jill/txt | I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, a professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen who researches how we tell stories online. I've been blogging since October 2000.
jill/txtI'm Jill Walker Rettberg, a professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen who researches how we tell stories online. I've been blogging since October 2000.
my books
talks and publications Browse my other publications on electronic literature, electronic art and weblogs. I also enjoy speaking in public, for general and specialised audiences, and I've posted summaries of many of my talks and presentations to the blog.
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blogging more
In those feverishly exciting early years of blogging Liz Lawley (a.k.a. mamamusings) was one of my favorite blogging buddies, and I’m excited to see she’s decided to blog more again, rather than leaving ideas and conversations on Facebook or Twitter. Some obvious problems with having most of our conversations on Facebook or Twitter is the forced brevity, that conversations happen in a non-public forum (good in some cases, bad for research though) and that its hard to search or access old conversations, even one’s own, and certainly other peoples’.
I’m going to blog more often, too. When I make time to blog, I not only feel more engaged with my research and teaching and have more interesting ideas, I also quite simply enjoy my job a lot more. Not too surprising, really…
04. January 2012 by Jill
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Can human behaviour be predicted with enough data?
I’m watching a presentation by Albert László Barabási on his book BURSTS: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do, and he’s telling some fascinating stories.
For instance, had you heard of Hasan Elahi, a media artist who after being investigated by the FBI for suspected terrorism (due to unusual travel patterns, among other things) put his entire life online at Tracking Transcience? Here’s a piece Elahi wrote in the New York Times about this project, or you can watch him talk about the project for TED. Actually the information is not very easy for a viewer to put together (he calls it user-unfriendly), but he has fed in a lot of images, his bank records, location, and so forth. The images are very sparse, void of people, factual. There are photos of every toilet he uses, for instance, or every taco he eats near a railway station, all time, location and date-stamped. But apparently, in BURST, Barabási analyses Elahi’s data to see how typical his patterns of movement are.
The reason for the title of BURSTS is that it turns out our behaviour is conglomerated in bursts (around 16 mins into the talk). We have periods where we send lots of emails, or talk on the phone a lot, or visit the library a lot, or even have sex a lot, and then there are gaps where we do these things much less. This actually follows power laws, and is not purely random.
Barabasi also analysed anonymised mobile phone data to analyse how people move around (around 24 mins into the video). He found that if you know the past movements of a person, you can predict their next location with a 93% accuracy. Another interesting point is that there is nobody whose predictability (in terms of location) is less than 80%. (That might actually explain why Foursquare and Gowalla and so on get a little boring after a while.) But ultimately, Barabási argues, with enough data, we might be able to predict all kinds of human behaviour – collapses of stock markets, wars, major historical events, and so on.
BURST has rather poor reviews on Amazon, where it is criticised for having too much story and too little science. Regardless of whether or not you read the book, his 30 minute talk on it is interesting.
04. January 2012 by Jill
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The history of the term “electronic literature”
Names can shape fields. In the proposal for a panel to be held at the MLA this week, Lori Emerson argued that the introduction of the term “electronic literature” by the founding of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999, in fact founded the field by creating “a name, a concept, even a brand with which a remarkably diverse range of digital writing practices could identity: electronic literature,” as Lori explains in a blog post. Seen in this perspective, the first book on electronic literature is Loss Glazier’s Digital Poetics in 2001. This renders invisible the very rich theory and practice of electronic literature before 2001 (as Mark Bernstein has pointed out), which I dislike, but Lori is correct in that a name that a field agrees upon is important in terms of establishing a creative and scholarly field.
The discussion did lead me to wonder when the term electronic literature first became common. Did the ELO really invent it? Fortunately we live in an age where this sort of question can easily be answered, at least partially, so I asked Google.
Google has digitised around 4% of all books ever published (as described by the Culturomics research team in Michel et.al. 2011), and Google’s Ngram viewer allows us to graph the occurrence of terms over time in all those books. Here is a graph showing the rise and fall of “hypertext fiction” (the red line) and the rises of “electronic literature” (the blue line) and “digital poetry” (the yellow line). “Digital literature” (green) is also fairly common, but “e-poetry” just gives us a flat purple line along the bottom of the graph.
Google's ngram viewer allows us to graph the frequency with which different terms for electronic literature were used in books published between 1985 and 2008. The terms are "hypertext fiction", "electronic literature", "digital literature", "digital poetry" and "e-poetry".
As expected, hypertext fiction (the blue line) was the more popular term in the 1990s, but it also retained its dominance for several years into the 2000s. This could show that the new term “electronic literature” took time to gain general acceptance, or it could also simply be a by-product of the slow pace of scholarship and book publishing. By 2008, the term “electronic literature” is still not as popular as “hypertext fiction” was at its peak, although the combined use of all these terms is growing steadily. It is interesting to see how high the use of “hypertext fiction” remains, even after the dominance of “electronic literature, and the rapid rise of “digital poetry” is particularly striking.
A problem with this graph is that the term “electronic literature” was frequently used in the 1980s and 1990s to describe research literature that is in electronic form, and so there are a lot of false positives, especially in this period. In fact, almost all uses of the term before the late 1990s are in this non-literary sense of the word. However, by clicking through and looking at the individual hits for each year I did find a few notable exceptions.
Jay Bolter published an article in 1985 called “The Idea of Literature in the Electronic Medium” (in the journal Topic: Computers in the Libreral Arts, vol. 39, p 23-34) which consistently uses the term electronic literature exactly as we do today. However, he writes as though there are no works of electronic literature yet. In fact, there were works by Roy Ascott (1983), bp nichols (1984), Robert Pinsky (1984) and no doubt others, but these works were not easily accessible or gathered by a shared community. In the article Bolter imagines a future electronic literature, writing that the adventure games of 1985 hold promise, but need better writers:
Electronic literature will never attract serious notice, if it remains at the level of the current adventure game. By the same token, no one would snow consider the motion picture an important art form, if it had remained at the artistic level of the nickelodeon. (page 25)
Bolter goes on to describe a system for allowing writers to write in a word processor (rather than typing into the program code itself) and a children’s version of the Odyssey that “enlists interactive participation”, much as the adventure game does. The described work would require readers to attempt to solve the problems Odysseus faces, changing the course of the story in doing so. He also proposes detective stories and quest literature as suitable genres for treatment in electronic literature.
I was surprised at how clearly Bolter states that “such literature is growing out of th computer games that are so popular today” (page 32), given how strongly authors of the late 1980s and early 1990s worked to distance themselves from games. But he also notes that the Oulipo’s works and concrete poetry are natural allies to the computer, and the possibility of generative electronic literature.
Bolter also uses the term “electronic literature” in his seminal book Writing Space (1991), although by this time, hypertext fiction had become the dominant genre and therefore the more common term.
A 1992 article in The Print Collector’s Newsletter mentions that Eastgate publishes electronic literature. In 1995, Robert Kendall uses the term in an article that presents an overview of electronic literature at the time, presciently titled “Writing for the New Millennium: The Birth of Electronic Literature.” So the term “electronic literature” was in use well before 1999 when the ELO was founded.
A few other interesting finds included a notice in Billboard 14 April 1979 of a conference at UCLA:
I would love to know what kind of electronic literature this was. It’s both exciting and frustrating to have such easy access to such a wealth of partial information!
I’ve written an essay on the early days of electronic literature that will be published in an upcoming special issue of Dichtung Digital that will include a lot of great papers on communities of electronic literature. The graph and some of the discussion are from that essay.
03. January 2012 by Jill
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ja, vi elsker
NRK commissioned this new version of the Norwegian national anthem, Ja vi elsker (Yes, we love this country) from Ole Hamre, the man behind Folkofonen. Go on, watch it, its sweet, with so few words in it that you really don’t need to understand Norwegian to get the gist. In fact, I think the only words other than the title “som vi stiger fram”, a slight twist on the anthem’s second line, “som det stiger fram” (as it [the country] as it rises forth). That’s all most of us actually remember, so it’s fitting, really.
The video was made using Folkofonen, which gathers videos of people singing long tones into a video camera and plays them like an organ of people’s voices and faces. You can play a simple version of Folkofonen yourself – here’s a screenshot.
But this video does more than that. It starts off in a pretty traditional YouTube aesthetics way, starting with one face and adding more singing faces to create a chord. After a while, the white backgrounded faces are joined by others, including a children’s choir, some elderly men in suits and ties, a woman pruning a rose bush in her garden and more. I love the bit where technology is given a voice too – although the choice of heavy industry as representing “the nation” is rather dated.
There’s national romanticism too, with the classic mountains and fjords, although by the time this comes around it seems a little ironical. There’s a brief brief section where the glory of Norway is modified a little by images of beggars and sick people, but fortunately for our moods, we’re able to look away and focus again on the mostly white crowds of individual (mostly though not entirely white) Norwegians singing the anthem on their separate screens. It ends with a young girl winking at the camera, encapsulating the mix of authentic love and emotion with irony that runs through the video.
I love this, despite the many ways in which I could/would criticise it. It would be extremely teachable for thinking about interpretation, metaphors, representations, semiotics and about the remediation of digital genres.
31. December 2011 by Jill
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PhD fellowships advertised at our department – deadline Jan 31, 2012
Three PhD fellowships have just been advertised in our department (deadline Jan 31), and I’m hoping that one of them will go to a Digital Culture scholar. Our department includes Nordic, Comp. lit, Classics and Theatre Studies and Linguistics as well as Digital Culture, and the fellowships are awarded to the best applicants across those disciplines, so that means I’ll be very happy if we get some excellent applications from people in the field of Digital Culture.
Norwegian PhD fellowships are sweet deals if you can get them. As a PhD fellow in Norway you have about the same salary as a nurse or police officer for three years without any teaching or research assistant duties. But unlike PhD programs in some countries, you have to have a project description ready when you apply. In fact, the main thing we assess when selecting from the pool of candidates is the five page project description. Does it seem realistic that it could be completed in three years? How well grounded is it in existing theory and scholarship? Does the applicant appear to know the field? Is there a clear plan for how the research will be conducted? Are any ethical issues addressed?
The other things we look at are your grade from your MA degree. The rules state that an A or a B qualifies you for acceptance to a PhD program, but in reality very few candidates are accepted who don’t have an A. I’ve seen candidates with B on their MAs accepted if they have peer-reviewed scholarly publications in addition to their MA thesis (could be on the same topic, but a publication in addition to the actual thesis itself) – and I suppose a really, really exceptional project description might weigh up for a B on the MA, though I’ve not seen that happen in the three years I’ve been on the committee.
Here’s a description of the application process I wrote a couple of years ago. Things are more or less the same now.
If you’re interested in applying, read the advertisement and get in touch.
15. December 2011 by Jill
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Hilde’s new book
I’m really looking forwards to seeing my good friend and colleague Hilde Corneliussen‘s new book, Gender-Technology Relations: Exploring Stability and Change, which will be out on Palgrave on January 3. Hilde and I co-edited the World of Warcraft anthology together, and have worked and played together for almost three decades now. (No, we’re not that old, but we happened to play in the same youth orchestra as kids. She was a fine cellist!) Here’s the abstract of her new book:
Hilde G. Corneliussen explores developments in gender–technology relations from the 1980s to today. Through empirical material and theoretical discussions, the author addresses popular discourses surrounding the cultural appropriation of personal computers. She presents a study of computer students, following them through their first term at a programming course, and meets women who are fascinated, addicted and even in love with technology. Corneliussen tackles questions concerning the low proportion of women in computing, and explores how this has been dealt with in higher education. By providing insights into historical as well as more recent discussions of gender in relation to computers, this book opens up new perspectives for understanding men and women’s relations to technology.
You can download the first chapter if you’d like to have a look.
14. December 2011 by Jill
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a turn from computational to ecological digital poetry
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Rita Raley’s giving this morning’s keynote at Digital Poetics and the Present, an ELMCIP seminar in Amsterdam, and in a larger discussion titled “Living Letterforms: The Ecological Turn in Contemporary Digital Poetics”, she’s offering a reading of David Jhave Johnston‘s Sooth, a cycle of six video poems, where the reader’s clicks draw out lines of poems superimposed on video that drifts around a natural scene. She argues that Sooth is emblematic of a recent shift in digital poetry towards a concern with ecology, where non-human actors are animate and lively. She describes this as a step away from the intense focus on the code, the technical and computational processes that dominated digital poetry at the start of the last decade.
The lyrical subject valorises his lover in each of these poems, and yet the pieces are grounded in the material world. The subject seeks a connection not only with his lover, but with the natural world. Jhave’s project, Rita Raley argues is to create digital poems that respond as though they are animate, alive. This isn’t about artificial intelligence. It’s not simply about emulating life but about prompting (in us, the readers) an embodied recognition of life.
We’ve added all the papers from the seminar to its entry in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base of Electronic Literature, and will be adding references and documentation after the seminar (slides and hopefully video).
10. December 2011 by Jill
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i fixed my blog!!!
I fixed my blog! I fixed my blog!!
And it only took about two months of whining to anybody who would listen that my ten years of blogging was gone, lost in hyperspace, between an ancient WordPress 2.0.1 install on a legacy university web server and the new version of WordPress on my new host which stupidly couldn’t read my old backups. Finally, the wonderful @daveyinsweden told me to just cut and paste stuff from the mysql file into myphpadmin. Which I had no idea how to do, but really, like most tech stuff, is dead easy once someone shows you and you don’t worry too much about breaking it. Or maybe not exactly dead easy, but at least not completely impossible.
Well. Pretty soon I had 12,000 comments and no posts. So I repasted the posts, and again, and again, and then finally figured out that if I made a new post I could compare the fields and sure enough, the imported ones were lacking a field. A fairly silly field, by the looks of things, but still a field: “Post_type = post”. Once I switched all their post-type’s to being “post” (what else would a post be I wonder?) they showed up with their comments and images and everything! Such joy! Hooray!
Now, I shall sleep, happily.
09. December 2011 by Jill
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haggis colitis (or; a week of grant writing)