognize that print technology today is digital, that it's more correct to say that books are a particular output form of digital technologies than it is to separate it all as if it were a separate arena. And in fact, I think it's very important to recognize that print technology itself is not one thing. It's undergone these epical shifts all the way from movable type to offset lithography to digital production, such as we have in the present. So I would like to see these binaries broken up, discussed in more nuanced terms that are more responsive to the technologies that produce that. And we had a wonderful example of that this morning in Bonnie Mack's presentation and others and to be more specific about what we mean, both with print and digital. Yeah, so I have a question I'm about to fall over. Okay, I just want to set this up a tiny bit by asking you to clarify, and this is for everyone really, just when you say book, I mean, I get the impression that what is being meant by book is like a narrative or a story, like a novel typically. But I mean, there are also other things that we get in print that are not intended to be consumed as that exact object. I mean, you have printed screenplays, you have printed plays, then there's a wide variety of other forms that have different kind of models of agency with respect to reading. And I was just wondering if any of you three could kind of speculate about this, because it's a question that I've been wrestling with a bit. But I mean, trying to adapt the model of literary agency where you have readers trying to interpret what an author is saying to more interactive forms, even if those aren't necessarily in digital forms. I mean, there are other models that we could kind of bring to it. I mean, if you look at the way that plays are constructed, I mean, there are a lot of different kind of spaces where agency happens in that. And I was just wondering if any of you had thoughts on like agency and reading, basically. Well, I think that's a useful correction to say that not all Codex books are novels, that there's a whole variety of productions in what we recognize as the Codex form. And I also think you're absolutely right in pointing to different reading practices that different kind of communities will bring to the Codex depending on the content of that Codex. Yeah, the books that are full of random numbers have to be approached differently, I think. But also actually, you know, manuals and books that are intended to help people understand systems to learn and to approach things through programming or doing calculations, doing exercises and working out and solving, right? So this is one thing that obviously books have served very well in that role. And, you know, there were... there's a very fascinating relationship to the ways that, you know, whole books full of not just one-line programs but very lengthy, basic programs for people to type in. The way in which those programs, in a time where it's not convenient for people to email something in, how they actually get printed, how they get sent in by contributors and users, what types of requirements are placed on there. So the way that early user communities worked and communicated with each other had a great deal to do with print. And as I've mentioned in some other contexts, the way that people interact with computers has a lot to do with ink and paper or thermal paper in some cases because print terminals were very frequent in use in the mid-1970s, for instance, and before. And so it wasn't the screen, but actually print, sometimes ending up, as I saw with one transcript of someone's playing Zork here at MIT in 1980 at Senior House, ending up getting bound into something very codex-like that contained the transcript of that play. Can I ask you a question? I don't think I know this. Did you do any anthropological work or did your team do any anthropological work on the original coding? In other words, how wide of a field do you articulate for this single line? Does it include the programmers at the time as well as the now? Do you do any sort of auto ethnography where you talk about your own executions? I'm vigorously non-anthropological in my approach. Are there any people involved, I guess, is another way of putting it? Well, there are ten of us, at least. I mean, one of the things that we did, I mean, really we're looking at this artifact of code itself as our focus and not trying to discern, for instance, processes at Commodore at the time that led to its being included in the book, but really trying to interpret that in a more literary sort of mode. What we did is we did have practice-based analysis of this program that involves writing variations of it to see what slight changes in the code would look like, porting it, to see what it could or couldn't do on a platform like the Apple II or in Perl or JavaScript, you know, and so on. So we tried to use, but the purpose of that was not to see what vernacular theories we ourselves formed about this, but rather to understand that through and the technology of it through practice. So those are certainly, those so-called anthropological approaches are certainly legitimate ones to take, but that was the way that we approached it because of the group of people who responded to my original message about this. Question over here. I think it's the left first. You want to wait? You're wrong. Hi again. I'm Ariel Baker Gibbs. I recently graduated from college last year. So anyway, I was thinking a little bit about how you guys were describing the narrative or the story or the form of the book. And then it occurred to me that really the change that's happened is that now there are less boundaries. The realm of the narrative or the story or the fiction or the, I don't even know what you want to call it anymore, but it is now infinite. Is that kind of the direction that you saw this moving or do you think that there is ultimately a sort of boundary or a beginning and an end now? Yes. There are boundaries. There are constraints. There are definitions of the way that different media operate and what's possible, not just technically, but culturally. It's not as much as I enjoy utopianism sometimes. It's not simply a time of complete liberation and freedom for narrative. I mean, yes. Well, I was just thinking concretely about Henry Jenkins' work on transmedial storytelling, the expansion of stories into fan forums and theme parks and so forth. But then so too, one would have to point to the third person, the MIT volume, on epic or big narrative, diegetic universes. So those two often articulated with, I mean clearly with parameters, but nonetheless they have the kind of scale that I think you're gesturing toward. Over here. So this is a bit of a follow on, I guess, to David's question, but also something that I've been thinking about quite a bit. So when I hear about the so-called crisis in print... You're into the mic a little more directly. Some of us are having... Thank you. Sorry. So when I hear people talk about the crisis in print, I'm often tempted to think actually the opposite. And I think Rita's distinction that she just made is a very useful one. I think of a... business owner in the print industry or a trained journalist who is thinking of what the profession was like for the last hundred years. It's easy to think about the crisis or impending due, etc. From the perspective of someone who studies literature today, I feel like I see the afterlives of print everywhere. And particularly in the fact that the practice of reading is so much more present and prevalent in a world where mobile devices, internet, etc. are the means through which we're receiving reading, interacting with creating texts. Which is to say that there's perhaps more reading than listening and watching than there was 50 years ago. So that makes me wonder, and I'm interested to hear how you all think about this, what are the things that actually are more relevant about practices of reading printed texts because of the reading practices involved in the digital? And I guess I'll push this a little bit further to say that I'm just as skeptical of the utopian narrative that comes along with people talking about the digital today. But the one place where I'm a bit tempted to get a bit utopian is when I think about in the 19th century when there were new genres being shaped in print because of the possibilities of the newspaper and cheaper print and more books, there was quite a bit of utopian thinking about the communities that could be formed as a result. And it seems to me that the parallels between print and the digital and reading practices provide an opportunity to perhaps look back to those possibilities that ended badly or however we want to interpret them and say, well, what could we learn about the possibilities that we're all so excited to talk about today? So I guess it's sort of two parts looking at what actually makes print perhaps more relevant to the digital and would you be tempted to pick up on that utopian thread that I just mentioned? I think in thinking about print versus digital texts of the editor from MIT who spoke in the previous panel Gita mentioned the issue of attention and a lot of studies have seemed to indicate that reading on the web is significantly different on the whole than reading in print and Bob Stein mentioned this also it involves a lot more skimming and scanning not reading complete texts reading partially along a web page for example whereas a lot of print forms encourage complete text reading if you're reading an article and new scientist for example there's a tradition that you would read the entire article even if you're now accessing it on print so one of the questions that has interested and also concerned me is what happens when our print tradition of deep reading kind of collides with the digital practices of shallow quick skimming and scanning reading and I think there is there are a couple of spin offs of this one is the idea that if you print up if you pick up a print artifact you're going to spend more time with it you're going to read it more deeply another spin off is that you now begin to see some transfer digital reading practices onto print and I think both of those things are now sort of in the dynamic of reading practices so there's so much to say but one of the things definitely is that I don't think utopianism should be considered a dirty word or a synonym for a neavite if you were talking about consciously constructing a better society due to increasing technological possibilities and what that offers yeah I think that's a good idea and I think though it takes some concept it takes some thought about what that really means and in the case of reading online for instance I think there were utopian idealists in the mid 1990s who feared that perhaps Disney and the major networks would own the web that would be what happened that would be the information available online in the year 2012 and thanks to those people that didn't happen actually many of us read mostly things written by individuals outside of corporations on blogs and from other sources and the nightmare was averted because of positive thinking about what reading and writing could be online and what it meant to have a space so I'm not sure that that addresses the very narrow and precise concept there but I think it's important to note that if we come to these issues consciously and pursue them there are possibilities not that technology drops in our lab but that we can make as a society I suppose I would add to that that the idea and I suppose rationale behind experimentation toward increasing literacy and so forth is not particular to print I mean we had Bob Stein presenting what is after all seems to be a kind of laboratory for experimentation and scaler both out of USC and an increasing range of experimental projects that are trying in some way to push the conventions or traditions of print discourse into what you might call different space articulated as multimodal in fact that's what I would say is a major contribution of electronic literature outside of providing poetic and aesthetic effect is that it encourages that type of deep attention it's bringing exactly that into the context of the web where we have other things that are good but not the full environment. Just quickly Kate when you address this question to start I think this is a very productive conversation you distinguished a certain amount of new research that has shown that reading online or reading on the screen is more distracted less as you said deep my initial reaction as a someone born in long in the pre-digital age and committed to books in certain ways was to wonder or not wonder but to expect or to hope and to sort of myself in so far as I'm capable of but even to work for the idea that deep reading ought to also become an experience on in electronic environments and there's no reason theoretically to say that shouldn't happen there's even some suggestion I think that some research has been done to say that people have begun to use tablets more in the way they use books and one explanation for that may be that the tactile element makes it more resemble the old version of the book so it is something that you so it seems to be we're in very early days here and that these distinctions between types of experiences you have online and in the old technologies are still very permeable and changing the great example of this that I mentioned to you earlier is the fourth coming iPad app for the Talmud which is absolutely a translation of the experience of deep reading and interpretive labor and so forth to this new format again we had talked about this earlier but some of you may know there's an interesting book that sees the Talmud as a precursor of hypertext and there are books like the Talmud or Joyce's Ulysses that actually seem to theoretically at least be preferable reads in digital format because they allow for the kinds of connections those texts demand but that the codex format does not allow and I suspect that there'll be a lot more of that there is a digital version of Ulysses being produced now I'm very eager to see what comes of it because it'll be a it'll give you access to aspects of the books texture that a reading of the hardcover doesn't allow you to do Mary just as a pendant to your comment David before I ask my own question I would want to add as an early modernist that early modern reading was very often not deep reading right there's a lot of work on that the question that I wanted to ask the panelists is sort of about your own reading practices so the kinds of digital objects and texts that you presented on how do those figure in your own sort of recreational consumption you know if you're going to sort of go to the equivalent of the bookstore for electronic texts where do you go and how do you choose them and do you curl up with them in the evening and how do you consume them when you're not doing so in a professional capacity you can even take them into the bathtub well the electronic literature collection is a great place to go actually since Kate and I are editors of the first volume with two other collaborators and Rita of the second volume I mean I'd like to think we did all that for a reason well Mary if I if I might I'd like to respond to your question in a kind of idiosyncratic way that takes into account your own presentation this morning so I gather that in the MIT library the space that you were exploring is a kind of purgatory that is the books aren't quite in the collection they aren't quite out of the collection they're sort of there in some sort of limbo that's in contrast to the UCLA library which had a practice of selling discard library books so you could go on your lunch hour and you could browse the stacks and I made a practice of doing that and I found some absolutely amazing finds such as Samuel Johnson's original edition of Lives of the Poets for example and another text from the Revolutionary War so I started a recycling practice in which I'd buy these books and then send them to less affluent libraries that might in fact want them for that collection so I found some wonderful old science fiction books and I bought those rare editions that other science fiction collections were missing sent them to the people who were starting those collections and so forth so it's just well it's a fun little activity but in any event there's a kind of recycling aspect to that I'll mention another activity and I'm teaching an undergraduate class in distracted reading and one of the things we do is keep a week long information consumption log modeled on the studies from UC San Diego and even alluding to the NEA studies and so forth accounting for our time and counting more specifically for again the information we consume and produce so we keep logs that require our counting the text messages we send and receive and so forth and the lesson that we've learned is that in the end all one can do is differentiate between time from non-screen time that it's immaterial whether I'm reading the New Yorker or work of electronic literature or comment on a particular novel, blog, etc. what matters is that it's within the space of the single screen so that was actually instructive to discover it answers the question about what one does for fun because what we've learned is how do you differentiate if you're five minutes reading Ian Hatcher's to signal to noise and then browsing over browsing back to another forum, etc. you can't demarcate space in the same way which speaks to Katherine Hill's work on attention and distraction and according to the program this part of the forum is supposed to involve all the panelists so I would like to ask a question to Christian Bach a Wittgenstein question so I'm so intrigued by the kind of confrontation between the human and the non-human in your Xenotex project and you mentioned last night and also today in your presentation that you're imagining this as an apocal storage that it will outlast the human race, it will outlast human civilizations and so forth but for Wittgenstein for language to have meaning it has to be shared it has to have a use context so let us suppose that you're successful in your microbial encoding let us suppose that a billion years from now the microbes still exist but human beings and human civilizations don't who's going to read it well these are the very same questions that could easily ask of the Voyager probes or the pioneer probes they'll persist probably long after humans disappear who will get to read them and how will they be able to interpret those artifacts it's not important what the message says it's important that it just be there I jokingly say that I'm really just spray painting graffiti on an obelisk and that by doing so I testify to you know the presence of a sentient response to the world there's no way anybody's going to be able to read a poem that's in ciphered in that in that genome but to signal that it's there that its presence is there testifies to the advanced technological civilization that occupied the planet that's really what it's about I think is pointing to that or at least talking about that to my own peer group addressing any potential audience of the future in the same way that I think the pioneer probe or the Voyager probe really aren't likely ever to address any potential audience of the future the probes are too small they're only going to come within a few light years of any individual star and it's unlikely I think that a civilization would just stumble upon them it really is a bottle thrown into the ocean with this faint hope that we might preserve some testament to our presence on the planet I look at the book as something akin to a demonic grimoire really it's an attempt to indulge in a much more hellish activity to assert the influence of poetry within the broader milieu of life itself to say that poetry is a way of life and then to try and embody it in an actual living thing to point to its significance at a time when poets are insignificant cultural contributors the most important cultural artifact that has so far been created in terms of sheer income is probably Halo 2 which made more money than any other cultural artifact in human history in less than a weekend that's the world in which I have to write poetry I'm losing my market share to online porn I suppose in an effort to redress those kinds of shortcomings of poetry I'm indulging in a very hyperbolic activity it's really all hyperbolic it's an exaggerated experience Question Hi Allison Kuhler again we've talked a little bit about the way the practice of reading has changed from the codex to the screen and I'm very curious about the process of writing in my own experience I've gone from using a pen to a typewriter to a keyboard and I know my writing has changed through those different mediums and I'm just wondering maybe if any of you who've spoken today would like to address that you know how you think the process of writing has changed over the years and what do you think the consequences of that might be down the road I can speak just for myself on this score so I've had quite a few years now to produce scholarly books and one hopes that one's produces scholarship a few people read it but I'm sort of in the position that Christian articulated here I am producing scholarship that you know may be read for maybe a few thousand people in my wildest dreams certainly nothing like the production of computer games so my latest endeavor is to create a computer game and okay people are now into computer games let's explore computer games as a medium of writing and of literary production and what I've discovered in that process is the way that creative writing can flow together with computer codes can flow together with cryptography can flow together with dirty little tricks we want to play on our players and it's actually been quite exhilarating so for me it's a radical change in my writing practice and in the relationship I imagine with my readers or players in this case can you just mention that you can create computer games and still have very few people read or otherwise encounter them not to deflate anything but there's a lot of I mean one of the issues of actual material apparatus of writing and the nature of the computer as much as I'm very interested in computation itself which is why I look at a computational artifact rather than a networked computer system in this recent book but a lot of what actually transforms writing experience for me has to do with a network and not so much new computational capabilities and not so much things that couldn't be done in longhand or with a typewriter so being able to collaborate with others online and write in the same document at the same time or write in a system that's tracked and versioned like in media wiki is a tremendously significant and it's significant to be online or not when one is writing to have to book tickets on a long distance Amtrak train in order to write without distraction because one cannot be online you know it's a different situation to be in and so I mean there are things about I write at coffee houses and I don't mind certain types of distraction or certain types of environment in those sorts of ways but that's a big issue and in many ways writing in a cabin longhand with a typewriter with a computer offline or writing in a coffee house or writing with a network connection the difference between the particular instrument of writing that's being used doesn't seem to me nearly as significant so to this discussion of the inevitable digitization of our writing practices I would just add one other note so Mark Danielewski's only revolutions for all of the complexity of its visual layout and certainly for all of the software that was required in order to formulate the page space came down to the use of note cards for the use of the dates in the central columns so even there one sees that there's a way to know such thing as a radical break nor would one want to think in those terms Question Hi, I'm Jonathan Bohan. I'm a recent library school graduate and my question is in this whole discussion of distracted reading I'm wondering if there's any consideration or thought given to people who already have a problem with distraction people with ADD, people with just a lot of people with those problems and like I have ADD and just even trying to read anything online I can't do it for more than 20 seconds or onto something else so how does that is there any effect on how how people would write for for that sort of situation What I've noticed is a tendency among argument authors to respond to distracted reading so a good example of that for me would be the exploit Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker so they in part of their print book they've provided short summaries so you can actually just read the bolded lines and get a sense of the argument and moreover they've divided into a kind of fashion so you can skip around and still get a sense of what the book is about so they're presuming readers who are not going to read continuously page after page but rather going to skip around or going to maybe only read the bolded lines in some sections and so forth so I think the distracted reading is now becoming not just a reading practice but a cultural practice to which writers are responding It's a fascinating question what would be the literary equivalent for Neville Dean and Taylor for instance the directorial team I think the closest thing we have is Talon Memis lexida perplexia which makes normative makes the standard the state of perplexity so in other words rather than thinking about a kind of deviation from long forms of narrative deviation from sustained attention it makes disorientation the standard from which one would have to imagine that a shift back to what we now regard as traditional forms of reading would be the deviation I'm compelled to make this one comment about distracted reading like let's say you're listening to music as you're reading perhaps and that's distracted reading so I mean why isn't that distracted music listening maybe it's the reading that's distracting you from the other activity I mean if you were reading while you're driving you wouldn't be like oh I'm doing distracted reading so I mean there is this media ecology in which different things are happening and I think like unplugging the network cable and hiding it somewhere those are the types of responses that are appropriate if you want to actually engage with something on a computer piece of interactive fiction, piece of electronic literature or some work without all the concomitant network sort of distractions you can Commodore 64 would be a great system to use actually I think too the whole suite of add-ons and plugins that have been developed in order to create what one might call a sort of page space online readability is the most well-known example I think I understand in California there are now slow internet cafes where you have only a dial-up modem and so you sit there and drink your coffee and wait for the message to appear on the screen you know if you think back to the earliest designs of word processing programs you can see a drama like this going on because in the very beginning certain people who use the word program for the first time they were obviously analog people were very offended by even the minimal manual that they found so they used to have an add-on a choice you could make where you could have the whole screen blanking just like a blank paper but I think one of the interesting things is of course how quickly people got used to the idea of distractions in the margins of the page has simply an experience of how you work and now they rule it out like I think the way people watching television for 40 years closed their ears and eyes to the commercials they were sitting in front of so I mean I think there is a process of a getting used to process that's clearly operating in the digital world in ways that are changing our uneasiness about the strangeness of these new environments in which we read and write I have to ask how many people read phone on their smart phone are there some? this is such a great sorry this is such a great thing because that is a device that is designed to interrupt you its purpose is to stop you from what you're doing so that you take the phone call it's exactly the opposite of what you would want in a reading device it's like having your doorbell or something like no and so it's a system that is growing out into a general purpose computer if the corporate superstructures will allow it but there's something about the fundamental nature of that system whereas this what is this? right here it's a book I mean this is Alan K's Dinah book your power book I mean these are this is a notebook computer wait I'm sorry I'm the left first you're next hi Evan Knight I'm curious as to who's publishing or if it's online who is hosting the works that Miss Rayleigh and Miss Hales talked about in other words like who's publishing and who's paying for it I will mention the electronic literature collection because it has collected together in the motive anthology David Clark's 88 constellations not Ian Hatcher's Signal to Noise Talon Memeslexia was in the first volume so there are these collection projects so they're not publication exactly but we do host so it's a kind of re-publication although the terminology starts to fall apart a little bit at that point and I'll just mention that editorial and curatorial work for both the electronic literature collection one and collection two was strictly pro bono so there was never any expectation that any of us would make a profit and indeed it cost us money to produce the CDs and DVDs that went along with the two collections and many people felt that it was redundant to produce a DVD of electronic literature collections but I think that was maybe short-sighted and had in mind only a U.S. context because when I traveled to places like Croatia people were extremely happy to get the DVD because they either didn't have internet access or it was very expensive for them so I think actually even though it was a negative income stream it was a quite worthwhile project. Plus it allows you to disconnect your computer from the network while you read the electronic literature. With that being said what sort of role do you think like an expanded book so with ancillary materials in addition to just the text what role would that expanded book play in traditional or more traditional even scholarly publishing? It is an important question what is the relationship between the electronic literature community to the MFA world or rather to the world of letters industry essentially. It is certainly the case that there is no commercial model there is no viable commercial model I always think the iTunes model might be one that could be adopted but it is very much there are very much amateur efforts even though there are dedicated creative writing programs like at Brown the MFA program where John Cayley works that produces MFA students who work with computational media nonetheless there is a sense in which this type of writing practice is situated outside of the economies of literary production that have developed over the last few centuries. To me it is quite an open question what publishing is going to mean in the near future or even right now so one of the things that I wanted to do was to publish a digital companion in my print book how we think that is coming out very shortly and I wrote a grant proposal to get some money to do this part of the grant proposal required me to state my plans to publish it and I thought about that so I am going to host the site I am going to pay for the site what would it mean for the University of Chicago Press to publish this work as far as I could figure out what it would mean is that they would put their name on it I was doing all the work I was hosting it why in fact would I want them to put their name on it maybe I do want them to put their name on it I take that back but you see the issue here when you start publishing things yourself what is the role of the Press or the University Press in particular and this morning we heard Gita make an argument that the role of the University Press is to maintain editorial control but then we heard Bob Stein say well everybody now can be an editor I expect that the very fine job that editors like prestige presses like MIT do is not going to be done as well by general public type people who may choose to serve as editors at Bob Stein but we live in an age now where hardly anybody except Christian Bach takes ten years to write a book a useful scholarly lifetime of a book now is about three years and so is there really a point to have these polished jewels where immense amounts of editorial work go into them when the lifetime the useful scholarly lifetime of books is increasingly diminishing I can see an argument for saying open up the editorial floodgates let everybody be an editor yes quality standards will go down but you'll get a lot more books and maybe it's a offset to have many more books with less careful editorship and curation then it is to have scholarly presses maintain a kind of funnel effect on what gets published and I would invite Peter now to respond to this provocation in particular one quick note this seems like the sort of economic question here is how this kind of work gets funded and David Clark's work is funded by grants from the arts and it does seem there are large arts organizations in Canada that are funding fantastic projects Christian's work has also benefited from large grants I don't know of comfortable institutions in the U.S. that are funding at least the digital humanities are incredibly well funded in the U.S. I'm not sure about digital artworks and the granting foundations for that sort of endeavor just a side note I think you're right I think there's a market scarcity of such things. Thank you for that question Kate. I wanted to respond by saying that we're asking similar questions about we're asking very similar questions at the MIT press about the usefulness of the highly reviewed, highly edited, highly polished monograph and is that something that is still valued is it something that we still want to invest so many resources in and I think right now we do we're willing to make that investment for the record for scholarship for the future but that doesn't in any way conflict with your point that other people can be editors as well. One's own scholarly community can edit one's work and that can be a very productive process that can compliment what we do as university press editors. So if you came to me with a project that your community had vetted and whose quality it had established and if that community had given you useful advice for revising the work and you brought it to me at that point after you had made that those revisions I would say do I have any remaining questions as as an editor about this work and can I get those answered by consulting more people or is this ready to go my questions at that point might be more commercial they might be about who is the audience for this work and I might want to do additional review to determine that. We have only a few minutes left let me ask the audience to be succinct and the panelists to be equally succinct think of it as a sort of final lightning round. I love this refreshing as a publisher refreshing view of the ambiguity of the costing and economics we're in such a volatile interplay between the two displays paper and screen for the one umbrella book that we have to kind of look around for other models I just want to offer one very briefly. Paper making and printing emerged as completely autonomous crafts for completely different agendas one was a debossing useful for making pilgrim badges and the other was a substitute for textiles well what occurred was that those two independent technologies began slowly to merge and in fact by the 18th and 19th century you could not distinguish the product of paper from the product of print in publication think of a a circus broadside or a daily newspaper so they not only emerged but became a third phenomena and technology of their own and even that merge the printing always gets the most attention because it's construed because it's more directly a compare of content it's construed as a high domination of transitions in politics and ideologies and literature but paper is never mentioned because it doesn't have that same immediate relationship with content but here's the kicker there's a third factor that was even more crucial than the merge of paper and printing it was the commodification of books commercially by book binders remember printers only print sheets of paper they don't make books so commodification stages have to be fulfilled and played out as well so I'm offering that that's an earlier model that can be brought to the functionality of the relationship of the two displays of paper and screen in books yes on the next question I just have a very quick question seems to me that this should be something like a wake I mean a celebration like we should be dancing in the streets we should be drinking champagne celebrating the death of the print book and I mean I'm being perhaps provocative here but I cannot think of a single negative aspect of the decline of the print book and I'll just give you a quick example of two things that might be might be that that might be perceived as negative on the one hand private entities have difficulty making profit but doesn't the free flow of information far outweigh the costs that gatekeepers have difficulty obtaining profit and the second issue has to do with this idea of distracted reading there's work on embodied cognition and really I think what's going on is rather than distracted reading is that the computer, the tablet is actually part of our cognition our long-term memory is stored in this and I'll just give a very quick example if you look at the Flynn effect IQ points have increased over the past 70 years and the dominant explanation is that you know we actually have this sort of distributed cognition with the computer so I would like to hear the panelist's response just the one word response to the first part of your comment no I can give the seven word response to that more or less and here's really the question that the sister is talking about everything that gets said from beginning to the end of the conference we started off looking at 2,000 year old books that we can read today we have Christians that nobody will be able to read in a billion years and because it won't be anybody to read it if it ever happens and besides which it doesn't matter what it says it could be saying nothing now if we actually have some content that's worth keeping perhaps the electronic literature that's being created today in media that in five years will dissolve or fugitive or not be able to be read or go the way of all of the other eight tracks and stuff what do we have in terms of the creative work that's being done now electronically that's going to ensure the readability of it the same way that that book that he wants to get rid of can be read another 2,000 years the same book that we read 2,000 years ago well if you carve that text in stone it would last even longer I mean there's different systems for different things it's you know this program is in a book that will last a long time you know so there are ways to address those questions as authors, as creators of work as preservationists but there are also different things that different objects do culturally and I think one of the things about the reason that we shouldn't be having a rebel at the demise of the book aside from the fact that it's not dead is it has to do with all of the cultural history and cultural cognition that's wrapped up in the development of that book and what it means and along with things like perhaps oppressive regimes concepts of authorship and copyright but also very positive things and so we have the chance now to pick those things out and to figure out in that utopian mode you know what of this do we want to bring into the next version of the book just as worth mentioning that the electronic literature organization has devoted a lot of time and energy to thinking about this problem and I think I saw on the table out there a copy of the white paper on the preservation of archiving dissemination initiative if not there it would be on it as if free bits is out there there should be several copies still that are free for the taking so it's something that we've looked into but that's not the single metric for the value of a medium the duration of time that it preserves a message I mean it's one of the things in a cultural system you know that is worth considering along with a lot of other factors final question final comment so one of the sort of more dystopian things that disturbs me that nobody has brought up is just how much of the digital record is proprietary and how the digital has actually fostered that and just what a tremendous amount of scholarship is behind paywalls and you know the libraries that are paying ten millions of dollars for this material and the ebooks that we're buying to replace print are less accessible they have really heavy DRM they can't be shared they can barely be printed they're much more difficult to use than printed books and so I just wanted to throw that out there as a tempering as a practical matter yes you know one of the responses is both volumes of the electronic literature collection are creative commons licensed and you can take those discs that are out there for you to get for free and copy them to your hard drive if you like and distribute them you know otherwise you I mean so we that this is one way you know actively that we try to deal with this from the standpoint of our realm of practice and criticism of looking at electronic literature it's a very severe issue it's the type of thing that people in the mid 90s concerned about the web you know are dealing with and the question of should we embrace the commodification of the book as a critical point I think bears on this issue do we need a proprietary model for what the book will be no I don't think so that's why I run free software and that's why I make my work available scholars need to help us us librarians basically I mean it's not enough to just create your new scholarship in open as open access what you really need to do is help work against the current system in which thousands and thousands of academic journals are just locked up yes sign up at thecostofknowledge.com to oppose Elsevier and work too but I think starting with work in one's own practice and making it available 10 print the book that I'm doing with nine others thanks to the MIT Press will be Creative Commons license it's going to be made available in digital version for free online it will also be a beautiful book object that will be two color printed with custom in papers and will be very carefully designed laid out to the advantage of someone who wishes to read that version I mean this is but I don't think you should stop it you know making your own work Creative Commons or otherwise opening it I think that it does need to be addressed institutionally it's a very serious issue and we're in a situation where libraries I mean MIT doesn't pay for bundling but other people don't have the same other institutions don't have the same sorts of of advantages they're greatly restricted in what can be done with the scholarly record that's paid for by institutions volunteer labor of people I could go on for a while but we need to stop I'd like to thank the audience and thank the panelists