Version 6.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

The absolute highlight of my time at MLA09 was the night panel on transmedia narratives. I finally got to meet my friend Christy Dena and also catch up with some other friends. Here are my notes:

Marc Ruppel

• The biggest shift in storytelling has been multiplatform narratives
• What are they? digital/analog, oral/audio, etc
• Examples of transmedia narratives: Lost, Buffy The Vampire Slayer series eight comic, etc
• Connectivity: Edges as transactional spaces
• Reading paths, instead of just left to right now…(It’s refreshing to hear this; I’ve been saying this for a long time!!!)

Migratory cues:

• Direct-URLs, books, phone numbers, business cards (the series Heroes was the example for some of these)
• Intermedial-Direct prescence of one site’s content in anothers
• Intersectional-One site reflects and approximates momentary events of another
• Often used in combination
• Visualize network as a whole

Christy Dena

• Presence of narrative and nonnarrative
• Jenkins transmedia storytelling definition
• Transmedia fiction definition: stories and games
• Distributed narratives, Jill Walker-Rettberg definition
• Jane McGonigal/Ubiquitous Gaming
• Jesper Juul/Definition of “game” (I wrote about that once)
• Fictional world is transmodel

After this, I just sat and listened to everything Christy was saying. Her work is fascinating and close to what I originally wanted to write about in my Master’s Thesis before sliding to something more “Englishy” (see about Distributed Narrative)

I also asked a question to Marc and Christy about the role of canon in fan culture. Specifically, I was curious how they regarded fan fiction and spinoff noncanonical media in regards to their examples of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who. The BTVS series eight comic is pretty established as canonical, but what about Doctor Who where there are numerous comics, Big Finish audios, and other things where their place in the canon is murky at best. Both Marc and Christy said that trying to decipher between all of that just wasn’t worth doing, so they regards everything in the same manner. I can certainly understand that.

Afterwards, while catching up with Christy, we also talked about the defining of new terms which she does in her work. While writing my Master’s Thesis, I had trouble enough with resistance to terms like ergodic, distributed narrative, hypertext, etc. Christy is creating new terms as she goes.

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I’ve heard a lot about Wordle lately and after seeing Prof Hacker’s recent post about I thought I would create a Wordle of my Master’s Thesis from last year. A lot of pretty obvious words come up highlighted or repeated enough to take up a lot of space in the Wordle. Prof Hacker has some links to more textual analysis webpages and articles; eventually, I’d like to look into this more when I have the time.

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In its original draft, this was part of the introduction to my MA thesis.  After some discussion, I ended up pulling this out to keep my thesis more focused on the matters at hand.  I really like what I wrote here so I decided to excerpt it on my domain for my readers.  I wrote this right around this time last year.

Everything I found in electronic literature upon discovery, the intellectual aesthetic and interplay with computers, which had been my cherished companion since childhood, I had been looking, searching, for in my literary studies.  As a child I had played some text adventures, known as interactive fiction, and certainly remember their printed cousins the Choose Your Own Adventure book. I loved how interactive those books were and the agency which readers were given to decide their own fate and reading path.  Growing up, I had a lot of problems with motor development and coordination.  This led to many other problems including very poor penmanship. A wise teacher, when I was in elementary school, suggested my parents buy me a computer. She claimed that I would end up ahead of the curve because personal computers were going to takeover classrooms before I left for college. Wisely, my parents took her advice and purchased an Apple II for me to do my school work on and, because I did not play well with other children, to have an outlet for play and creativity.

Long before I became an avid reader in my teens, my creativity came almost exclusively from computers. Game designer Jane McGonigal’s recent weblog post about her experience creating detailed narratives out of Apple II games that did not already have them like Summer Games brought back memories from my own childhood. I had a similar experience at almost the same time by creating forms in a word processing program with different countries and names. I created brief backgrounds for each character and had them compete against each other on screen. Scandal, same gender romance, athletic achievement, and other intrigues played out in this interpretation of my gaming experience. I would not call that literature, obviously, but I tell this story to show how my creativity was electronically nourished before I embraced print culture later in my teens.

I have been on the Internet since sometime in early 1995. Immediately I became involved with participatory online culture by writing fan fiction, posting to newsgroups and listservs, chatting on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and, on and off, creating journals which nowadays would be called a weblog. At the same time, I published print based punk rock fanzines periodically until 2005 when I began Signifying Nothing, a webzine, archive of my earlier fanzines, and podcast devoted to my endeavors in hardcore punk which continue to this day.

My interest in electronic literature came to fruition while taking a senior seminar on postmodernism with Scott Rettberg in the spring of 2004. While being turned onto writers like Italo Calvino, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, and theorists like George Landow, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva I realized that not only were these fiction writers exactly what I had longed for all of my life from literature, but the bridge between literary theory I fell in love with from Kristeva and Barthes, which I had struggled with until this time, and computers which Landow and others like Rettberg himself bridged via their theories was a dream come true. The beginning years of my college career were filled with frustration, failure, and difficulty. The first step of my recovery came when I embraced electronic literature.

Reading hypertext fiction and the theories of Barthes and Kristeva in Rettberg’s seminar improved my readings of previously read authors like Faulkner, Woolf, and Wallace. I began researching electronic literature and exploring the links on Rettberg’s weblog. Through these links I was able to explore the work of other hypertext and New Media theorists like Nick Montfort, Angela Thomas, and Jill Walker. I experimented with and clicked through Rettberg’s hypertext novel, The Unknown, and began actively participating in the sticker novel he authored with Montfort. As the semester wound down, two classmates and myself began our own weblogs, inspired with Rettberg and Walker especially, and I moved mine to its own domain later that summer.

Since the rise of the novel the past few centuries have had some hypertextesque works of literature. Novels like Tristram Shandy, Infinite Jest, and Ulysses can seem to those familiar with the workings of electronic literature to have qualities which “stand out for the first time.” (Landow 1982) When I read Sterne’s novel in an undergraduate course on the history of the novel, I came in one morning and remarked to my professor that the novel had a lot of the qualities of hypertext fiction which I was learning about in Rettberg’s seminar on postmodernism the same semester. Without knowledge of electronic literature I would have never made the connection, which made my reading of Sterne’s novel much more pleasurable. Experimental works of literature like Pavic’s Dictinary Of The Khazars and Nabakov’s Pale Fire also exude qualities which are emphasized by an understanding and familiarity with hypertext and electronic literature.

As Janet Murray argues in Hamlet On The Holodeck: The Future Of Narrative In Cyberspace, “the impending dissolution of Yugoslavia,” in Dictinary Of The Khazars, “is preconfigured by the fragmentary account of a mythical lost tribe” of three separate, conflicting, dictionaries (Murray 37). The “multicursally” seen in Pale Fire has been seen as a branch between not only modernism and postmodernism but as a text that has hypertextesque qualities (Aarseth 8). Writers like Robert Coover, a longtime advocate of electronic literature, Borges, and other postmodernists from France and South America also write literature which embodies many aspects of hypertext fiction.

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After nearly two years of hard work, frustration, anger, thrills, and multitudes of new learning paths gained I present my MA Thesis:

My primary focus, I hope, is on the role of reader agency and how it is affected by hypertext fiction. I used These Waves Of Girls and The Unknown as my primary examples and Dracula as a canonical touchstone.

I’ll have a longer post next week documenting my thoughts about my work, the MA Thesis process, and other issues that crossed my path.

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I am happy to announce that I defended my MA thesis on Monday morning. Overall, it went well with some lively discussion about my work. I am happy to be done: the writing process has been difficult and very trying at times. There are some things about the process, and the constraints of an English program, which I did not forsee. Graduate school ended up involving a lot of things I did not want it to when I began back in January of 2007.

It’s become quite clear that I will not be heading towards a PhD, but in some other direction yet to be determined.

I need to thank again my advisors, Dr. David Tietge and Dr. Liora Brosh for all their help and guidance. This week I will be doing one last set of revisions and then handing in my work for a final grade. No matter the outcome or grade I am glad I went through this process, which has given me a number of research paths to undertake in the future.

Here is a of what I read on Monday. It is very hard to summarize my ideas in fifteen to twenty minutes, but the general idea is there.

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I am happy to announce my participation in this semester’s graduate symposium for our English program at Monmouth. This semester I will be taking part in a round table discussion about academic writing and publishing. It is a great privilege that Dr. Kristin Bluemel will be moderating and my thesis adviser, Dr. David Tietge (no link: ahem), will also be participating.

I will be sure to arrive early to check out Meghan Kutz’s presentation on orientalism in British travel writing. I have had the pleasure of speaking to her about her research and it is quite impressive.

Here is the complete schedule:

LITERATURE MATTERS

Graduate Student Symposium

Monmouth University Department of English

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Wilson Hall, Room 106

PROGRAM

10:00 to 11:30 Session 1: Colonial and Post-Colonial Readings

Moderator: Dr. Sejal Sutaria

Veronica Guevara “Cultural Conflict–or Synthesis? Revised Double Consciousness, Engaged Resistance, and Man’s Relationship with Nature, Time, and Humanity in Vahni Capildeo’s ‘No Traveller Returns’”

Meghan Kutz, “Orientalism in 1930s British Travel Writing on China”

Shanna Williams, “Feminism in Indian Literature”

11:30 to 12:30 Roundtable: Writing and Publishing

Moderator: Dr. Kristin Bluemel

Participants: Dr. Sue Starke, Dr. David Tietge, Sara Van Ness, William P. Wend, Kim Rogers

12:30 to 1:30 Lunch

1:30 to 3:00 Session 2: Literature and Composition Today

Moderator: Dr. Elizabeth Gilmartin

Lisa Pikaard, “Moral Ambiguity in a World in Turmoil: Harry Potter’s Global Implications”

Jenn Ernst, “The Hunter and the Hunted: Drug Use/Abuse and the Failings of the 60s in H. S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”

Jana Phelps, “Amending Writing Composition Instruction to Fulfill the Needs of the Contemporary Student”

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Ada Lovelace Day is an awesome idea going on today to celebrate women in technology. Participants are asked to blog about a woman in technology who has inspired them.

There are so many women I could blog about. To name a few: Angela Thomas, Molly Wood, Christy Dena, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, and so many others. However, the woman who rises above all others in my mind, and for readers of this weblog this should come as no surprise, is Jill Walker-Rettberg.

I first encountered Jill’s work via, her now husband, Scott’s weblog while I was taking his senior seminar on postmodernism in 2004. She blogged about everything I was becoming interested in: weblogs, electronic literature, sticker art, and other emerging forms of New Media. It was her paper on that really was the big “ah ha!” moment for me about New Media. Combining sticker art, literary theory, and reader/user participation the way she did in writing about things like sticker novels and Online Caroline really opened the blinders for me about all of these things.

(Funny story about that article: the day I read it, I met Jill! I was at an event on and I overheard a woman talking to Dr. Tompkins, what sounded like an Australian accent, squinted at her for a moment, and realized who she was. I went over, introduced myself, and embarrassingly gushed about how much I like her weblog and articles. After talking for awhile, she was also very supportive of my then burgeoning hypertext project that would become War Prayers. Seeing a link to it on her weblog a few days later blew my mind at the time.)

Jill’s work with has been extremely influential in how I engage with both print and electronic literature. A lot of the first ideas I engaged with while planning what would become my MA thesis came from the time I spent the holiday break before last spring reading that article over and over.

Even if you don’t care about New Media (how dare you!), Jill’s weblog is filled with useful links. Whether about knitting or motherhood, or social networking, or other weblogs, or anything else I’ve always thought of it as the Boing Boing of New Media. So many websites I read daily I first encountered via her own.

Can I also mention that I have rarely met someone as honestly just flat out nice and engaged as Jill is? I’ve been told by people I am bit overwhelming at times, and don’t doubt it, and she has always been a wonderful person to email with or spend time chatting in person. While writing my thesis she has been helpful and interested in what I was doing with her work, to which I cannot truly state how appreciative I am.

Jill inspires me every time we send messages back and forth on Facebook or when I load her weblog in Google Reader. She even went and married my favorite professor, one of my favorite people ever and now they have a baby together. I wouldn’t be as involved in New Media if it weren’t for Jill’s inspiration. Thank you.

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