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Nele Noppe

Hypertext fiction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Hypertext_fiction

literature hypertext phd phd_unfinished

shared by Nele Noppe on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in "literature" and reader interaction[1].
Nele Noppe

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books - 0 views

weekly.ahram.org.eg/...bo3.htm

umberto_eco literature internet open_work phd phd_unfinished

shared by Nele Noppe on 15 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The WWW is the Great Mother of All Hypertexts, a world-wide library where you can, or you will in short time, pick up all the books you wish. The Web is the general system of all existing hypertexts. Such a difference between text and system is enormously important,
  • Today there are new hypertextual poetics according to which even a book-to-read, even a poem, can be transformed to hypertext. At this point we are shifting to question two, since the problem is no longer, or not only, a physical one, but rather one that concerns the very nature of creative activity, of the reading process, and in order to unravel this skein of questions we have first of all to decide what we mean by a hypertextual link.
  • Notice that if the question concerned the possibility of infinite, or indefinite, interpretations on the part of the reader, it would have very little to do with the problem under discussion.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • No: what are presently under consideration are cases in which the infinity, or at least the indefinite abundance of interpretations, are due not only to the initiative of the reader, but also to the physical mobility of the text itself, which is produced just in order to be re-written. In order to understand how texts of this genre can work we should decide whether the textual universe we are discussing is limited and finite, limited but virtually infinite, infinite but limited, or unlimited and infinite.
  • First of all, we should make a distinction between systems and texts. A system, for instance a linguistic system, is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given natural language.
  • If you are able to use an English dictionary well you could write Hamlet, and it is by mere chance that somebody did it before you. Give the same textual system to Shakespeare and to a schoolboy, and they have the same odds of producing Romeo and Juliet.
  • Grammars, dictionaries and encyclopaedias are systems: by using them you can produce all the texts you like. But a text itself is not a linguistic or an encyclopaedic system. A given text reduces the infinite or indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a closed universe.
  • A text castrates the infinite possibilities of a system.
  • Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, but it is certain that it will never provide you with a demonstration of Fermat's last theorem, or with the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of many deconstructionists was to believe that you can do anything you want with a text. This is blatantly false.
  • How can hypertextual strategies be used to "open" up a finite and limited text?
  • The first possibility is to make the text physically unlimited, in the sense that a story can be enriched by the successive contributions of different authors and in a double sense, let us say either two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally. By this I mean that given, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood, the first author proposes a starting situation (the girl enters the wood) and different contributors can then develop the story one after the other, for example, by having the girl meet not the wolf but Ali Baba, by having both enter an enchanted castle, having a confrontation with a magic crocodile, and so on, so that the story can continue for years. But the text can also be infinite in the sense that at every narrative disjunction, for instance, when the girl enters the wood, many authors can make many different choices. For one author, the girl may meet Pinocchio, for another she may be transformed into a swan, or enter the Pyramids and discover the treasury of the son of Tutankhamen. This is today possible, and you can find on the Net some interesting examples of such literary games.
  • AT THIS POINT one can raise a question about the survival of the very notion of authorship and of the work of art, as an organic whole. And I want simply to inform my audience that this has already happened in the past without disturbing either authorship or organic wholes.
  • Yet, there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing infinite and unlimited texts and the existence of already produced texts, which can perhaps be interpreted in infinite ways but are physically limited. In our same contemporary culture we accept and evaluate, according to different standards, both a new performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new Jam Session on the Basin Street theme. In this sense, I do not see how the fascinating game of producing collective, infinite stories through the Net can deprive us of authorial literature and art in general. Rather, we are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will coexist with the interpretation of already written texts. I like this. But we cannot say that we have substituted an old thing with a new one. We have both.
  • I have tried desperately to find an instance of unlimited and finite textual situations, but I have been unable to do so. In fact, if you have an infinite number of elements to play with why limit yourself to the production of a finite universe? It's a theological matter, a sort of cosmic sport, in which one, or The One, could implement every possible performance but prescribes itself a rule, that is, limits, and generates a very small and simple universe.
  • A hypertext can give the illusion of opening up even a closed text: a detective story can be structured in such a way that its readers can select their own solution, deciding at the end if the guilty one should be the butler, the bishop, the detective, the narrator, the author or the reader. They can thus build up their own personal story. Such an idea is not a new one.
  • All these physically moveable texts give an impression of absolute freedom on the part of the reader, but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom.
  • n contrast, a stimulus-text that provides us not with letters, or words, but with pre-established sequences of words, or of pages, does not set us free to invent anything we want. We are only free to move pre-established textual chunks in a reasonably high number of ways.
  • At the last borderline of free textuality there can be a text that starts as a closed one, let us say, Little Red Riding Hood or The Arabian Nights, and that I, the reader, can modify according to my inclinations, thus elaborating a second text, which is no longer the same as the original one, whose author is myself, even though the affirmation of my authorship is a weapon against the concept of definite authorship. The Net is open to such experiments, and most of them can be beautiful and rewarding. Nothing forbids one writing a story where Little Red Riding Hood devours the wolf. Nothing forbids us from putting together different stories in a sort of narrative patchwork. But this has nothing to do with the real function and with the profound charms of books.
  • A BOOK OFFERS US A TEXT which, while being open to multiple interpretations, tells us something that cannot be modified.
  • Alas, with an already written book, whose fate is determined by repressive, authorial decision, we cannot do this. We are obliged to accept fate and to realise that we are unable to change destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such inventive activity will be implemented in the schools of the future. But the already and definitely written novel War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of our imagination, but with the severe laws governing life and death.
  • That is what every great book tells us, that God passed there, and He passed for the believer as well as for the sceptic. There are books that we cannot re-write because their function is to teach us about necessity, and only if they are respected such as they are can they provide us with such wisdom. Their repressive lesson is indispensable for reaching a higher state of intellectual and moral freedom.
  • Its model is not so much a straight line as a real galaxy where everybody can draw unexpected connections between different stars to form new celestial images at any new navigation point.
  • Even after the invention of printing, books were never the only instrument for acquiring information. There were also paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and so on. Simply, books have proved to be the most suitable instrument for transmitting information.
  • Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete.
  • Then they are books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopaedias.
  • There are two sorts of book: those to be read and those to be consulted.
  • Yet, can a hypertextual disk or the WWW replace books to be read? Once again we have to decide whether the question concerns books as physical or as virtual objects. Once again let us consider the physical problem first.
  • Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.
  • TWO NEW INVENTIONS, however, are on the verge of being industrially exploited. One is printing on demand: after scanning the catalogues of many libraries or publishing houses a reader can select the book he needs, and the operator will push a button, and the machine will print and bind a single copy using the font the reader likes. This will certainly change the whole publishing market.
  • Simply put: every book will be tailored according to the desires of the buyer, as happened with old manuscripts.
  • Alas, if by chance one hoped that computers, and especially word processors, would contribute to saving trees, then that was wishful thinking. Instead, computers encourage the production of printed material. The computer creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed documents.
Nele Noppe

Electronic Literature: What is it? - 0 views

eliterature.org/elp.html

literature hypertext open_work phd phd_unfinished to_read

shared by Nele Noppe on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • the practices, texts, procedures, and processual nature of electronic literature require new critical models and new ways of playing and interpreting the works.
  • "literature" has always been a contested category.
  • To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast "digital born," a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer
  • At the same time, because electronic literature is normally created and performed within a context of networked and programmable media, it is also informed by the powerhouses of contemporary culture, particularly computer games, films, animations, digital arts, graphic design, and electronic visual culture
  • Digital technologies are now so thoroughly integrated with commercial printing processes that print is more properly considered a particular output form of electronic text than an entirely separate medium. Nevertheless, electronic text remains distinct from print in that it literally cannot be accessed until it is performed by properly executed code
  • immediacy of code to the text's performance is fundamental to understanding electronic literature, especially to appreciating its specificity as a literary and technical production
  • How to maintain such conventional narrative devices as rising tension, conflict, and denouement in interactive forms where the user determines sequence continues to pose formidable problems for writers of electronic literature, especially narrative fiction.
  • . "Giving the audience access to the raw materials of creation runs the risk of undermining the narrative experience," she writes, while still acknowledging that "calling attention to the process of creation can also enhance the narrative involvement by inviting readers/viewers to imagine themselves in the place of the creator.
  • Hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, "codework," generative art and the Flash poem are by no means an exhaustive inventory of the forms of electronic literature, but they are sufficient to illustrate the diversity of the field, the complex relations that emerge between print and electronic literature, and the wide spectrum of aesthetic strategies that digital literature employs
  • . Such close critical attention requires new modes of analysis and new ways of teaching, interpreting, and playing. Most crucial, perhaps, is the necessity to "think digital," that is, to attend to the specificity of networked and programmable media while still drawing on the rich traditions of print literature and criticism.
  • One problem with identifying the hyperlink as electronic literature's distinguishing characteristic was that print texts had long also employed analogous technology in such apparati as footnotes, endnotes, cross-reference, and so on, undermining the claim that the technology was completely novel. Perhaps a more serious problem, however, was the association of the hyperlink with the empowerment of the reader/user. As a number of critics have pointed out, notably Espen J. Aarseth, the reader/user can only follow the links that the author has already scripted.
  • ergodic literature
  • The shortcomings of importing theoretical assumptions developed in the context of print into analyses of electronic media were vividly brought to light by Espen J. Aarseth's important book Cybertext: Explorations of Ergodic Literature.
  • ," texts in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text"
  • The deepest and most provocative for electronic literature is the fifth principle of "transcoding," by which Manovich means the importation of ideas, artifacts, and presuppositions from the "cultural layer" to the "computer layer" (46).
  • arguing that print texts also use markup language, for example, paragraphing, italics, indentation, line breaks and so forth.
  • Complementing studies focusing on the materiality of digital media are analyses that consider the embodied cultural, social, and ideological contexts in which computation takes place.
  • electronic literature can be seen as a cultural force helping to shape subjectivity in an era when networked and programmable media are catalyzing cultural, political, and economic changes with unprecedented speed.
  • Liu urges a coalition between the "cool" — designers, graphic artists, programmers, and other workers within the knowledge industry — and the traditional humanities, suggesting that both camps possess assets essential to cope with the complexities of the commercial interests that currently determine many aspects of how people live their everyday lives in developed societies.
  • The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information
  • Realizing this broader possibility requires that we understand electronic literature not only as an artistic practice (though it is that, of course), but also as a site for negotiations between diverse constituencies and different kinds of expertise.
  • Nele Noppe on 08 Sep 10
     
    Hayles
Nele Noppe

The Future of the Book - 0 views

74.125.155.132/scholar

umberto_eco internet technology reading open_work fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 10 Jan 10 - No Cached
  • The present and the forthcoming young generation is and will be a computer- oriented generation. The main feature of a computer screen is that it hosts and displays more alphabetic letters than images.
  • Moreover, the new generation is trained to read at an incredible speed. An old-fashioned university professor is today incapable of reading a computer screen at the same speed as a teenager
  • I am a rare-book collector, and I feel delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles that took one page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina Wertmuller's movies. The introductions were several pages long. They started with elaborate courtesy formulas praising the ideal addressee, usually an emperor or a pope, and lasted for pages and pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the virtues of the text to follow. If baroque writers read our contemporary scholarly books they would be horrified. Introductions are one-page long, briefly outline the subject matter of the book, thank some national or international endowment for a generous grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible by the love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children, and credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We understand perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals revealed by those few lines, the hundreds of nights spent underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers eaten in a hurry.... But I imagine that in the near future we will have three lines saying "W/c, Smith, Rockefeller," which we will decode as "I thank my wife and my children; this book was patiently revised by Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller Foundation." That would be as eloquent as a baroque introduction. It is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The quest for a new and surviving literacy ought not to be the quest for a preinformatic quantity. The enemies of literacy are hiding elsewhere
  • the radical mistake of irresponsible deconstructionists or of critics like Stanley Fish was to believe that you can do everything you want with a text. This is blatantly false. Busa's hypertext on the Aquinas corpus is a marvelous instrument, but you cannot use it to find out a satisfactory definition of electricity.
  • Then there is the third possibility, the one outlined by Michael Joyce. We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can add something, and you can implement a sort of jazzlike unending story. At this point the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to implement free creativity. As the author of The Open Work I can only hail such a possibility. However there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing texts and the existence of produced texts. We shall have a new culture in which there will be a difference between producing infinitely many texts and interpreting precisely a finite number of texts. That is what happens in our present culture, in which we evaluate differently a recorded performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new instance of a New Orleans jam session
  • The problem is in saying that we have replaced an old thing with another one; we have both, thank God. TV zapping is an activity that has nothing to do with reading a movie
  • Debray has reminded us that the invention of the photograph has set painters free from the duty of imitation.
  • Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has freed literature from certain narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform. But if there is something like postmodern literature, it exists because it has been largely influenced by comic strips or cinema. This means that in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else
Nele Noppe

Interview with Umberto Eco (Coppock) - 0 views

carbon.ucdenver.edu/...eco.html

internet literature umberto_eco games fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 15 Jan 10 - Cached
  • "Do you think this might lead to new forms of literature?" I have been using a fantastic hypertext for the last 30 years. It is called Scrabble. Isn't it true that with Scrabble you can compose every possible cross link, every combination of sentences. It's a nice game, it can have educational purposes. Sometimes my wife who is German learned part of her English lexicon by playing Scrabble. Sometimes we play Scrabble in English, or in French. OK, but if you are a poet you have your mental Scrabble. You don't need the board to do it. It is the same I think for all those kinds of games. They can be very nice to play. So, I repeat: they can be used for training people in inventing and composing, but they have nothing to do, according to me, with the future of literature.
  • At the present state of the art, if I had to bet all the money I have in my pocket, I would bet more on hyper-systems more than on hypertext.
  • Then, when you read a serious book on Cremonini, first you discover that Cremonini was a great mind of this time, even though he was not an innovator like Gallileo, and that it isn't true that he refused to look into the binocular. He just said: "At the present state of technology, those lenses are very rudimentary, so I don't think that they can really help me to see something more." It was an objection to the present primitive state of the art. So what I am making now is probably a statement that we are still at a primitive state of the art. I have not been interested up to now to try virtual reality. Because until it is possible to make love to Marilyn Monroe; until the moment that her clothes start floating away - well, then at that moment I will try! But as long as it is just a sketch of Marilyn Monroe, and I can have the real sensation elsewhere, then the state of the art is so primitive that I prefer to wait, that's all! If you offer me this possibility soon, or better still, if you offer me this possibility when I am 80, I will be enthusiastic about the innovation, and I will become a fanatic supporter!
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But that's why I say that at this point I have the impression that it is most interesting for educational and training purposes, rather than for providing real new aesthetic experiences.
Nele Noppe

Electronic literature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Electronic_literature

literature hypertext open_work phd phd_unfinished

shared by Nele Noppe on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • N. Katherine Hayles discusses the topic in the online article Electronic Literature: What Is It. She argues in her 2008 text Electronic Literature that, "electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast 'digital born,' and (usually) meant to be read on a computer."[1]
  • Computer art installations which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects
  • Nele Noppe on 08 Sep 10
     
    N. Katherine Hayles discusses the topic in the online article Electronic Literature: What Is It. She argues in her 2008 text Electronic Literature that, "electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast 'digital born,' and (usually) meant to be read on a computer."[1]
Nele Noppe

JSTOR: Narrative, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 21-39 - 0 views

www.jstor.org/20107227

internet literature open_work fanficforensics phd

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    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 31 Jan 10
       
      Let me begin with a claim: literary theory and criticism are shot through with assumptions specific to print, although they have not been recognized as such. Only now, as the vibrant new medium of electronic textuality is asserting its presence, are these assumptions coming into view. O
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