751 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2018
  2. May 2016
    1. You can listen while you are walking around. You can listen while driving. You can listen while applying makeup. You can listen while you are cooking. You can listen while you are in the dentist's chair.

      Multitasking, a gift

    2. Tomorrow's readers will immerse themselves in their favorite books, not self-consciously as I did for this experiment, but based on deeper needs

      The key word here is needs, "whatever is useful for us shall be beautiful." Utilitarianism is the way to go in this battle.

    3. That's the worst accusation: that I am not a serious reader. Not guilty! I love books as much as anybody. But I love reading more.

      I think worrying about whether others think you're a serious reader or not is kind of silly. The idea of "poser academics" is funny because on paper academia is the polar opposite of "cool," which is the only reason someone would be a poser. I can just see the Vice article now: "Are Academics the New Hipsters?". Actually, I should stop here before the folks at Vice get any ideas.

    4. Kindle2

      Reading about the kindle at this point is like reading about the Motorola RAZR or the T-Mobile Sidekick. On paper, it's so recent, but it's so, so far away.

    5. The iPhone is a Kindle killer.

      I don't understand how ANYONE can primarily read on a screen. Don't get me wrong, I know I'm the outlier in this equation, but reading on an iPhone is infuriating to me. I'll eventually adapt-- I'm not nostalgic about the feel of "old pages" or anything like that, it's just easier to me. Print is not dead-- yet.

    1. James Joyce’s “Nausicaa” episode from Ulysses by focusing on the modals “could” and “would,” the causal conjunctives “so” and “because,”

      While this is definitely useful for doing an extremely close reading, I definitely would not have the patience to visualize this kind of data. Talk about a lesson in perseverance.

    2. As “cultural production”—“for its political role, its exposure of the state of a given society” (9)

      Does anyone remember when Atlas Shrugged became a hot, political topic a few years back? I think it was in the 2012 election-- I remember CNN had a headline that read "Who is Ayn Rand?". You can tell there was at least one English major in the editing department.

    3. Gertrude Stein. In

      I feel like Stein is a perfect writer to utilize data visualization for as much of her work revolves around repetition. For example, I would be interested to see how many times Stein says the word "patriarchal" versus "poetry" in Patriarchal Poetry.

    4. In the digital humanities community, most projects are replete with collaborators, and resources are continually shared, reused, and remixed; yet even in such a context, data-mining methodologies stand out as being particularly dependent on collaboration.

      quite possibly the beauty(?) of digital humanities. Collaboration is essential.

    5. As rhetoric or practical criticism: “the examination of diction and syntax, rhythm and repetition, and the various figures of speech” (6) As philosophy or the “potential expression of truth and knowledge” (7)2 As art or a unique aesthetic construct—a form of discourse inherently other, of which the objective is the “pleasure of representation” and the “pleasure of recognition,” or the pleasure “of taking in impersonations, fictions, and language creations of others and recognizing their justice” (17) As “cultural production”—“for its political role, its exposure of the state of a given society” (9)

      just a personal tidbit: personally found this useful while planning out my final project on a digital visualization project of "Bartleby"

    6. “to explore both the nature of Stein’s art and certain wider questions about linguistic and literary meaning

      going off of Kate's comment, I think a 21st century Stein might possibly embrace the concept of "digital mapping" to explore literary meaning of novels.

    7. This use of syntax and grammatical analysis is so so so interesting. I would love to see Shakespeare processed in this way - we know how he plays with language and motif, but his use of grammar is oft overlooked.

    8. magnifying glass
    9. Both close and distant reading practices can facilitate interpretation through subjective and objective means

      I certainly feel that there isn't as much of a distinction between the two practices now - perhaps that's a flaw in my education, or perhaps a strength. What I mean to say, is that in a single reading (especially when assisted by digital media) I often take a longer analysis considering everything, rather than using multiple readings to delve further into the depths of the novel. I feel like this use of technology allows and enhances this - you engage all kinds of reading by being able to see and explore the novel swiftly and through these different visualisations and readings so easily.

    10. As rhetoric or practical criticism: “the examination of diction and syntax, rhythm and repetition, and the various figures of speech”

      http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/j.ctt24hzc6.9.pdf?acceptTC=true

      I can't help but think of David Foster Wallace's use of diction in Infinite Jest

    11. Noting trends in word frequencies, however, provides us with a simplified view of the text. The computer’s ability to sort and illustrate quantified data helps identify patterns, but understanding why a pattern occurs and determining whether it is one that offers insight into a text requires technologies of self-reflective inquiry.

      repetition such as refrains repeat and echo themes. It does give us a simplified way of reading.

    12. As philosophy or the “potential expression of truth and knowledge”

      In my opinion, this is the most common approach to literature, especially in the date-and-age of close reading. "Philosophy" is a word with many meanings; while we may not be referring to the Sophocles variety, one may say that each piece of literature works to express some sort of truth to its reader, no matter how "deep" the truth may be.

    13. As “cultural production”—“for its political role, its exposure of the state of a given society”

      http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw

      the idea of writing for "political purpose"

    14. “to explore both the nature of Stein’s art and certain wider questions about linguistic and literary meaning” (170);

      This argument can be used in reference to any literary work. It is more present or more effective within the lens of the modernist era?

    15. digital tools seem to take the “human” (e.g., the significance of gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, and history) out of literary study.

      Like Shadika says, this is so inaccurate in terms of accessibility, but also when considering the fact that anyone can edit and produce, creating a wider diversity of intellectual wealth. Then, you have to consider the fact that sure, gender, race, class etc. are, undeniably, indeterminable from online readings. However, it is from much literature too. Most people don't know that Arthur Miller was Jewish, taking plays like "The Crucible" as the allegorical pieces that they are, but on a very 2D scale. What is the argument here; that books and journals expose explicitly the "humanity" of the authors?

    16. understanding why a pattern occurs and determining whether it is one that offers insight into a text requires technologies of self-reflective inquiry.

      Uh obviously, was this even necessary to put in an article. Computers are only necessarily useful with quantitative data, I doubt a computer is reading and analyzing the data for figurative meaning.

      face palm

    17. Figure 1. Table of word frequencies from texts comparable in size or composition date to Stein’s The Making of Americans. The novels are arranged in the order that they were published, starting with the earliest at the bottom.

      Am I the only one completely confudled. (see that a unique word lol) what in the world is this graph conveying?

    18. The graph also makes visible the fact that the low number of unique words (or words that are used at least once in each text) and the high average frequency of words in The Making of Americans are almost exactly the inverse of the numbers for Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

      I find this funny that this what our technology is going to. I am not sure what the importance of word counts or uniqueness. Count and Uniqueness does not change overall message.

    19. Yet electronic archives—the source materials of so much text analysis, data mining, and visualization methodologies—are always assembled behind very real stone walls, by very real people. Jerome McGann, in writing about the “categorical systems and subsystems (‘cross-references’)” used by archives, libraries, and museums, implies that any database is the result of an interface between a person and an archive:

      Knowing all of this gives technology a very human quality. As is, technology does not act on its own. Though we may think of google and certain things a magical technology all of these things have been compiled and ordered by human. Technology only creates access, it does not create material.

    20. digital tools seem to take the “human” (e.g., the significance of gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, and history) out of literary study.

      I think this statement is so inaccurate. In fact with the new digital technology today the "human" is more easily accessible. We are now more capable of interacting with said human and/or researching that human more efficiently.

    21. Using tools to facilitate differential reading practices can facilitate self-reflective or self-conscious critical practices by helping us interpret the patterns we see in texts and in how others have read texts.

      This methodology continues to proliferate these days: http://www.cinemetrics.lv/

    22. This short list of examples reflects the awareness within digital humanities that “situated knowledges” are entwined in the “silences, absences, and distortions in dominant paradigms” that compose the layers of representations of representations of representations that literature and digital tools employ (Haraway; Hawkesworth 8).

      Brings to mind the PowerPoint chapter of Jennifer Egan's "Visit From The Good Squad". Also, a beautiful piece of academic language.

    23. John Unsworth touts “the importance of failure” within digital methods (“Documenting”). Willard McCarty’s notion of a “via negative,” or a “negative way,” to knowledge involves an iterative, trial-and-error process (5; 39–41). This short list of examples reflects the awareness within digital humanities that “situated knowledges” are entwined in the “silences, absences, and distortions in dominant paradigms” that compose the layers of representations of representations of representations that literature and digital tools employ (Haraway; Hawkesworth 8).

      Failure as an epistemological strategy is a kind of seeing in relief. However, the more that I think about what an array of misreadings might yield in terms of analysis, I suspect that the text at hand dissolves deeper into being art rather than the merely mediated literature it was before the digital method was applied. Granted, I may be splitting a hair that doesn't even exist.

    24. D. Sculley and Bradley Pasanek preface their discussion of data mining with the observation that these methodologies “will always be subject to experimenter bias”

      Sweet and thoughtful, if not defensive and alert.

    25. The physicality of an archive’s categorical system shows a flexibility that a database does not have, because a card catalog is itself an interfaced database.

      A notion of flexibility necessitates a material object to show the effect of that characteristic. In dealing with data, we've given up the possibility of thinking about these problems in terms of stacks of books in rooms.

    26. an interface that reflects, as Derrida reminds us, a structure of “archivization”

      It seemed that this thought is increasingly commonplace in general perception of how we interact with technology. Derrida would have enjoyed the Snowden revelations.

    27. the wider one’s reading in a specified area, the greater the pleasure of a given text and the greater the ability to make connections between texts” (16).

      This is a really compelling notion of pleasure, and I've heard it said so frankly.

    28. These methodologies defamiliarize texts, making them unrecognizable in a way (putting them at a distance) that helps scholars identify features they might not otherwise have seen, make hypotheses, generate research questions, and figure out prevalent patterns and how to read them.

      The visual metaphor is both helpful and necessary. Similarly, in accompanying our deconstructive turn in analysis, a mechanical way of picking apart the constitution of texts makes sense given where we're going. At the same time, it will soon become outdated to create distance between ourselves and the apparatus-- for that seems to be what early critics purport shortsightedly when they claim dehumanization-- and the sanctity of the humanities is swallowed up as we become cyborgs.

    29. Gass is using his tool to magnify one sentence of Stein’s text because he believes that it will augment his ability to examine the rest of the novel. Doing so is “convenient” and generalizable: he maintains that “almost any sentence would yield the same results” (vii). Van Dyke, in generating syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic patterns and comparing these with the style in Stein’s novel, seeks “to explore both the nature of Stein’s art and certain wider questions about linguistic and literary meaning” (170)

      Smoke 'em if you got 'em, but also, that's a really beautiful and clever way to pose a question.

    30. data-flow

      There seems to be a poetic dimension to a lot of the language that has developed around digital technology, and this particular word combination feels like it illustrates it.

    31. such as solve literary conundrums

      For now!

    32. that it is the combination of data mining and visualization (distant reading) with the ability to read and contextualize one’s results (close reading) that generated many of the most productive studies

      There has been an extreme academic focus on close reading, as we have spoken about at length before, and it is interesting to see the other approaches to Literature, such as crafting infographics and data mining, that can also be utilized to analyze a text. Too often, it seems like there is only a singular way to approach a text, and utilizing quantified data, while not altogether replacing close reading but instead supplementing it, is simply another method with which one can tear apart and interact with a text.

    33. The third step is to use the data-mining algorithm to apply that mapping to new documents to find similar patterns or behaviors.

      Be it in a single novel or an entire genre! I saw a series of brilliant infographics done on the gothic novel genre a while back here.

    34. Using tools to facilitate differential reading practices can facilitate self-reflective or self-conscious critical practices by helping us interpret the patterns we see in texts and in how others have read texts.

      And therefore, also how we write!

    35. The graph also makes visible the fact that the low number of unique words (or words that are used at least once in each text) and the high average frequency of words in The Making of Americans are almost exactly the inverse of the numbers for Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

      Once again, the use of data and statistics allows for two pieces to be directly contrasted. While one may have had to battle context in so far as comparing the two works, with data and graphics, one is able to deal almost solely with crunching numbers (words) and quantify the work itself while also comparing it to others.

    36. Noting trends in word frequencies, however, provides us with a simplified view of the text. The computer’s ability to sort and illustrate quantified data helps identify patterns, but understanding why a pattern occurs and determining whether it is one that offers insight into a text requires technologies of self-reflective inquiry.

      We may need technologies but technologies needs us. Technology can go far until a certain extent where things needs to be organized and interpret by us.

    37. Figure

      who knows how to read this table? I'm confused on what it's representing.

    38. Alan Liu asserts that text analysis, visualization, and data mining represent paradigmatic shifts in the work of the humanities that force scholars to reflect on the relation between information and new media and technology and that require them “to investigate underlying database, data-flow, cross-platform data architecture” (14)

      We use what has been created for us to use. Even though sometimes we take advantage of what we can get out off the tools.

    39. This startling discovery confirms the idea that the repetition in the text is not completely random. Making the same discovery would have been difficult through close reading, since the text is replete with many shorter repetitions, and impossible through more straightforward string searches without preknowledge of its existence.

      Here the argument gets really weird but/and interesting: Stein has written a text that only computers can read? Stein writes like a computer? Computers can write like Stein? I don't want to get too delirious here, like the "dreamy" bit from Voss and Werner above, especially since Clement's central point is that computing power is a tool in service of making meaning. But the example of Stein, whom many readers have found unreadable (for better and for worse) does push one's thinking in this direction.

    40. Ultimately, these analytics and visualizations help us generate new knowledge by facilitating new readings of the text and by affording a self-reflective stance for comparisons, a perspective from which we can begin to ask why we as close readers have found some patterns and yet left others undiscovered.

      Like Jeremy, I find this a weak broth. Quantifying approaches risk doing what social scientific disciplines sometimes end up doing: confirming what we already know with more data.

    41. While it is not within the purview of this discussion to debate whether the categorical systems that structure the archive are any less structured than the database, the notion that we are constantly met with interfaces (such as the card catalog) that reflect real structures with real people (with all of their quirks and fallibilities and imaginative wonderfulness) in real institutions reminds us how material and constructed (how situated) is the context in which the reader accesses and analyzes cultural content with text analysis, data mining, and visualization methodologies.

      Consistent reminder that analog cultural tech is still tech: that the card catalog or magnifying glass is as technological as the database or search tool.

    42. that depend on differential (close and distant, subjective and objective) reading practices, technologies of self-reflection and collaboration, and the value of plausibility, all of which have always been crucial to literary inquiry.

      So it's not just "distant" reading; rather, it's using computing to pose and answer a wide range of questions, some of which may be quite traditional.

    43. binary between “old” (i.e., human) versus “new” (i.e., computational) practices

      It shouldn't be a binary though; as Greg mentioned before, the computational practices are designed by humans.

    44. Stein’s work in Three Lives

      I wonder what studying the pervasive modulated repetition of "Melanctha" would reveal.

    45. The results, as seen in figure 1, make it clear that The Making of Americans has the largest number of words, or tokens (see the label “Total”), the least number of unique words or types (“Unique”), and the largest average word frequency (“Avg. Frequency”).

      Another mini-tangent, sorry. I recently read this interview with Alexander Galloway in which he says the following about the two main approaches to DH (investigating the nature of letters and numbers versus focusing on the use of letters and numbers for other means):

      Ultimately it comes down to this: if you count words in Moby-Dick, are you going to learn more about the white whale? I think you probably can — and we have to acknowledge that. But you won’t learn anything new about counting. That’s the difference between the two approaches, and I think a lot of the misunderstanding between the two methods (or cultures) of working with digitality is due to this difference.

    46. By identifying quantifiable pieces of a text using word frequencies and locations, these scholars have generated computer-assisted close readings of the structures of texts that correspond to, contradict, or otherwise provide interesting insight into what has been assumed about the texts on an abstract level.

      Shakespeare infographics/data have been ALL over the Internet recently, probably because of the 400th anniversary of his death. Here's a great one about character interaction in the tragedies:

    47. Stephen Ramsay has used StageGraph to cluster Shakespearean plays on the basis of low-level structural elements such as the length of acts, scene changes, and character movements (“In Praise of Pattern”).

      Tangential, but fun: Sir Ian McKellen and Heuristic Media recently released the first "Heuristic Shakespeare" app.

      From the website:

      The Tempest from Heuristic Shakespeare is the first in a collection of thirty-seven separate apps. Each app is a tool for demystifying a play and making it more enjoyable for a modern audience. Sir Ian McKellen and Professor Sir Jonathan Bate take us on journey of discovery using the world-famous Arden Shakespeare texts and their extensive essays and notes. The apps are not meant to be a replacement for seeing the plays in the theatre or on the screen but instead bring the text to life and help readers understand the language.

    48. Perloff argues that each of the classifications above must be adopted in conversation with the others

      Agreed! Why view a text through only one lens?

    49. As rhetoric or practical criticism: “the examination of diction and syntax, rhythm and repetition, and the various figures of speech” (6) As philosophy or the “potential expression of truth and knowledge” (7)2 As art or a unique aesthetic construct—a form of discourse inherently other, of which the objective is the “pleasure of representation” and the “pleasure of recognition,” or the pleasure “of taking in impersonations, fictions, and language creations of others and recognizing their justice” (17) As “cultural production”—“for its political role, its exposure of the state of a given society” (9)

      Highlighting this section because it might be useful for my final project (lit crit wiki).

    50. Gertrude Stein

      I can't help but think Stein would have appreciated certain digital tools given her work with William James and interest in classifying personality types.

    51. “All literature is to some extent aware of itself as a technology”

      The medium is the message?

    52. The thinking is that twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary (and cultural) theory, which tends to value the literary texts and aspects of them that resist simple evaluative resolutions, is incompatible with digital methodologies, which are supposedly geared toward simplifications and fast solutions.

      Is Clement talking about formalist approaches?

    53. As with more traditional methodologies, these readings are enacted in the context of the technologies of access, self-reflection, and collaboration that make it a situated act.

      So digital methodologies become another method in the system of analysis that we're used to rather than exist as an entity separate from original decryption methods.

    54. For such insight we must turn to the texts, where we can see that Joyce includes words that are “word-sounds” such as “tauftauf thuartpeatrick” and “bababadalgh­araghtakamminarronn­konnbronn­tonnerronntuonnthunn­trovarrhounawn­skawntoohoohoor­denenthurnuk!,” linked words such as “upturnpikepointandplace” and “devlinsfirst,” and many other experimental words that are only used once.

      Taken all from the good ol' first page of Finnegans Wake.

      For those who are interested, I made a very informal guide on tackling the first page of the work:

      http://digitalrelay.nyc/2016/03/15/wakeipedia-an-extended-reading-of-page-1-of-finnegans-wake/

    55. these words reflect the extent to which the character Gerty MacDowell does not understand her social world or have any power in it.

      For those who don't know, Gerty MacDowell is a handicapped (21?) year old girl.

    56. From no other evidence than statistical analysis of the relative frequencies of the very common words, it is possible to differentiate sharply and appropriately among the idiolects of Jane Austen’s characters and even to trace the ways in which an idiolect can develop in the course of a novel”

      Concordances have become an awesome thing for situations like this.

      http://www.writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp is a good resource for that if you're ever curious to try it on a text.

    57. Yet electronic archives—the source materials of so much text analysis, data mining, and visualization methodologies—are always assembled behind very real stone walls, by very real people.

      Therefore giving them a human element. We aren't in an age of autonomous indexing: everything still has to be programmed by human hand.

    58. Alan Liu asserts that text analysis, visualization, and data mining represent paradigmatic shifts in the work of the humanities that force scholars to reflect on the relation between information and new media and technology and that require them “to investigate underlying database, data-flow, cross-platform data architecture”

      What's more human than utilizing the tools we've created to learn?

    1. I remember during football season the New York Times posted this ridiculous page on it's back cover with a data visualization of all of the ways that the New York Jets could clinch the playoffs. In each alternate timeline certain teams would win and lose and drift further into alternate timelines. It seemed as if the data visualization itself was commenting on the unpredictability of playoff sports, or perhaps, the dismal chances of the NY Jets (who, ultimately, did not make the playoffs.)

    2. challenge is to understand how the information visualization creates an argument and then make use of the graphical format whose features serve your purpose.

      This is interesting, as in this case, the platform for the information becomes information (an argument) within itself.

    3. The challenge is to understand how the information visualization creates an argument and then make use of the graphical format whose features serve your purpose.

      Interesting how this might be able to be used in literary research papers, an area where I previously assumed to be entirely separate from the realm of data and statistics.

    1. In the PC versions of the series, gameplay was typically thought of as a toy—something for players to pick up and enjoy for however long they want with no clear end in sight. (Lewis and Boulding)

      It's this exact reason when I spent my childhood pouring hundreds of hours into the Sims. The imagination it leaves you with is unmistakable.

    2. Just as the game had no offi cial name, it also had no marketing (in fact, was unavailable for purchase), and no offi cial beginning. Or, to put it another way, it began when and how people be-gan to play it. For many it began with the second A.I. trailer, in which “Jeanine Salla” is credited as “Sentient machine therapist” (Hon). Players’ web searches for these terms revealed the beginnings of a trail that threaded through texts, images, and movies across the internet—as well as phone calls, faxes, US Post-al Service deliveries, bathroom walls, and live event

      This is very reminiscent of the alternate reality game for the 2008 film "Cloverfield." I remember running home from school to uncover fake websites for fake brands and dig through enigmatic websites with forums full of archaeologists such as myself.

    1. In some of these cases, we've invented devices that perform the actions, solutions that represent definitive answers for a particular problem, be it increasing the amplitude of a signal, removing impurities from a liquid, or increasing moisture in a room.

      Thankfully, in video games we're ultimately seeing shifts towards ambulatory games-- games without "leader boards, points, badges, etc". This is aided by the development of indie games.

    2. Most recently, Serious Games have offered another, more general attempt to expand games' scope.

      I always disliked the rhetoric of "serious games" within the gaming community because I feel like it missed the point of games to begin with. Take a game like Donkey Kong that's entirely presented in 8-bits, literally takes it's narrative from King Kong, and contains three stages. However, this game, is (in many instances, for me) a lot more enjoyable than repetitive FPS franchises that keep releasing the same game (cough Call of Duty cough).

    1. Salem Witch Trials,

      I feel that this is especially poignant as IVANHOE inevitably leads to "contextualization" no matter which way it's utilized. When I played Billy Budd I was unable to see past the realm of my role (Melville) after the game concluded. Contextualizing Melville's biography proved not only to be interesting and fruitful, it legitimately altered my real life reading of Billy Budd.

    2. agree to collaborate in thinking about how

      Perhaps it would be more interesting if the participants didn't agree to collaborate in re imagining the text? Although such a game may not be as academically fruitful, it could be more insightful as to how one originally thinks about a text and track how the different viewpoints flow and ebb, perhaps change, each other throughout the context of the game.

    3. all interpretation is misinterpretation

      Sounds more like Harold Gloom, am I right or am I right?

      crickets

    4. The concept of criticism as "a doing," as action and intervention

      Somewhere, a graduate student is smiling in his sleep.

    5. Why are we so hesitant about doing the same thing?

      Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

      And in accordance with everyone here, I don't see any kind of difficulty that the reader has in remixing original works; it happens so rampantly, and the intensity of close reading that happens in high school and college classroom often births the accusation that ANYTHING could be said about a text provided you can dig up a cursory word or two to drive that interpretation home. Contrary to McGann, maybe it's time for us to think a little bit more about authorial intention. The mishandling of anti-Semitism in Ivanhoe is fodder for nuanced critical and historical work-- the way out is not to rewrite Ivanhoe along lines that helps us sleep at night.

    6. humane

      I understand that the Humanities stems from this attribute, of being humane, but this word choice seems so strange to me.

    1. Gaming. These artifacts represent the most literal meaning of play. The pedagogical value of games and simulations has long been known, but it was James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy that raised awareness about gaming’s potential as a pedagogical tool. The artifacts in this category either treat games as objects of study in their own right alongside literature, or provide examples of games as pedagogical tools.

      Although I'm far from a self-described "gamer," I've had several experiences where gaming has helped me learn in the process of my youth. I did play strict educational games (in my opinion, both "Typing of the Dead" and "Math Blaster" were great fun) but I feel even "non-educational" video games had a pedagogical impact on me. A good example of this is the N64 game "Paper Mario," which was (even by today's standards) a tough RPG. I think it took me about forty to forty-five hours as a kid to beat the game. Recently I looked back at the structure of the game (through some YouTube videos) and I was astounded that I was able to play it as a child-- you are often given complicated directives, objectives, and are forced to creatively solve a multitude of platforming puzzles. Also, you had to choose very wisely the ways in which you upgraded your character. Choosing the proper sidekick, attack moves, defense moves, and items to keep in your repertoire was a vital part of success in the game. In fact, the beginning of the game was reminiscent of "Mistakes over Sucuess." The game takes the phrase "Every Game Over is the start of a new game" literally-- in Paper Mario you are immediately forced to face Bowser at the beginning of the game and it's impossible to win. The entirety of the rest of the game is you, Mario, training to take another stab at Bowser and rescue Peach.

    1. Although not directly related to this piece, I think it would be interesting to see what the author thinks about the emergence of "two-screen" experiences. The author talks about "interactivity," which is related. When Microsoft was showing off the Xbox One before it's release they showed that you could plug your cable box into your XBox to enhance your experience-- I believe the demo reel showed player statistics on the bottom of the screen and a live tweeter feed of a conversation about the game on the margins. In this regard, the game's marginalia becomes a fluid part of the game. This is true even without being on the same screen, for example, when watching the Mets play you can easily find pitch by pitch reactions by searching for the pitchers name or an associated hashtag. During a recent game the commentators were speculating whether or not Matt Harvey was pitching so poorly due to the viral buzz about his poor outings lately. Although people have been critiquing athletes for centuries, the accessibility and the ubiqiotusness of social media can surely broaden that criticism, and in turn, effect Harvey's performance. In this way there's an "interactivity" tangible on several levels.

    1. Bridle argues that in a world in which we’ll no longer own books as discrete physical objects, the only really meaningful thing we’ll own will be the reading experience itself.

      This is a truly radical idea that I can get behind. Not only does this observation change the way we can view annotations or marginalia, rather, the experience of art itself. Especially within the context of the twenty-first century, where a new profit-model for any art form is constantly being made the new industry standard, it's important to attribute value to the art and not the medium. Simon & Garfunkel's music, for example, contains value-- not the 180 gram vinyl, the Tidal subscription, or the eight track.

    2. Infinite Jest

      Doesn't Infinite Jest already have three hundred pages of footnotes? DFW is on track to give Joyce a run for his money.

    3. According to the marginalia scholar H. J. Jackson, the golden age of marginalia lasted from roughly 1700 to 1820. The practice, back then, was surprisingly social — people would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers

      This is incredibly interesting to me as once I annotate a book I consider it "unborrowable" unless I have a close friendship/intimacy with the lendee. Also, annotating something that you know others are gonna read makes your annotations more faux-intellectual and less utilitarian. (Oh my god am I doing that right now, this is getting far too meta for my taste.)

    4. As John Dickerson recently put it on Slate, describing his attempt to annotate books on an iPad: “It’s like eating candy through a wrapper.

      I find Hypothes.is largely enjoyable, however I find it hard to stomach lengthy readings on a screen. Put the author and John Dickerson make a great point here, writing on .PDF's is a complete nightmare.

    5. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation; marginalia is — no exaggeration — possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis

      This catharsis reminds me of an anecdote a classmate in a modernism class once shared with me. She said that her mother was an editor for a publishing company and decided one day to pick up a copy of William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury." She was apparently so distraught by Faulkner's flagrant disregard of grammar, spelling, and syntax in Benji's chapter that she reorganized the entirety of the first two narratives with her own marginalia. Of course, following the expansive traditions of new criticism (and Barthes) this text would be viewed in academia as a completely different text.

    1. Barthes' point on "filiation" is certainly an interesting one, given that many contemporary academics believe that most texts are written about past periods are inevitably going to be about the period they're being written in. For example, it's highly improbable that "The Crucible" acted as a platform for Arthur Miller to talk about the witch trials, and not, the HUAC trials happening in the United States. Although, perhaps, Barthes is arguing that the text goes beyond this interpretation. Reading "The Crucible" the reader is allowed to view it in the vein of McCarthyism, yet acknowledge the witches and every other reading. It's apparent that Barthes doesn't want the modern reader to say that a text is "about something" or that there's one end all, be all way to read a text.

    1. and move toward formulating their own distinctive voice

      This brings up an interesting point, when does marginalia becomes it's own text? Many (including myself) would argue that marginalia could always constitute it's own vitality, however, if readers are urged to bring their own "distinct voice" to their annotations, does marginalia only become an autonomous text if the reader goes against the initial point of the text? Surely, there must somewhere be a line between an echo-chamber and an autonomous text, but where is it?

    2. As Fitzpatrick has pointed out, the visibility of this annotative action is both a gift and a problem

      Unknowingly, I opted to turn my annotations on Hypothes.is off right before I read this line. Fitzpatrick, and the author of this piece, both have great points, however, if anything annotations are distracting on the page. While it would be interesting to see if numerous people/scholars find the same passages noteworthy, if anything, it becomes unaesthetically pleasing on the page. Although aesthetic is (rightfully) unimportant in most open-source educational software there has to be a firm middle-ground between endlessly scrolling to the end to see annotations or being overwhelmed on the page. I think Greg in our class made a good compromise and remedied this problem through his final project for #Allred399.

    3. Medieval marginalia is so well-known that amusing or disconcerting instances of it are fodder for viral aggregators such as Buzzfeed and Brainpickings, and the fascination with other readers’ reading is manifest in sites such as Melville’s Marginalia Online or Harvard’s online exhibit of marginalia from six personal libraries

      Collection of text and materials, a library is always cool

    1. by clarifying that Hermione Granger’s skin tone had never once been mentioned.

      Interesting. This comment reveals how fans, as well as authors, can also be driven by unconscious biases.

    2. Just as one can become more of a writer through reading, it seems that an annotation can also become a Text through ceaseless annotations upon it, and an annotator can thus also become an author.

      Again, fabulous transition that pushes the argument in a new direction without losing the prior thread.

    3. the potential to become a form of entertainment,

      Cool. You make me think about temporality here, too: we think of novels as existing somewhat out of time, but these practices (not to mention the midnight vigils to buy new of HP novels) create an intense simultaneity for readers that makes them more like TV or film.

    4. there is a total number of 78,787 and 95,683 listed Harry Potter related works respectively.

      This archive begs for "distant reading" modes: how does this body of writing compare to the "original" texts?

    5. though Rowling confirmed his homosexuality in interviews and on Twitter, many fans feel that the paratextual confirmation of Dumbledore’s sexuality is a cop-out.

      This is a funny idea, no? Does Rowling know Dumbledore's sexuality better than her readers do? Who controls the authority of textual interpretations? You also might consider the rather aggressive role played by readers who want to prescribe X or Y depictions of sexuality here: do you see a problem with stipulating how "out" a character is in a text?

    6. Fan fiction is effectively marginalia, annotations on an original source text that has gained a life and autonomy of its own. I

      Lovely connection, and rhetorically speaking, a fabulous transition.

    7. Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, could be read as fan fiction of the Bible.

      This is WONDERFUL: hilarious and true.

    8. something that is inherently natural

      See above on "naturalizing."

    9. the traditional roles of author and reader.

      Avoid naturalizing print as the "traditional" here, since you're making very broad arguments encompassing oral-print-digital: it seems that your point is that "tradition" is evolving in ways that hearken back to pre-print tradition!

    1. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

      I would include MYTHOLOGIES rather than this later text, which is more illustrative of poststructuralism: Barthes is a convenient pivot-point between pre-late 60s structuralism and poststructuralism, since he's central to both periods.

    1. An instructor’s comment can also prompt students to consider a particular passage in the larger context of the work or in the context of ideas.

      I feel like this super telling as I, annotating this piece, found myself looking for other annotations for points of interest. Although this is definitely useful, as it's beneficial to know where others found merit, it could also discourage readers from uncovering their own interesting passages. Although I'm no master of pedagogy, wouldn't it be more interesting to have every student annotate a single passage they see as important, and compare the findings in class?

    2. Annotating The Elements of Style

      This is unconstructive, but that Comic Sans really threw me for a loop.

    1. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact exppresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

      page 28-29 last paragraph

      I chose not to paraphrase this passage because I thought Marx said this better than I could ever imagine to. Also in including a humorous Marx and Engels I thought it would make the character seem more like the Chorus of an old Greek play.

    1. It's interesting to learn how/why Edison developed the technology necessary for audio recording-- I feel that this course as recurring theme in which the main use of an invention is never what it was intended to be. Pretty much any time a new technology is invented someone figures out to capitalize on it or completely perverts it. I highly doubt Steve Jobs, struggling over the initial concepts of the iPhone, imagined me mindlessly swiping through OkCupid on the bus.

  3. www.mlajournals.org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu www.mlajournals.org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu
    1. When the community finds such language in supposedly nonliterary sources—A m a z o n. c o m reviews, Web forums, Goodreads, blog book events, and library re-sources online—professionals of the “read-ing class” are quick to dismiss the activity as wrong reading, a phenomenon we might call the Biennial Harry Potter Backlash

      I think the growing interest in "found poetry" represents how these are being (slowly) acknowledged as forms of writing. Recently I saw a (comical) tweet that took the photos out of a Buzzfeed list and claimed it worked as a "strangely affecting" poem. I've done similar art projects in the past; going through Craigslist "Missed Connections" pages and making compilations of sincere, straightforward, wistful feelings of regret. "Content" is no longer just king, content is everything. This annotation is content. The tradition continues.

    2. how good

      I feel like the tone of this piece is vaguely condescending to those not enrolled in Penn State. The author seems surprised that non-academics were able to enjoy a novel in a case where (most likely, pretentious) college kids weren't able to enjoy it. I wish the author had a little more faith in the quality control of non-academic readers.

    3. too cerebral

      I don't want to be friends with anyone who criticizes a novel for being "too cerebral."

    1. ….

      It is strange that the main character of a novella can have such few words. Melville did not think he needed many and neither do I. There is strength in Bartleby's silence. It can be interpreted as a sort of passive resistance.

    2. hear

      This is not a typo or confusion of homophones. This is just a pun on words. This context of this message is from Public Enemy's song "fight the power." The song is about the struggle of blacks against systematic oppression; but it also works in a capitalistic setting as well.

      Just thought it would be funny, it is what I imagine Marx to have sung if he grew up in the epoch of hip hop.

    3. Yes, Sir

      It is important to keep Ginger Nut's statement as short as possible. The only mandatory inclusion for Ginger Nut's statements is "sir." This is a phrase that he so often repeats that and it greatly highlights how obedient he is to the Narrator.

    1. In the future, we might expect digital humanities researchers to adapt such off-the-shelf social-computing technologies or innovate new ones to allow for other ways to experience and communicate—that is, to read, interpret, and perform—primary literature. Perhaps custom-designed reading, interpreting, and performing applications will be created by the robust creative and scholarly community of the Electronic Literature Organization to make literature not just what Noah Wardrip-Fruin calls “playable media” but, specifically, socially playable media akin to two of the interactive social modeling examples that Wardrip-Fruin studies in depth in his Expressive Processing: The Sims, a computer game, and Façade, an interactive computer drama. Or perhaps Ivanhoe, the game of interactive, role-playing literary interpretation created by Jerome McGann, Johanna Drucker, and others, will set the mold for socially computable literary experience.

      This is especially poignant due to the developments and huge advancements made in the field of VR. Ivanhoe may not appeal to the casual reader, however, being able to visually "play" a novel might change the average consumers mind.

    2. And it is there in the epic of all the social-news, shared-bookmark, or similar sites that build a portrait of collective life from constantly reshuffled excerpts, links, and tags from that life akin to Homeric formulae. Above all, as a literature professor, I recognize that—viral YouTube videos aside—the vast preponderance of Web 2.0 is an up-close and personal experience of language.

      What disallows viral YouTube videos from this equation? Although their virality may make them a less "personal" experience, they convey wavelengths and bring people together. Especially as the years progress, the internet has it's own distinct language. Everyone I know that isn't connected to the internet a significant portion of time finds no merit in "dat boi,"which I personally find hysterical. Call it a decline in humor standards, but I was born well after someone wrote a hit Christmas song about "an Italian Christmas donkey."

    3. “the use of technology in networked communication systems by communities of people for one or more goals,” even if that goal is as seemingly unfocused as building the community itself and one’s identity in it.

      While this is most certainly true, it's essential to note the importance of the "Internet boom" through all of this-- these mediums and startups were able to gain prominence because the online market place that simultaneously built around it. Imagining my parents in the mid-1990's, when we bought our first personal computer, I can't imagine them being very focused on building an online community.

    1. Second, of course, there is the long association between computers and composition, almost as long and just as rich in its lineage

      Everyone scoffs at the English major until they're forced to cohesively utilize the written word. This is a great point by Kircschenbaum, the English departments are probably they only group of people that would know what to do with the various tools that came to fruition in the early days of computing.

    2. Digital humanities has also, I would propose, lately been galvanized by a group of younger (or not so young) graduate students, faculty members (both tenure line and contingent), and other academic professionals who now wield the label “digital humanities” instrumentally amid an increasingly monstrous institutional terrain defined by declining public support for higher education, rising tuitions, shrinking endowments, the proliferation of distance education and the for-profit university, and underlying it all the conversion of full-time, tenure-track academic labor to a part-time adjunct workforce

      The need for more expansive digital humanities programs in schools is so apparent. The fact that I personally know four people that have the term "social media" in their job title shows the sprawling nature of the twenty-first century job market. However, these jobs are usually scoffed at by baby boomers and other forms of narcissists (too low a blow?) because disciplines like digital humanities don't have enough visibility in the public sphere.

    3. Tweeting has rapidly become an integral part of the conference scene, with a subset of attendees on Twitter providing real-time running commentary through a common “tag” (#mla09, for example), which allows everyone who follows it to tune in to the conversation.

      The origin of the hashtag is so interesting because how quickly it's initial purpose became hijacked by corporate entities and comedic communities. Of course, I say this as someone who uses hashtags almost exclusively for the sake of irony. I feel that the use of hashtags, as well as memes for that matter, have ultimately closed discourse in areas where it should be opened up. For example, there's no real political value by searching #NeverTrump or #ImWithHer or #BernieOrBust-- you're either gonna stumble upon an echo chamber or trolls just looking for a fight.

    1. proliterian revolution

      The proletarian revolution is a revolution theorized by Marx and Engels. It is a revolution in which the working class come together and overthrow the bourgeoisie. This revolution is largely based on the French's unsuccessful February revolution in 1848. During this revolution the french attempted to overthrow the elected government of the Second Republic, which had begun to take a conservative path. This government was elected after France over threw King Louis Phillipe)

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf [Page 10-11]

      http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/1848/french_revolution_1848.html

    1. acquired capital; and in acquiring capital you have gained no political power, but instead have gained the power to purchase and command labor.

      This passage was taken from Karl Marx's earlier writing on Capitalism; it is stated on page 11 to be specific. The idea that capitalism isn't merely owning wealth but also owning power over others is one that persists today. It is with this idea that the upper class has driven a large wedge between them and all others.

    2. Bourgeoisie class, the strife between the aristocrats and proletarians have lessened; but for this new age that statement is sorely inaccurate

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

      This statement was made based on Marx's remarks on page 15 last two paragraphs. Historically the Bourgeoisie have made a revolutionary impact on the class issue, but today what was considered to be the bourgeoisie may now be considered to be upper class.

      This game is being written as if it were happening in the early 2000s and Marx were alive to comment on it. which is why Marx has claimed he was wrong about that statement. The modern Bourgeoisie is what spawned the #occupywallstreet movement.

    1. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method. I do not speak it in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion. I will freely add, that I was not insensible to the late John Jacob Astor’s good opinion.”

      Interesting thing about John Jacob Astor is that he was an actual person in history. He had his things in many of businesses; money was his passion. To say his name rings like bullion-gold is an accurate statement. Our narrator's continuous reference and association to him allows us to know that he is not part of the lower class like his workers. (http://titanic.wikia.com/wiki/John_Jacob_Astor_IV)

    1. Bartleby

      You may have not noticed but this "no image" image was purposely chosen for Bartleby. IT would only make sense since the narrator knew nothing of him and he preferred not to disclose that information to the reader.

    1. Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut

      For these particular characters I decided to describe them using only words from the narrator/boss. It is essential that the viewer of the game understands that the characters/workers are only measured by their worth. I was very careful of using parts of the descriptions that the narrator said pleased him or was beneficial to him.

    1. “…economic production, and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom, constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primaeval [sic] communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social evolution; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles.”                                                                                                                                  -Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

      Taken from the 1883 Preface to the German Edition of the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Most of what will be said will be taken from the Communist Manifesto. Though it is said that only Part III of the Manifesto was Marx's actual words, Engel credits all of the ideas in the manifesto to Marx.

    1. They recalled the fresh young image of the Handsome Sailor, that face never deformed by a sneer or subtler vile freak of the heart within

      Billy Budd, the good kid

    1. towards the ocean with me

      Setting is the ocean, we must be on a boat

    2. Call me Ishmael

      Main Character

    1. Authors seldom create links and lexias, nor do they in-sert visual images or sound effects into the narrative proper.

      Not true anymore.

    1. . Is art about making up new things or about transforming the raw material that's out there? Cutting, pasting, sampling, remixing and mashing up have become mainstream modes of cultural expression, and fan fiction is part of that. It challenges just about everything we thought we knew about art and creativity.

      Not really. Art has always been about reacting (in some part) to the works that have come before it.

    1. This is an ebook on a collection of popular culture journals online in book form with literal page flipping and no option to highlight the text. Why.

    1. Well, the obvious topic is "fan fiction," but as you can tell just from scanning the subject index, we've branched out a bit - columns on fannish politics, columns that focus more on the show itself, columns on writing, etc.  Bottom line: is it going to be of interest to fanfic writers and readers?

      This is bad ass.

    1. Fan fiction alludes to universes which resemble those of the source text but which are also transformed in accordance with the writer's creative impulses and with reference to generic conventions and interpretive conventions of the fan community.

      ** Best description.

    2. This transportation may be so complete that they respond emotionally to the events portrayed as if they were situations involving real-life people rather than characters--that they become, in other words, emotionally immersed

      Couldn't this be said about anything and anyone?

    3. Fans approach fan fiction with highly detailed schemata in mind: of the characters, for example. If writers of fan fiction simply described the primary text, readers would no longer have the challenge of imagining something new and such texts would be too boring to be immersive. In effect, fans tend to value fics the most when they both adhere to canon and diverge from it

      * Important.

    4. Abigail Derecho argues that fan writers add artifacts to an archive surrounding the source text and "all texts related to it" (63-65) and Juli J. Parrish insists that fan writers "reimagine the preserve itself" (67-68).

      "Hypotext" and "hypertext"

    5. Several scholars have emphasized that fan writers are no slaves to their source text.

      Great sentence.

    6. Fan fiction studies have typically respected this framework by either taking an ethnographic approach to the subject or considering the motivations, interpretations, and metatexts of fans (Busse and Hellekson 17-24).

      So fascinating how "metatexts" themselves are considered fanwork. Reminiscent of the Symposium, a collection of essays about fandom by its members that ran from 1999-2006. http://www.trickster.org/symposium/colyear.html#1999

    1. author revises and as editors, printers, and other "collaborators" make their own changes to a manuscript

      This is a fantastic point-- "collaborators" are often invisible to the casual reader. Listening to a record passively one thinks of the songwriter not the session players, producer, mixing engineer, mastering engineer, A&R person, etc. There's significant ebb and flow in the creative process of anything, in fact, it's a new concept (brought to life by the combination of "DIY" culture and the accessibility of the internet) that one person can be oversee the conception and creation of something from start to finish.

    2. Melville responds on the level of diction, syntax, image

      True, however, isn't it acknowledged that all art is derivative and/or intextual? Melville's musings on his predecessors and contemporaries are noteworthy and interesting, but he's by no means an outlier.

    3. but all the passages that are incorporated freely or in a modified way … are also marked in this copy

      "Incorporated freely" is a fantastic euphemism for stolen. However, this answers my previous question about the source of Melville's passages that were "incorporated," and really works as an adhesive to blend Melville's marginalia and Beale's work together.

    4. The whereabouts of 285 titles have been tracked, which means that more than 700 could still be extant somewhere, waiting for scholars to find them.

      Unrelated: This is reminiscent of Jack White's "secret" vinyl records that he hid in couches during his time as an upholsterer in Detroit. People are still coming across this records as their furniture falls apart.

    5. But he has recovered the next best thing — the notes Melville made in his copy of a critical source for Moby-Dick: Thomas Beale's 1839 book, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale.

      I wonder, I'm sure a cursory Google search could answer this, if this is the same book that Melville "borrowed" from verbatim. Surely, such a discovery would irrefutably link both texts closer together, no?

  4. Apr 2016
    1. For example, if you are showing the results of opinion polls in the United States, the choice of whether you show the results by coloring the area inside the boundaries of the states or by a scatter plot or other population size unit will be crucial. If you are getting information about the outcome of an election, then the graphic effect should take the entire state into account

      I never think of this when looking at maps - I suppose it goes to show how used we are to just accepting graphics and visualisation! I think it's interesting too then, to consider in the abstract sense that we are beginning to understand the poor communication of scale in modern world maps - do we now transfer to using the "real scale" maps to more accurately portray things?

    2. If you are showing change over time or any other variable, then a continuous graph is the right choice.

      Nowadays there are options to have interactive graphs which can display data over time. I highly recommend that people play with http://www.gapminder.org/world/ and see how they can represent data to fit a certain lens through style changes.

    3. All parts of the process—from creating quantified information to producing visualizations—are acts of interpretation.

      Crucial point to make at the outset: dataviz is aesthetic and value-laden, not "objective" (whatever that means).

    1. Here and throughout, you do a wonderful job of filling in the empty space around the "handsome" depiction of Budd. You really demonstrate how the game opens up imaginative possibilities of reading Melville in a "writerly" way a la Barthes.

    1. Many of my critics have thought: Clag sticky in English but a more convincing one, Anklaegar accuser in Greek (which alludes to Satan meaning accuser and adversary in Hebrew). I may have drawn inspiration from Paradise Lost. Being foreign, neither English nor Latin in origin of his name, is what makes this character stand out as was the accuser foreign and sudden, with no background, from the garden. Perhaps this was my intention or perhaps not but alas, I cannot remember for I am old in my days. Maybe if my characters could just speak to and remind me… Related

      This fanciful riff nicely captures the creative process and I love the joke about wishing his characters could speak to him, which is quite possible in this game.

    2. Claggart with no origin and no background. “What?” you say. That’s right, it’s not very clear.

      Claggart is a unusual name indeed, it stands out from the rest of the story. The name is pretty cacophonous and well it's never used before and probably will never be given the association given by Melville

      http://goo.gl/oxGvuF(need Jstor access)

    1. ….not. I think our Handsome Sailor is setting up a mutiny, why else would he be so nice? The way he charms all my men on the ship, the way he acts so “sweet” and inn-nnn-nn-o-ccc-eeennnt. I think he’s up to no good. I heard stories, about what happened with that man Delano and the slaves revolting against that poor Cereno lad.*  He thought that soup incident was so funny. Wait till he thinks how funny he is when he walks the plank.

      Exemplary instance of using the gameplay to explore off-kilter, unusual angles on the plot. Here you channel B. Johnson a bit and explore the possibility that Claggart is sincere and Billy devious: I love it.

    2. I love this crossing of the streams. And many critics note parallels between BB and BC in terms of the questions of vision, blindness, and justice.

    1. ****”You just couldn’t let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.” The Dark Knight, Dir. Christopher Nolan. I chose to reference this quote because like Batman and the Joker, Billy and Claggart are forces that (by virtue of being opposite) are by nature destined to clash. In the context of this quote, the Joker is the “unstoppable force” (signifying “evil” like Claggart), Batman being the “immovable object” (signifying “good” like Billy). In that sense, Claggart is the unstoppable force, in which he eventually provokes violence against Billy the immovable object, leading to Claggart’s demise. Related

      I'm fascinated that both you and Jeannine have referenced comic books (she mentioned DEADPOOL) with regard to the text. There must be something about the play of the game that is comic-like, no?

    1. One of the most interesting moments for me in the Dansker’s narrative is when he cries this utterance, and I was desperate to find the different connotations of the phrase. I really like the idea that Dansker couldn’t quite verbalise what he was saying to Billy, that his language is so caught up in the nautical (cat’s-paw is also a knot often used in maritime settings), that he can’t quite breach into the wider English language. Related

      Nice reading: exemplary instance of linking a creative performance to a more cerebral "close reading" in the same move. And I love that the "cat's paw" is a knot that is associatively linked with the knot in BENITO CERENO: I hadn't noticed that detail before.

    1. With each wax and wane of the sun and sky the tension builds. I’m not the only one on the ship to notice it, and neither am I the only one to ignore it. But these young ones, these children – babies! They don’t ignore because they know the world like I do. They ignore the problem to save their wet hides, like a stowaway among the onions.

      I love the voice you create here for the D-man. I also am really excited by the back-and-forth that your group has invested in around this move.

    1. How I long for the days with Nelson, when the most thinkin’ I’d do would be in combat; when this scar on my face meant something more than “This old timer stood for something once”.

      I love how much interpretation you fit into this move: the idea that the Dansker is very lively and verbose on the inside, the comparison between Nelson and Vere.

    1. Love the use of the strikethrough to capture things thought "under erasure": nice use of the blogging medium to do things that are not customary in print.

    1. Friedrich Kittler credited the phonograph with “the death of the author” for bringing audiences into contact with the writer’s actual voice at the expense of the imaginary one invoked by the silent page.

      Contrast this to modern film and television adaptations of fiction. The death of the imaginary voice is joined by that of imaginary physicality. Granted, the extent of the latter depends on the text--certain works provide more physical descriptors than others. Film/television adaptation, however, also opens the question of how true the adaptation is to the text's original medium (the text itself!).

    2. confronted readers with a choice between two different forms of mechanical reproduction

      Seems that the number of choices had at least doubled by 2009, if the title of Kirschner's essay ("Reading Dickens Four Ways") holds weight.

      Also: nice Benjamin shout-out.

    3. the printed book as a superior aesthetic format

      Is "aesthetic format" code for "book as object"?

    4. They show instead how the very possibility of sound recording led audiences to reevaluate what the book was capable of doing in the first place

      I assume Rubery is using "book" as a kind of metonymy for the content of a book.

    5. “The phonograph presents its compliments to the audience”

      In away, this greeting places the phonograph as an almost archaic prototype of Siri.

    1. game space is not an infinite virtual reality, never an island of disembodied consciousness, but is instead a possibility space in multiple di-mensions, one whose objects are deliberately marked up or metatagged by human intelli-gence,

      I really like this particular description of a game. It's not an unformed, empty, space, but a promise of possibilities of sorts between current modes of thought; universes within human intelligence.

    2. A text, according to this theory, is a switch or node in the network of these forces, the place where meanings are dynamically generated.

      This is much like Barthes's notion of Text. Barthes explains the way that a work can be transformed into a Text based almost entirely upon the way it is interacted with.

    3. you necessarily remain at all times both in the world and out of it, controlling what happens by way of interface conventions

      Much like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels.

    4. “[P]eople and machines are both embodied, and the specifica-tions of their embodiments can best be under-stood in the recursive dynamics whereby they coevolve with one another”

      what about in terms of the colloquial term "internet addiction". I could suppose that many people get too connected in the online world.

    5. In Second Life and in almost all massively multiplayer online role-playing games, such as World of Warcraft, fungible goods and ser-vices and currency (in Second Life, “Lindens”) can be purchased with dollars on eBay and can be exchanged across the border of the vir-tual world and the real world (Castronova)

      completely supports his argument made earlier - e.g. cyberspace being images of capitalism.

    6. n any session, you may have to consult maps and signs to know which building is the one you are looking for

      literally a "second world"

    7. In response to the same trend toward augmented reality, Bruce Sterling projects a coming “Internet of things,” based on RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags and metadata attached to physical objects, connected by WiFi in networks. This new kind of network will rely on conceiving of objects as existing in relation to their users over time

      This was highlighted completely at CES 2016. One example of integration was a washing machine with unique users which gave wash statistics and usage time through a user's home network. The person was able to then see efficiency and who wasn't using it effectively in his household. The scary part is, nobody is talking about data security.

    8. Sometimes you experience server lag, and your avatar hesitates to respond to key-board commands.

      Because networks might never be perfect, would this render the reach towards this singularity asymptotic?

    9. It was built through remediation of earlier technology platforms for interactive virtual spaces, from the text-based mazes of Adventure to the so-cial spaces of MUDs (multiuser dungeons) and MOOs (MUDs object-oriented).

      I wonder if it took any inspiration from DeviousMUD (Runescape).

    10. Intellec-tual, cultural, and financial capital is flowing into and out of Linden Lab’s “metaverse,” often because of an assumption that Second Liferepresents the “future of the Internet.”

      I would definitely have to credit second life with the initialization of the web currency model that affects real life. It has grown to be quite immense.

    11. total sensory immersion in a self-contained alternative world.

      There is an anime that explores the idea of total sensory immersion. It's called Sword Art Online, basically the characters enter a RPG and are unable to get out. They sleep, eat and basically live their life in the game until they've beat it. It is possible to even die in real life if you die in the game. Anyways...I digress, back to reading.

    12. n April Fool’s Day 2008, the United States congressional Subcommittee on Telecommunica-tions and the Internet held a hearing on the topic of online virtual worlds, focused almost exclusively on Second Life. Simulcast inside Second Life, the hearing took up questions such as the possibility that Islamic militants could use avatars inside the virtual world to recruit and plan terrorist attacks.

      I'm starting to get the feeling that this article is nearly a decade old. Why is it so preposterous to think that terrorists would not use Second Life, or any digital world for that matter, as a platform? They use facebook don't they?

    13. academics have increasingly treated the proprietary platform Second Life as the end toward which the Web is evolving

      This is a funny statement only because technology, like people is ever evolving. How can this Second Life be an end to something that should be considered infinite. The possibilities are truly limitless when it comes to technology and digital interaction. When was this article written anyway? lol

    14. Cyberpunk fiction and film codi-fied the mood into a tech-noir aesthetic

      What are "cyberpunk fiction" and "tech-noir aesthetic"???

    15. He began with observa-tions of the gamers’ body language

      Studies pertaining to gaming go beyond observations of only body language now--companies employ psychologists to measure pupil dilation, body temperature, sweat to gauge adrenaline levels and emotional arousal, etc.

    16. kung-fu fighting
    17. “reach right through the screen and get with what they were playing with,”

      Psh. Roald Dahl thought of this in 1964 when he wrote about transmitting candy bars through televisions via radio waves in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

    18. Second Life, is run across a grid of servers, each hosting at any given time a small subset of the game’s massive community and keep-ing records of players’ actions in the game

      I can't help but think of how we could apply Freud's ideas of manifest and latent content to digital texts.

    19. The goal is to establish the relation of the character to the text and to its multiple versions and competing interpretations.

      Learning objective for our Billy Budd game?

    20. Texts are the cu-mulative histories of their own receptions.

      Yes, if you're Jauss or Iser.

    21. “[P]eople and machines are both embodied, and the specifica-tions of their embodiments can best be under-stood in the recursive dynamics whereby they coevolve with one another”

      How does something like Google Glass fit here? The machine and the body are essentially joining physically...is that still coevolution?

    22. Economically, cyberspace and the metaverse are images of capitalism.

      Does bitcoin play a role here?

    23. it remains a little like watching what’s going on in the reflection on your train window at the same time that you’re aware of the city going past beyond the window—a multilayered expe-rience of divided attention, at the threshold of the virtual world and the physical world.

      I have nothing specific to say about this excerpt; I just think it's really great prose.

    24. When Second Life is described (as it often is) as another world where you can build anything you can imagine and be anything you desire,

      Rainn Wilson's character on The Office (Dwight Schrute) is seen playing Second Life in the fourth season. Here's the extended, deleted clip, which does an interesting job of commenting on how "real life" affects the game play--it's more obvious if you're familiar with the show, but still.

    1. Playable media” also encompasses a body of work that I want to consider—including the examples above, as well as many other products of the commercial game industry, and also the body of what might be called “playable art.” By “playable art” I primarily mean projects from the digital art community such as Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain (fi g. 5), which invite and structure play

      Speaks to not only interaction but a directed type of interaction that functions in an open space, allowing "players" to not only freely interpret, but also dissect, to poke and prod and see what they find!

    2. open-ended game-like experiences such as Sim City,

      Where players can not only control the characters themselves, but the weather, natural disasters, etc. The God-like omniscience is even stronger here, interestingly enough.

    3. “THISISNOT” and “AGAME” appear in red near the center of the fi rst and second still, respectively.

      Reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project and how the initial movie's promotional trailers were done entirely through the internet, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.

    1. Perhaps, I’m just depraved.* Maybe we can’t all be good. But I wish I hadn’t known that. I wish that I could unsee the things I have seen, be as ignorant as our Handsome Sailor. That’s what makes me envious** of him, see. He doesn’t know of himself, our Handsome Sailor. No malice, no envy…pure bliss. I can’t unsee that, which is why he is foe.

      This is me taking a huge leap in playing the character of Claggart -- in which I am writing his voice under the auspices of him being self-reflective enough to understand the pure polarity, yin-yang relationship he shares with Billy. Most of what the reader understands of Claggart's character and his inner motivations is presented by the narrator in a purely clinical and analytical fashion -- speculative, but not fully grasping the subjectivity within his mentality. Based on what the narrator presents us, along with the differences he shares with the titular character, I'm asserting that Claggart (as someone who is intelligent, and can understand nuance, unlike Billy) is capable of understanding his own psychological motives, and the existential dynamic he is against in his relation to Billy.

    1. That's the worst accusation: that I am not a serious reader. Not guilty! I love books as much as anybody. But I love reading more.

      Good point: serious readers should be defined not by their form of choice but by their content of choice.

    2. You can listen while applying makeup.

      For me, audiobook time was when I used to straighten my hair, which is a boring task that takes forever when your hair is a curly/frizzy as mine. Audiobooks made it slightly more bearable. Clearly, not bearable enough, as I no longer straighten my hair.

    3. Given the enormous storage capacity of the iPhone, I can also have several books waiting their turns

      For me, storage capacity was overshadowed my immediate gratification, which is what I liked about e-readers when they were first popularized. I remember finishing the first book in a series at two in the morning; I was literally able to press a button to purchase and start reading the next installment within two minutes.

    4. In a book about how the present is haunted by the past, I was confronting my old self through the medium of the physical book, still in great condition, still fitting perfectly in my hands.

      The most meta meta that ever did meta.

    5. a text reveals itself differently as the reading context changes

      But it's not just the context that's changing; it's also the medium. Unless context and medium are the same? Or, does context dictate the preferred medium?

    1. On Being a Book Character (and an improsional one at that!) Captain Vere · April 10, 2016 Respond to On Being a Book Character (and an improsional one at that!) SourcePossibly Incomplete Game Description Mantrap: The Billy Budd Game, team 3This game's players are: Jeaninne, Shadika, Niurkalis, Travis, Josie, Ezra. Our "gamified" Billy Budd will be unlike any novel you're read and unlike any game you've played (though for RPG fans, maybe a bit more familiar). Each of us will play one or more roles. Roles can be: "inside" the text of Billy Budd (and remember, it's already … Ah

      improvisional* oops - don't think there's a way to edit text after posting.

    1. multimedia and multimodal forms onlin

      the rebus, derobed

    2. the ability to formally instantiate that marked-up document

      Makes me think of the way in which there is sometimes more literary juice flowing when one is working in a word processor versus a piece of paper