Multimodal Scholarship: Blogging, Pedagogy...

...and-so-on, etc.

It's my turn to engender discussion.

From our post-hypertext vantage points (which position we've decorously earned having traversed the vast regions of post-print data-dump poetry, ludology, fanfic, digital archives -- oh, and not to forget Angry Birds), I wonder if we feel like we've already been there when it comes to LFYT.  YouTube is a mess?  Absolutely.  User-produced content/ratings and view counts facilitates convergence?  Of course: it was only a matter of time (speaking of which, we shouldn't forget niconico dōga).  Comparatively speaking, as a database it doesn't come to close to more heavily "curated" sites like WWP and Project Gutenberg (nor, if you're interested, Aozora bunko; check out the English-language Wikipedia page here); although, a YouTube plunge certainly feels like Caren Kaplan's Precision Targets, and it certainly brings one into the sort of corporate synergy that we saw at thisibelieve.org and poets.org.  Ultimately, following a link at the latter to Amazon.com breeds no less irony than watching a Fox Friends interview with Juhasz about LFYT on YouTube.

If we hadn't yet thought of ourselves so, I suppose we should now pose the question: have we become Digital Humanists? Maybe it could be argued that one's fate was sealed with Duck Hunt (or, duly replace with alternative canonical game), but whatever the case the issue no longer seems to me to lie with "Yes/No" but somewhere between "Yes, I have a Blogger account" and "Yes, I'm fluent in TEI, I write fanfic, and my next course will feature a Vectors-funded online project."  Reading Hartley's article (among others we've read together), I understand the urgency implicit in such a response as the manic latter to stem from a perceived need to prove one's academic mettle through pedagogy.  This pressure is no doubt felt in the sciences -- I dare you to read Thomas Friedman's latest editorial in the latest NYT Sunday Review (BTW: I'd be remiss not to mention here the latest front-page email scandal and the article announcing Machinima's freakish success with young, web-savvy male consumers) -- and, as in the sciences, implies Hartley, so marches the humanities: "For good or ill, the representation of the human condition migrated decisively from art to science, even as knowledge itself was re-embodied and audiovisualized."  What do we think?  Is Friedman right, for example, to expect academics to fall into step with 21st-century nation-building lest they relinquish, in Fitzpatrick's words, the "prestige and power" that are (supposedly) the trappings of academia in the West?

Perhaps a secondary issue is the perceived Humanities/Science antithesis.  McPherson calls for "a deep engagement with databases and algorithms" -- and in doing so she resonates, seemingly, with many of our readings this quarter that have evoked just such a marriage of math, code and culture.  Is Hartley's "Culture Science" our panacea?  Will it convince UW computer science students to collaborate with us newly-minted Digital Humanists?

Arcade Fire's "The Wilderness Downtown" Project

Incorporating HTML5 (with the aid of Google Labs), the Canadian indie-rock band, The Arcade Fire, released this short interactive "film" ahead of their 2010 album.  When you enter your (childhood) address into the search bar on the main page, you're treated to a music video that uses your childhood home to illustrate the track's nostalgia and sense of loss/change.  Listeners were encouraged to submit letters to their youthful selves and those heartfelt postcards were sent across the country in addition to being incorporated in the band's live show via video projection.

I highly encourage all of you to check out the site/film for yourself.  I was just exploring the Walt Whitman archive which, for whatever reason, called to mind this project and I knew I had to share it right away.

High standards and vast opportunities

The readings this week express a tension in the academic community between a traditional commitment to high standards in editorial practice and an acknowledgement of the unprecedented diversity of opportunities provided by the digital landscape. McGann describes the web as a “petrie dish for humanities sites” and reminds us that by comparison, “scholars commit themselves to developing and maintaining rigorous standards for critical procedures and critical outcomes.” Flanders echoes this hierarchizing sentiment when she situates the WWP “among a group of digital anthologies that have adopted the most rigorous practices.” Yet, McGann argues that “texts remain, in the last analysis, ambiguous,” and Flanders concludes with an argument for “capturing editorial decisions not as finalities but as contingencies, with important effects.” Fraistat and Jones are interested in the potential for “interactions between the poem and the network,” and envision “potentially infinite expansion of the traditional editorial apparatus.” But Rosenberg holds back; perhaps the most clearly articulated statement on this tension is found in the protective tone of his introduction:

The most important point to be made about any digital documentary edition is that the editors' fundamental intellectual work is unchanged. Editors must devote the profession's characteristic, meticulous attention to selection, transcription, and annotation if the resulting electronic publication is to deserve the respect given to modern microfilm and print publications. At the same time, it is abundantly clear that a digital edition presents opportunities well beyond the possibilities of film and paper.

Do you share Rosenberg’s metrics for “respect” in your scholarly and/or online reading and research practices? Do you find the arguments for shared, rigorous editing practices to be persuasive? Do you find the web exciting in its haphazard connections and sprawl and/or did you feel at home in this discourse of critical procedures and critical outcomes? Finally, what were your observations on the digital projects we viewed?

Does the post-apocalyptic blogosphere = reddit? oh god...

I am 85% sure that this is my blogging week...so here we go! First off, I hope Angry Birds is going really well for everyone.  I, for one, repeatedly threw my phone into my pillow in frustration last night but I like to think that means I was just having a really great time.

Like Robert last week, I've been almost entirely incapacitated this weekend due to flu so I hope this post makes a certain kind of sense.

Wanted to link you all to a fine piece over at Salon re: Wikipedia and the burgeoning practice of paid content.  The piece starts out with some high praise for Wikipedia and its inception as a kind of "utopian ideal" of open/crowd-sourced knowledge for all.  Anyone who grew up with Wikipedia probably has a more complex relationship with it than that--as the citation of last resort or as a site more valuable for its footnotes than its actual content.

Regardless, Salon seems to think that the commercialization of Wikipedia will lead to certain doom indicative of Web 2.0 as a whole--that this entire internet project of open source knowledge production is in jeopardy. I tend to be more critical of that assessment of the situation, particularly in light of the subjects the article highlights: paid editors who publicly acknowledge their status as such.

However, the piece gets at a problem discussed in Henry Jenkins' "Cultural Logic of Media Convergence" piece from last week.  Namely, how will the web change if its economy transitions from a gift economy to a commercial economy mirroring our IRL economics; furthermore, if that transition has already largely occurred, what (if any) are consumer alternatives? 

Will we, the consumers, suffer from "higher barriers of entry to the cultural marketplace" or will another system rise up to replace it?  What will web 3.0 look like and are we gradually getting further and further away from some initial, lawless cyberspace utopia or is that just cynicism typical of an aging first-generation of web users??  Do we really want Reddit to be the arbiters of consumption on the internet or will we retreat to a familiar economy of regulation that we understand?

Narrative rules!

Sorry I’m late posting. I have been incapacitated by some manner of feverish bug since late last week. Hopefully this post isn’t completely apart from what was discussed today in class; if it is, I hope the divergence is productive. Lastly, I had hoped to make this a bit shorter, but this is what I ended up with. Pick and choose where you’d like to engage me, if at all – my thoughts on this are multifarious and scattered.

The slugfest between ludology and narratology (“There was no slugfest!” pipes an indignant Mr. Bogost) now sufficiently abated, we are left with a somewhat more nuanced view of the interplay between systems of rules and narratives in video games. According to Bogost, the torchbearer is not Aarseth, but Juul, who in his earnest syncretism admits that a game can be meaningfully ludic and fictive. What a relief!

As an avid consumer of single-player, story-driven games, it was difficult for me to even humor the idea that video games narratives could be, as Eskelinen reductively has it, “just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games,” “marketing tools” devoid of meaning. I knew this couldn’t be the case. I cut my teeth on Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, Xenogears and Star Ocean—games that exist to immerse the player in a fantastical story. And yet, I also knew that the gameness of games could not reside in traditional narrative. It would have to be a very specific kind of game narrative, or else (as Roger Ebert argues*) the game would simply be a representation of another form.

At the moment, I tend toward the school of thought that says a game is inescapably a kind of narrative. I am not speaking of the sweeping plots of a 100-hour long RPG, but the inherent quality of a game, be it Monopoly or Texas Hold ‘Em or a Halo frag-fest. It begins, it twists, it rises, it climaxes, and it often even settles into a dénouement (that sad realization, some time before the actual end of a game, that someone else has already won). The form and action of each game tells its own story. This is to say nothing of the fact that most classic games (though, to be honest, I’ve done no research at all on the topic) seem to have originated as simulations of warfare—born from narrative.

If I am on the right track, I believe there is an exciting distinction to draw here between the narrative inescapably enacted by the game system and the “story” rendered on top of it. This is difficult to illustrate with a modern game, but take Tetris, for example. As much as someone like Aarseth may decry me for saying so, I believe there is a meaningful (if hardly singular) narrative to Tetris. But what would happen if the creators decided to superimpose a new canonic narrative atop it? What would it mean? And what happens if that new narrative clashes with the existing narrative order? Would it resemble the poetry of an amateur, in which the sounds clash disharmoniously with the themes? I am still working out this idea, but I think it can be effectively demonstrated that there are games that enact one narrative by way of gameplay and another clashing narrative “story.”

Bogost, for his part, wants to blow the whole house down. He applies Levi Bryant’s flat ontology to what he sees as the hierarchized ontology of video games (giving primacy to the rules, privileging the player-game relationship), opening up a vast array of new meaningful connections to explore. To some extent he shares an ideal in common with Steven Jones, who also wants to expand out and away from the ludic model. Jones adopts Genette’s concept of paratext, opening it up to refer to the complete production and reception of the work by players, reviewers, fans, critics, and so on.

Operating from a new textual studies angle, he applies the pivot away from authorial absoluteness and textual authority in books to video games: our studies should “break the hermetic seal of the text” (a phrase he deploys with some frequency) in order “to interpret across the boundary dividing the formal aesthetic object from the social world into which it is received” (93).

His main concern does indeed lie with the social world of the game and the gamer. I will leave you with what I think is the best distillation of Jones’ very valuable work, with just one caution. By placing all his eggs in the basket of social, “threshold” gaming, Jones is doing no small injustice to the immensely successful and innovative field of immersive single-player RPGs. These are not “Where’s the Cheetos?” type experiences—these are head-first dives into fully absorptive worlds. Jones seems aware that he is short-changing certain types of gaming experiences, offering the defense that shallow gaming is the norm. Maybe—but immersion-gaming is no niche.

            “As with the complex verbal texts we study, we need to understand games such as Halo as existing at the center of a kind of spreading possibility space, a multidimensional virtual grid running off in many directions, the imagined vectors of any number of possible moves, performances, or instances of gameplay, all of which are contained, in potential, within the “code” of the object itself, whether or not any particular state of the game or sector of the grid is activated at any particular time.” -S. Jones

*http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html

Digital Humanities Summer Institute: Tuition Scholarships

Hi all,

Tuition scholarships for DHSI are still available. Check out this link!

http://dhsi.org/scholarships.php

Demystifying Digital Humanities Workshop Link

If you can't make it to the Demystifying Digital Humanities workshops this quarter,  highlights are posted here:

http://www.paigemorgan.net/demystifyingDH/updates/

The first session was fun, around thirty-five people, free breakfast plus biscuits. But I know, 9:30 AM on Saturday is tricky. Next Saturday is "professionalizing your online social presence".