Goodbye, Farewell

Just to let you all know that I submitted final course grades to Testudo this afternoon.

Best wishes for the summer (and beyond!) to all--

Final Exam

1:30-3:30 PM, as scheduled by Testudo.

Details to be announced.

Final Exam Review

Here is a copy of the Final Exam Review sheet (PDF).

Today's Topic: Logging Off

Reading:

Shelley Jackson, Skin: http://ineradicablestain.com/skin.html.

Exam review;
Evaluations;

Paper/Projects due.

Today's Topic: Emergent Literature and Smart Texts 2.0

Readings:

Rheingold, from Smart Mobs (CP);
“Location Aware Narrative”: http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/Opinion/index.cfm?article=83;
Onesixty: http://www.centrifugalforces.co.uk/onesixty01/pages/main.html;
UniFiction: http://unfiction.com/;
Flight Risk: http://shes.aflightrisk.org/.

Today's Topic: Emergent Literature and Smart Texts 1.0

Readings:

Johnson, from Emergence (CP);
Richard Powers, “Literary Devices” (to be distributed).

Today's Topic: Literary Games and Instrumental Texts 2.0

Readings:

Stuart Moulthrop, Pax: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/pax/;
Interview with Moulthrop by Noah Wardrip-Fruin: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/moulthrop/.

Today's Topic: Literary Games and Instrumental Texts 1.0

Readings:

Borges, “The Interloper” (CP);
Natalie Bookchin, The Intruder: http://dian-network.com/con/intruder/;
“Literary Games” issue of PoemsThatGo: http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/fall2003/poems.htm.

Today's Topic: Writing for the Web 2.0

CLASS CANCELLED TODAY--CYOA ASSIGNMENTS DUE MONDAY, APRIL 26

Reading: Poems by Jason Nelson: http://www.heliozoa.com(requires Flash).

Last day to submit the Choose Your Own Adventure assignment.

Today's Topic: Writing for the Web 1.0

Readings:

Olia Lialina, “My boyfriend came back from the war”:
http://www.teleportacia.org/war/ (1996 HTML version especially);
Shelley Jackson, “My Body”: http://www.altx.com/thebody/.

In the News

Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages was Slashdotted.

"Call Me E-Mail: The Novel Unfolds Digitally" in the New York Times (non subscription copy here).

Today's Topic: Hypertext Before the Web 2.0

Reading: Joyce’s Afternoon.

Today's Topic: Hypertext Before the Web 1.0

Readings:

Aarseth, 76-96;
Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (sections 6, 7, 8 especially):
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm;
Begin Joyce’s Afternoon.

Today's Topic: Writing and/as Code 4.0

Readings: The Bug; examples of codework (to be announced).

Today's Topic: Writing and/as Code 3.0

Reading: The Bug (258-End).

The First Bug

The first documented computer bug, discovered by Grace Murry Hopper in a Mark II computer at Harvard University in 1945.

Oulipo Comix

Exercises in Style:

Exercises in Style was inspired by a work of the same name by the French writer Raymond Queneau. In that book, Queneau spun 99 variations out of a mundane, two-part text about two chance encounters with a mildly irritating character during the course of a day. He started by telling it in every conceivable tense, then by doing it in free verse and as a sonnet, as a telegram, in pig latin, as a series of exclamations, in an indifferent voice... you name it.

The goal of this project is to apply the same principle to comics by creating as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story: different points of view, different genres, different formal games, and so on.

Digital Paper, Electronic Ink

Extra, extra, read all about it.

Snap

I haven't looked at this closely, but Snap advertises itself as an amazingly simple to learn language for creating interactive fiction. Might be something someone wants to explore for the final project.

Today's Topic: Writing and/as Code 2.0

Readings:

The Bug (cont.);
Steve Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Writing as Programming as Writing”:
http://cantor.english.uga.edu/docs/u4.3.pdf/ (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader). Use this copy instead.

Old School Moveable Type

Photos from our Pyramid Atlantic letterpress course this past weekend (that's my wife, Kari). Click any of the images for a more detailed look.

Repost: The Game of Life

As seen in The Bug: The Game of Life is one of the most famous formal systems ever devised, by the mathematician John Conway.

You can read all about it by following the link. Play the Game of Life by clicking the button in the top right-hand corner, drawing a starting pattern with your mouse, and then clicking Go. Try zooming out to see how your system proliferates.

Artificial Life

Apropos of The Bug.

Today's Topic: Writing and/as Code 1.0

Reading: The Bug (87-257).

WARNING: SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS (don't read if you haven't finished the book yet).

My Fall Course

ENGL 475: Postmodern Literature
MW 2:00-3:15

Postmodern literature, with an emphasis on works published within the last fifteen years. A consistent sub-theme this semester will be urban aesthetics before and after 9/11. The major novels we will read are: Paul Auster, _City of Glass_; Susan Daitch, _The Colorist_; Kathy Acker, _Empire of the Senseless_; Don Delillo, _Underworld_ and _Cosmopolis_; William Gibson, _Pattern Recognition_. Additional texts will include a sampling of postmodern poetry, a graphic novel (possibly _Transmetropolitan_) and at least one work of contemporary electronic literature. We will also discuss the origin and nature of postmodernism, and aspects of the "postmodern condition" such as the collapse of identity, the erasure of cultural and aesthetic boundaries, and the dissolution of life into textuality.

Requirements: class participation and attendance, responses papers, midterm, final, and long (10-12 page) term paper.

InfocomBot

Check it out.

"If you have an AOL Instant Messenger account, send an IM to InfocomBot, InfocomBot2, or InfocomBot3. I set up an automated bot to play classic Infocom text adventure games from your favorite IM client, T-Mobile Sidekick, or any other device that connects to AIM. It supports "save" and "restore" commands, so you don't need to lose your place."

Midterm Exam

Details to be announced.

Today's Topic: Catch-Up and Exam Review

Reading: Ullman, The Bug (1-83).

MOO Study Session

There's going to be a virtual study session tonight (Sunday) in my office in the MOO at 6:00 PM (hosted by William).

To get to my office, go to the Maison Chapuis from the Dock, or else type:

@go MattK

Today's Topic: Social Texts: MOOs and MUDs 2.0

Introduction to the MOO: http://www.rc.umd.edu:7000.

Today's Topic: Social Texts: MOOs and MUDs 1.0

Aarseth, 142-161;
Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace”:
http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html.

Today's Topic: Spatial Texts: Interactive Fiction 2.0

Andrew Plotkin, “Shade”: http://www.eblong.com/zarf/zplet/shade.html;
HTML assignment due. It's now due Friday, March 5, by 11:59 PM.

Hint: In the dark about Shade?Take a look at the to-do list on the table. It'll tell you what you need to do next.

Cybertext Studies in NY Times and at Princeton

"The Ivy-Covered Console", NY Times, Feb. 26, 2004--on academic game studies.

See also this upcoming Princeton conference on Video Game Criticism.

Marc Blank's Deadline

If you'd like to try Marc Blank's Deadline, which is discussed by Aarseth as a representative Infocom game, there's an excerpt online here. Scroll down about 2/3 of the way to find it.

The whole review is well worth reading.

Extension

As noted in class today, I'm offering an extension on the HTML assignment: it will be due by 11:59 PM, Friday, March 5 (actually midnight's fine, but it would be confusing to say "midnight Friday" so 11:59 PM it is).

To submit the assignment, please send me an email with the following:

• Your full name
• The URL of your project (test it to make sure it's correct and working!)
• The email address to which you'd like comments (and your grade) sent

We'll have half the class for workshop on Wed.--bring your questions.

Today's Topic: Spatial Texts: Interactive Fiction 1.0

Readings:

Aarseth, 97-128;
Play Crowther and Wood’s Adventure online,
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery/adventure/index.html.

Steven Johnson in Town

Stephen Johnson, author of Interface Culture and Emergence (we'll be reading a short excerpt later in the semester) will be in town talking about his new book, Mind Wide Open (subject: brain science), at Politics and Prose this Monday.

Today's Topic: Procedural Texts and Potential Literature 2.0

Readings: Mathews, “Mathews’ Algorithm” (CP).

Freedom and Constraint

"The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant."

--Raymond Queneau

Help With Images

HOW TO DOWNLOAD AN IMAGE AND PLACE IT ON YOUR WEB PAGE

1. You're surfing the Web and find an image you want to use on your own page. Right-click your mouse over the image, and choose Save Image As from the menu. Save the image to your hard drive. If it has a long, complicated name best to change the name to something simpler when you save it. Avoid spaces and mixed upper/lower case in your file names.

2. Make sure you retain the .jpg or .gif or .png suffix--these are the ONLY image formats that will work on the Web. If your image does not have one of these three suffixes, it will not display.

3. Now you need to upload the saved image to your WAM account. You will do this with an FTP client.

4. Open WS_FTP. (Note: you may be using a different FTP client, with a slightly different interface, but the basic procedure will remain the same.) Enter, in the appropriate fields, the name of the machine (also called the host) to which you are connecting (wam.umd.edu), your login, and your password.

5. Once connected, you will see the directories for your local machine
on the left and your remote account (WAM) on the right.

6. On your local machine, change directories to whereever it was you put the iamge you download. On your WAM account, change directories to ../pub

Note: if you forget to do this, you will wind up putting your image into the private portion of your WAM account and it will not display on the Web.

7. Select the file(s) you want to transfer and use the right-arrow icon to send it to your WAM account. Be sure that FTP is using the BINARY setting. If you do not transfer your images as binary files they will not display on the Web.

8. Your image should now be in your WAM account, alongside your HTML files. You can use the image tag to insert it into your document.

TROUBLESHOOTING

If your image isn't displaying:

1. Make sure that the file name of the image and the value of the src attribute in your image tag correspond EXACTLY, including upper/lower case. (Remember, file names ARE case sensitive.) This is why I recommend using simple file names and all lower case--there's simply less room for error that way.

2. Make sure your image has a .gif or .jpg or .png suffix.

3. Make sure you indeed put the image in the same directory as your HTML files (you can see if it's there by using the "ls" command when logged in to your account via telnet).

4. Make sure you FTPed the image in binary format.

FTP

You can get a copy of WS_FTP (the same FTP client we've practiced with in class) here.

If that link doesn't work, go to the OIT page and follow the download directions.

Yesterday's Links

Here's the Travesty program I briefly demoed in class.

See also Ray Kurzweil's site, which features both a Cybernetic Poet (a program that writes new poems in the style of famous authors) and AARON, a program that paints its own original pictures.

Today's Topic: Procedural Texts and Potential Literature 1.0

Readings:

Aarseth, 129-141;
Knuth, “Basic Concepts” (CP);
Have a talk with ELIZA: http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/eliza.htm.

Quotable

Looks like I made the Diamondback on Friday (for a good reason).

Today's Topic: HTML 2.0

MITH Tables Tutorial (different from last week's): http://www.mith.umd.edu/teaching/tutorials/tables/index.html

HTML Sampler

In addition to the MITH tutorials, this page is an excellent way to expand your tag vocabularly. Simply view the source code in your browser, and look for the corresponding effect on screen--then try the tag out yourself to make sure you understand how it's working.

Messing around on your own is the best--really the only--way to get comfortable with writing basic HTML.

Yesterday's Links

Here are links to the sites I showed in class yesteday:

Illuminated Manuscripts (Bodleian Library, Oxford)

The Gutenberg Bible

Project Gutenberg

Turning the Pages (British Library)

TextArc

Inscribed Bits

Today's Topic: The Book Machine

Reading: McCaffery and Nichol, “The Book as Machine” (CP).

In the News

Via GrandTextAuto: An AP wire service story on the rapidly emerging field of Ludology, or the study of (video) games:

"Rejecting the stigma that games are only for kids, researchers around the world are making computer games the subject of serious academic pursuit alongside literature, music and art. They are staking out space in universities -- with Ph.D. programs, research centers and online journals."

Espen Aarseth gets a mention.

Recursive Sims

From Wired News:

"The Russian Nesting Doll of Games. The object of The Sims, a popular video game, is to keep the characters happy in their daily lives. Now comes a fan-made plug-in that lets the in-game characters amuse themselves by -- what else? -- playing the SimCity video game. By Daniel Terdiman."

Full story here.

Today's Topic: HTML 1.0

Complete MITH's HTML Tutorial: http://www.mith.umd.edu/teaching/tutorials/html/index.html

Game of Life

The Game of Life is one of the most famous formal systems ever devised, by the mathematician John Conway. We'll be seeing it again later in the semester when we read Ellen Ullman's novel The Bug.

You can read all about it by following the link. Play the Game of Life by clicking the button in the top right-hand corner, drawing a starting pattern with your mouse, and then clicking Go. Try zooming out to see how your system proliferates.

A Piece of Pi

No direct bearing on the course content, but I couldn't resist posting this piece of pi (to one million decimal places). [Thanks KF]

Today's Topic: Labyrinths (Ergodic Literature)

Readings:

Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (CP);
Aarseth, 1-23.

Forking Paths (Not)

Here's a classic example of what Aarseth terms a "unicursal labyrinth" (only one correct path).

Haiku Machines

If you'd like to share some output from your Haiku machine, feel free to do so below!

Today's Topic: Loops and Branches 2.0

Reading: Ryan, “The Structures of Interactive Narrativity” (CP).

Mark Saporta's Composition No. 1

Here's a detailed description of a reading of Mark Saporta's recombinant novel Composition No. 1, which Marie-Laure Ryan cites as perhaps the only actual example of a Complete Graph. The description, incidentally, is by Nick Montfort, whose work we'll be encountering again during the semester.

Formal Systems

Remember the criteria for a formal system: a set of tokens or units; a set of rules for their manipulation; and, a starting position. Given that, can you think of an example of some aspect of your life that can be modelled as a formal system? Whether it's how you sort your socks or decide what classes to take? (Remember, you need to be able to articulate the rules.) Anyone willing to start us off?

Today's Topic: Loops and Branches 1.0

Readings:

Queneau, “Story As You Like It” (CP);
Coover, “The Babysitter” (CP);
Atwood, “Happy Endings” (CP).

William Gibson Reading in N. Virginia

William Gibson (who coined the term "cyberspace") will be reading is at the Borders in Bailey's Crossroads (http://www.bordersstores.com/stores/store_pg.jsp?storeID=45). The store is in Northern Virginia, at the intersection of 7 and 244 (Leesburg Pike and Columbia Pike). It's taking place on Feb. 16th at 7:30 pm.

Citations and Certificates

A couple of local programs you should be aware of:

The Interdisciplinary Multimedia and Technology Citation, which several of you are already enrolled in. 16 credit hours; ENGL 467 is one of three requirements. Additional information is available here.

The Science, Technology, and Society Certificate. 21 credits. ENGL 467 is not listed as an elective, but I'd be willing to talk to the program director about changing that if any of you are interested.

I Ching

There are numerous I Ching resources on the Web. Here's the page I showed in class.

Today's Topic: Poetry and Checkers

Checkers: http://www.darkfish.com/checkers/Checkers.html.

Readings:

George Quasha, “Too Late”;
Arthur C. Clarke, “The Longest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told”;
Georges Perec, brief excerpt from A Void;
Tristan Tzara, “How to Make a Dadaist Poem”;
(all texts to be distributed).

Snow Day

Please stick to the reading schedule as you see it in the Outline section, despite today's snow day. We should be all caught up by the end of next week (Feb. 4).

Today's Topic: Logging On

Introduction to the course.

Reading: Raymond Queneau, One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems: http://www.bevrowe.info/Poems/QueneauRandom.htm.

Introductions

Please use the comment function below to tell us a little about yourself: your year and major, where you're from, what attracted you to this course, and anything else that you'd like us to know about your background and interests.