Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media

A newly completed Ph.D. dissertation by Jeremy Douglass:

Abstract:

The Interactive Fiction (IF) genre describes text-based narrative experiences in which a person interacts with a computer simulation by typing text phrases (usually commands in the imperative mood) and reading software-generated text responses (usually statements in the second person present tense). Re-examining historical and contemporary IF illuminates the larger fields of electronic literature and game studies. Intertwined aesthetic and technical developments in IF from 1977 to the present are analyzed in terms of language (person, tense, and mood), narrative theory (Iser’s gaps, the fabula / sjuzet distinction), game studies / ludology (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and filmic representation (subjective POV, time-loops). Two general methodological concepts for digital humanities analyses are developed in relation to IF: implied code, which facilitates studying the interactor’s mental model of an interactive work; and frustration aesthetics, which facilitates analysis of the constraints that structure interactive experiences. IF works interpreted in extended “close interactions” include Plotkin’s Shade (1999), Barlow’s Aisle (2000), Pontious’s Rematch (2000), Foster and Ravipinto’s Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003), and others. Experiences of these works are mediated by implications, frustrations, and the limiting figures of their protagonists.

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference

Currently seeking proposals, but also held next spring in our own backyard of Vancouver, WA.

MediaCommons: a digital scholarly network

"MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation, will be a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network."

FlowTV

"FlowTV is a critical forum on television and media culture published by the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Flow’s mission is to provide a space where researchers, teachers, students, and the public can read about and discuss the changing landscape of contemporary media at the speed that media moves."

Their site also offers their journal articles, reader polls, columns, and more.

museums and the web

This is a fascinating topic, as the links between the two become thicker and the question of the archive, with its desire for the transmissible memorial, becomes more complex.

 

gray kochhar-lindgren, ph.d.

director: center for university studies and programs

professor: interdisciplinary arts and sciences

university of washington  bothell

425-352-3670

 

 

Museums and the Web

Museums and the Web

via Dolores' List of CFPs on 9/27/07

Museums and the Web

April 9-12,2008
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Join hundreds of your colleagues at the only annual conference exploring the on-line presentation of cultural, scientific and heritage content across institutions and around the world: Museums and the Web.

Call for Participation Closes September 30, 2007.

Demonstration Proposals will be accepted through December 31, 2007.

For more information go to: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/

Museums and the Web addresses the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line. Taking an international perspective, senior speakers with extensive experience in Web development review and analyze the issues and impacts of networked cultural, natural and scientific heritage. Together, we are transforming communities and organizations.

The MW Program
MW features plenary sessions, parallel sessions, museum project demonstrations, commercial exhibits, mini-workshops, professional forums, a usability lab, a design 'Crit Room,' and the Best of the Web awards. The primary language of the conference has always been English, but in 2008, the sessions will be simultaneously translated English/French and /French/English to encourage a wide francophone participation.

Prior to the conference, there are full-day and half-day pre-conference workshops and a day of pre-conference tours, including one to the museums of Ottawa, Canada's national capital.
Social events include receptions each evening, a Birds-of-a-Feather Breakfast, and plenty of refreshment breaks to provide hours of discovery and debate among hundreds of colleagues from around the world.

The MW2008 Program will be selected through peer-review by an International Program Committee based on proposals due September 30, 2007.

Who Attends MW?
Webmasters, educators, curators, librarians, designers, managers, directors, scholars, consultants, programmers, analysts, and developers from museums, galleries, libraries, science centers, and archives join the professionals, companies, foundations and governments that support them and attend Museums and the Web every year.

Scholarships and Volunteers
Archives & Museum Informatics awards MW Scholarships to museum professionals from small institutions and developing countries. For MW2008, The Department of Canadian Heritage has sponsored Scholarships for Canadian Professionals. Scholarship applications are due December 31, 2007.

Students are invited to volunteer at MW; they may attend the conference in exchange for helping out. Preference in 2008 will be given to fully bilingual volunteers. Volunteer applications are accepted until all spaces are filled.

Can't Make It? Get the Book.
MW2008 Presenters will be required to submit written papers; the best will appear in print in Museums and the Web 2008: Selected papers from an international conference. All papers are also published on-line and on CD-ROM. Discounted advance orders of the Selected Papers and CD-ROM Proceedings are now being taken.

Past papers from all Museums and the Web conferences – since 1997 – are on-line. Printed volumes of Selected Papers from MW97 – MW2007 are also available to order.

Conference Co-Chairs
Jennifer Trant and David Bearman
Archives & Museum Informatics
158 Lee Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M4E 2P3 Canada

ELPUB2008: Open Scholarship in the Age of Web 2.0

ELPUB2008

via Dolores' List of CFPs on 10/29/07

CFP: ELPUB2008 (Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0)

Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0
12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing
25 to 27 June 2008, Toronto, Canada

Submission Deadline: January 20, 2008
http://www.elpub.net
CFP URL: http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~elpub2008/call.html

Scholarly communications, in particular scholarly publications, are undergoing tremendous changes. Researchers, universities, funding bodies, research libraries and publishers are responding in different ways, from active experimentation, adaptation, to strong resistance. The ELPUB2008 conference will focus on key issues on the future of scholarly communications resulting from the intersection of semantic web technologies, the development of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and the sciences, and new dissemination channels and business models. We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of these communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of scholarly communications. Topics include but are not restricted to:

* New Publishing models, tools, services and roles
* New scholarly constructs and discourse methods
* Innovative business models for scholarly publishing
* Multilingual and multimodal interfaces
* Services and technology for specific user communities, media, and content
* Content search, analysis and retrieval
* Interoperability, scalability and middleware infrastructure to facilitate awareness and discovery
* Personalisation technologies (e.g. social tagging, folksonomies, RSS, microformats)
* Metadata creation, usage and interoperability
* Semantic web issues
* Data mining, text harvesting, and dynamic formatting
* User generated content and its relation to publisher's content
* Usage and citation impact
* Security, privacy and copyright issues
* Digital preservation, content authentication
* Recommendations, guidelines, interoperability standards

Author Guidelines
Contributions are invited for the following categories:
- Single papers (abstract minimum of 1,000 and maximum of 1500 words)
- Tutorial (abstract minimum of 500 and maximum of 1500 words)
- Workshop (abstract max of 1000 words)
- Poster (abstract max of 500 words)
- Demonstration (abstract max of 500 words)

Abstracts must be submitted following the instructions on the conference website

Key Dates:
January 20th 2008: Deadline for submission of abstracts (in all categories):

February 28, 2008: Authors will be notified of the acceptance of submitted
papers and workshop proposals.

April 11th, 2008: Final papers must be received. See website for
detailed author instructions.

Posters (A1-format) and demonstration materials should be brought
by their authors at the conference time. Only abstracts of these
contributions will be published in the conference proceedings.
Information on requirements for Workshops and tutorials proposals
will soon be posted on the website.

All submissions are subjected to peer review (double-blind) and
accepted by the international ELPUB Programme Committee. Accepted
full papers will be published in the conference proceedings.
Printed proceedings are distributed during the conference.
Electronic versions of the contributions will be archived at:
http://elpub.scix.net

ABOUT ELPUB

The ELPUB 2008 conference will keep the tradition of the previous
international conferences on electronic publishing, held in the
United Kingdom (in 1997 and 2001), Hungary (1998), Sweden (1999),
Russia (2000), the Czech Republic (2002), Portugal (2003), Brazil
(2004), Belgium (2005), Bulgaria (2006) and Austria (2007), which
is to bring together researchers, lecturers, librarians,
developers, business executives, entrepreneurs, managers, users
and all those interested in issues regarding electronic
publishing in a wide variety of contexts. These include the
human, cultural, economic, social, technological, legal,
commercial, and other relevant aspects that such an exciting
theme encompasses.

Three distinguishing features of this conference are: broad scope
of topics which creates a unique atmosphere of active exchange
and learning about various aspects of scholarly communications
and electronic publishing; combination of general and technical
issues; and a condensed procedure of submission, revision and
publication of proceedings which guarantees presentations of most
recent work.

ELPUB 2008 offers a variety of activities, such as workshops,
tutorials, panel debates, poster presentation and demonstrations.
A variety of social events and sight-seeing tours will be
available to participants (at additional costs). Please see the
conference web site for details.

Conference Location: Toronto, Canada. Toronto is one of the most
vibrant cities in North-America. It has a large multicultural
population, is the largest city in Canada and the 5th-largest
city in North America. There are many world class galleries and
museums across the city and you will find authentic cuisines from
around the world at reasonable prices.

Conference Host: Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI),
University of Toronto. KMDI is a graduate research and teaching
institute at the University of Toronto, and an intellectual
incubator fostering cross-disciplinary initiatives across the
university. The work of the institute spans both the scientific
study of the ways in which media shapes and is shaped by human
activity, and the practical work of founding an interdisciplinary
nexus for design and evaluation of both media and media
technologies. KMDI has acknowledged leadership, substantial
research programs and broad participation in three major areas:
collaboration and collaboration technologies, the phenomenon of
openness and new forms of knowledge production and dissemination,
and public policy and citizen engagement.

General Chair: Leslie Chan, University of Toronto Scarborough
chan@utsc.utoronto.ca

Programme Chair: Susanna Mornati, CILEA - Inter-Academic
Consortium for ICT, Italy: mornati@cilea.it

"A plenary event including Howard Rheingold, Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown, Joi Ito, and Lawrence Lessig on the Future of DIY Media."

Here are the details of the event:

24/7: A DIY VIDEO SUMMIT
February 8-10, 2008 School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

Conference web site: http://www.video24-7.org
Blog: http://diy.video24-7.org/

Spaces are limited for attendance at the academic panels and the workshops. The video
screenings are free and open to the public.

24/7: A DIY Video Summit will bring together the many communities that have evolved
around do-it-yourself (DIY) video:artists, audiences, technology providers, academics,
policy makers and industry executives. The aim is to discover common ground, and to
chart the path to a future in which grassroots and mainstream, amateur and professional,
artist and audience can all benefit as the medium continues to evolve.

This three-day summit features:

SCREENINGS OF DIY VIDEO

On February 8 and 9, there will be screenings of DIY video that are
open to the public. These will feature curated programs on design video, activist
documentary, youth media, machinima, music video, political remix and video blogging.
The video program will culminate in an evening program and reception on February 9 that
will draw from all of these video genres.

ACADEMIC PROGRAM
Registered attendees will have access to the academic program on February 8 and 9 that
features panels on The State of Research, The State of the Art, DIY Media: The
Intellectual Property Dilemma andDIY Tools and Platforms.

WORKSHOPS AND BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER MEETINGS

On February 10, the day will be devoted to practical and hands- onworkshops for
registered attendees on topics such as intellectual property, media creation,
distribution and new-media design tools.

Attendees will also have the option of organizing their own birds-of- a-feather meetings
to connect with other attendees.

On her blog, scholar Danah Boyd wrote a short essay for review by her colleagues entitled "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace". The idea was consumed - and transformed - by bloggers and news outlets world wide.

She wrote an interesting response to the criticism and misinterpretation her essay received, indicating that "I didn't write my piece for the audience who ended up consuming it." A fascinating example of how the web is transforming academic scholarship.

THE SYNTHETIC AESTHETICS OF NEW MEDIA ART Presented by The New Media Caucus in Association with the College Art Association February 20-23, 2008; Dallas, TX http://conference.collegeart.org/2008/
Panel Chair: Carolyn Kane, PhD Candidate Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University clk267@nyu.edu
Contrary to traditional aesthetic theories that argue for the primacy of either the subjective and phenomenological, or formal and objective interpretations of artwork, the aesthetics of electronic media, like the logic of technical media itself, is thoroughly removed from anthropomorphic sensibility. One could say that electronic media aesthetics are marked by technical trauma.
However, much contemporary new media art criticism exemplifies a hermeneutic approach that seeks to rationalize and transform work into intelligible *art objects* for canonization and social theories. Is this approach problematic for the logic of technical media? Can certain attributes such as color, form, affect, or sound, effectively reconcile computer based artwork with the subjective and humanistic drives in art making?
The panel invites papers that address the aesthetics of New Media art in distinction to previous aesthetic models or media platforms. For instance, papers suggesting the ways in which color, sound, line, form, symbolism, affect, anti-aesthetics or ideology may be distinct to new media aesthetics are all welcomed. Essentially the panel inquires: what do theoreticians and practitioners address in New Media art, and why? Which artists and / or commercial work do you think best exemplifies these issues? Special attention will be given to those abstracts that are concerned with the use of color in New Media work.
Presenters can propose brief lectures; media or artist presentations of their own, or other artist's work; discussions; or other acceptable suggestions.
Timeline:
Due by October 1, 2007:
*Abstracts (max 500 words)
* Paper / Presentation Titles
*Confirmation that presenters will be able to travel to Dallas on February 20-23, 2008
* Current CV and a brief bio.
*Specification of presentation format
Send proposals and / or any question to Carolyn Kane clk267@nyu.edu For CAA conference information visit:
http://conference.collegeart.org/2008/

experienced Toni Dove's Spectropia at a workshop in Montreal....movement activated movie, about a noirish passage through time...right on the edge of new media and interactive art...

Social Networking for the Digital Arts & Humanities

Digital Arts & Humanities is a place to share ideas, promote your research and discuss the digital arts and humanities. As a member of the Digital Arts & Humanities community you can:

• announce activities in your field to a wide audience and keep up to date with what others are doing
• exchange ideas and experience with the community in our group forums and user blogs
• build your profile to show your research interests and background and search others' profiles to find contacts and identify future collaborations
• use our wiki to learn more about tools and methods for your research
  

Social Networking and Class in America

An Excerpt:

“As a society, we have strong class divisions and we project these values onto our kids. MySpace and Facebook seem to be showcasing this division quite well. My hope in writing this out is to point out that many of our assumptions are problematic and the internet often reinforces our views instead of challenging them.”

Webware's Top 100 Web Applications

As voted on by nearly 500,000 users, Webware has published its 2007 list of the best web applications in 10 different categories, including browsing, communication, reference, and media:

http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100.html

I love how the results are listed using icons instead of lists - great for quick reading!

ALTX Online Network

"Where the digerati meet the literati"

This site offers a "library of avant-pop novels, collections of new media (h)activist writings, and critical ebooks. These experimental titles are available as free ebook downloads or as Print On-Demand books."

Examples of current offerings include a blog art exhibit, galleries of web art, and conversations, interviews, and audio addressing aspects of textuality, cyberculture, and digital design.

Check out Seattle's McLeod Residence

The McLeod Residence is a home for extraordinary living through art, technology, and collaboration.

They are a new art gallery in Belltown, Seattle. A lounge for members is open Thursday through Saturday.

Check out their exhibits and hours here.

From the desk of "old" media to new media, boingboing.net has started to post reviews of its previous incarnation, a zine started in 1988.

The older zine issue covers have been scanned in, and PDF versions of the zines are available online for a small fee.

Read the review of issues #6 here.

MIT Open Course Ware

A free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.

Find more OERs on the Internet Archive's OER page, a collection of educational content including coursework, study guides, exercises, and recorded lectures. It is meant for students, teachers, and self-learners at all levels.

New Media & the Global Diaspora Conference
5 to 7 October 2007
Bristol, Rhode Island, United States

This symposium focuses on the migrations of the past 100 years
- how New Media's role, both direct and indirect, in the
transmission by these communities of "living traditions" has
resulted in loss, gain and interpretation.

The symposium has the following objectives:

• To encourage academic discourse focused on transnational migratory populations and the role new media plays in transmitting and sustaining their living traditions.
• To create a forum for researchers in the liberal arts and other disciplines studying the nature, significance and consequence of global migration
• To provide a concert performance of traditional music and dance illustrating the vitality of these living traditions.

The deadline for abstracts/proposals is 1 June 2007.

Do You Feel Fine?

Check out the WeFeelFine website: http://www.wefeelfine.org/

It trolls blogs and picks up statements in which people talk about their feelings, then displays and analyzes the results in several different aesthetically pleasing ways. Limit your searches by geographic area (US and beyond), date, gender, and more.

What a great tool for attempting to capture the emotional state of the blogging population at any one time. One shortfall is that it only trolls the English-language blogs.

Furtherfield

Check out Furtherfield, "an online platform for the creation, promotion, and criticism of adventurous digital/net art work for public viewing, experience and interaction."

They are also currently seeking reviewers/contributors.

Old Messengers, New Media Digital Archive

A special website set up by Library and Archives Canada - Bibliothèque et Archives Canada - is now accessible, courtesy of Project Manager Don Wallace and doctoral student Joanne Stober.

The site, which is particularly intended to be a resource for students, is entitled "Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan," includes summaries of both scholars lives and works, and a set of short, accessible essays on the topic of "Archives as Medium," with contributions from Robert Babe, William Buxton, Michael Cheney, Terry Cook, Kim Sawchuk, and Lance Strate.

There's also a Forum section for further discussion.

Here's a great article from the NY Times on how podcasting is changing/has changed book publishing.

Newman, Andrew. "Authors Find Their Voice, and Audience, in Podcasts" New York Times, March 1, 2007.

Media Ecology Association
An "organization dedicated to promoting the study, research, criticism, and application of media ecology in educational, industry, political, civic, social, cultural, and artistic contexts, and the open exchange of ideas, information, and research among the Association’s members and the larger community."

“Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival.” —Neil Postman

International Journal of Communication
This new journal is "an online, multi-media, academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The International Journal of Communication is an interdisciplinary journal that, while centered in communication, is open and welcoming to contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that meet at the crossroads that is communication study."

Museum of Lost Interactions
This is very cool, though I became more suspicious of its authenticity as I browsed through the "lost" technologies they highlight. Turns out these technologies were created/invented by Interactive Media Design students at the Univ of Dundee in the UK, and indeed are not formerly existing technologies. Very cool projects, though.

Social Networking through Singing

Check out www.midomi.com, a music search engine powered by your voice.

"Sing, hum, or whistle to instantly find your favorite music and connect with a community that shares your musical interests....Contribute to the database by singing in midomi's online recording studio in any language or genre. The next time anyone searches for that song, your performance might be the top result!.....Create your own profile, sing your favorite songs and share them with your friends and get discovered by other midomi users....Features an extensive digital music store with a a growing collection of more than two million legal music tracks."

Hmm, has potential to become an online American Idol talent contest forum...

Web 2.0: The Machine is Using Us

Check out this video (2nd draft) by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. It does a nice job illustrating some of the concepts and implications of Web 2.0. On YouTube, Michael says to look for a final draft in late February.

If you'd like to read more about Web 2.0, check out Tim O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0.