Digital Literature from Penguin Publishing

PenguinUK has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story - designed specially for the internet.

Their We Tell Stories project took six authors and offered them six weeks to create six interactive, online stories. Check out the 21 Steps story...great fun! Hard Times is intriguing, too.

Elit 2.0: A Guide to Literary Works on Social Software

Do you want to teach Web 2.0 technologies but need some exemplary creative texts for students to "read" as examples and/or illustrations of the tool's creative potential?

Check out ELit: A Guide to Literary Works on Social Software

"While students are still developing literacies in new technologies it is important that their adoption involves more than just accepting the software at interface value. What these technologies are and can be has yet to be decided and this set of electronic literary works offers an artistic exploration of their possibilities that will enrich the quest for software literacy."
From: WRT: Writer Response Theory: a blog and podcast dedicated to discussing text arts forms

Expressive Processing: An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review

Participate in a blog-based peer review experiment!

Expressive Processing is the name of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press.

He's decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: ask the Grand Text Auto blog community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.

Digital Toy Chest

Digital Toy Chest for Online or Downloadable Tools

via Machina Memorialis by John on 1/15/08

From Alan Liu, via Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 465:

“Toy Chest” collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects. Most of the tools gathered here are free or relatively inexpensive (exceptions: items that are expensive but can be used productively on a free trial basis). Also on this page are “paradigms”–books, essays, digital projects, etc.–that illustrate the kinds of humanities projects that software thinking tools/toys might help create.” Each entry includes a descriptive annotation, screenshot, and link. Included at present are tools for diagramming, game creation, mapping, mashup creation, simulation & modeling, text analysis, visualization/pattern-discovery, and machinima.

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.