Below are links to some of the projects students in my English 121 class completed (Winter 2015). For the presentation I gave at the CSDH/SCHN and ACH conference in Ottawa (June 2015), click here. For the (shorter version of this) presentation I gave at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria (June 2015), click here.…
From the April 1985 issue of Electronic Games Magazine (via the Internet Archive): “Start an Electronic Novel by reading the opening chapters in the hard-cover book, and then go directly into the story. As the asynchronous real-time universe unfolds, your actions determine the direction and the outcome of this imaginative journey. You can’t get tired…
-fascinating memoir here by J.M. Graetz from the August 1981 issue of Creative Computing about the development of the ‘first’ computer game, Spacewar. Talks about the importance of Edward E. Smith’s Skylark and Lensman science fiction novels.
-worked through Stephen Ramsay‘s wonderful “Algorithmic Criticism” article in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. A great article which pushes textual analysts to do more with the data produced by their clever computational systems–to go beyond the data outputs and ask new questions, produce new critical interpretations of literary texts, not simply data-sets. Ramsay’s article…
-On the suggestion of committee member Paul Hjartarson, I’ve been working through (the always excellent) Alan Liu’s (excellent) 2012 article for Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, “The State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique.” Liu points to many resources that sound both interesting and useful (that is, generally interesting and useful…
-Working through old notes from N.K. Hayles’s texts. Her account of the cybernetic theory of the transmission of information (in How We Became Posthuman) emphasizes the importance of both the sender and the receiver (neither of which are necessarily human, but both of which are necessarily embodied). The inclusion of the receiver parallels the importance…
-What are the formal characteristics in cyberpunk that are evident in digital spaces? -Working through a collection of notes from K.N. Hayles’s wonderful texts. These, in many ways, will serve as the spine of my project (I suspect). -Uncertainty: is this what might be measured empirically in readers and digital space residents? In cyberpunk, readers…
-working through “Sciencepunk” by Bailenson et al. Some good stuff. Reference to Norman Badler’s paper, “Avatars a la Snow Crash, which was delivered at a VR conference in 1998. The paper is available here (as a .pdf). -Also mentions the book “True Names” and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, which is apparently edited by…
-requested Technoscience and Cyberculture, edited by Stanley Aronowitz. I’ve been digging into the Krokers’ wonderful Critical Digital Studies and realizing that my favourite parts are those written by Arthur and Marilousie. Technoscience and Cyberculture contains a chapter by Arthur, titled “The Theory of the Virtual Class,” which sounds interesting. -discovered an article that seems to…
-requested the book Analysing Media texts, edited by Marie Gillespie and Jason Toynbee. David Hesmondhalgh (in The Cultural Industries) says that it contains a “survey of some of the main techniques for analysing media texts” (45). Perhaps such techniques will provide clues about how one might test users’ responses to virtual spaces (if an empirical…
digitalfictional 