Creative-Critical Works

This category was among the first that leapt to mind, since Kim and I are both literature people and particularly because we met through my admiration and critical read of her creative-critical work. The general idea here is to point to that category of work commonly referenced as e-literature and usefully chronicled by the Electronic Literature Organization-- digital creative constructions, the most interesting of which frequently comment upon and even deconstruct their own means of articulation, the electronic medium itself (therefore "critical"). For this reason, as metacognitive, self-analytical texts, we will call them "Creative-Critical." Below is a representative sampling (this is, of course, the barest surface scraping of a rich and varied category). Also I should say that this list likely betrays a certain prejudicial inflection arising from my graduate work with Thom Swiss, editor of The Iowa Review Web. I'm dividing these various works into subcategorization based on development platform in order to facilitate subsequent discussions of preservation/collection issues.

Non-web-enabled:
afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce (the original Hypertext, created using Eastgate Software's Storyspace standalone authoring application)
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (also developed on Storyspace platform)
riverisland by John Cayley (developed using HyperCard standalone app, Mac only)

Web-enabled - using Shockwave Flash and other plugin animation software:
The Minotaur Project by Kim White
Three Proposals for Bottle Imps by William Poundstone
The Dreamlife of Letters by Brian Kim Stefans
Lexia to Perplexia by Talan Memmott

I'd like to add two more examples: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and Tracie Morris' sound poems. The Morris link takes you to a page on Penn Sound, be sure to listen to her poem From Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful which was "exhibited" in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Mass Market Publications

Here we have the most literal reinterpretation of the historical book form: the ebook-- which comes in a variety of forms: variations on software format and technological support platforms. In a free market and with developing technologies this makes for a proliferation of interpretations.

Most commonly, at this stage in their development ebooks exist as downloadable, for-pay files available in different, platform-compatible reader formats for display on personal computers or handheld devices such as pdas and cell phones and, in fewer instances, tablets. A hybrid technology directed at the consumer market, ebooks are for the most part published and produced in the traditional model by divisions of print book publishers like Simon and Schuster as well as software publishers like Microsoft and sold via ebookstores.

Some older texts in the public domain (Treasure Island, Vergil's Aeneid) have been made generally available on the web--the determinant of course being what people will pay to access. Project Gutenberg is notable for its efforts to make a wide selection of (mainly classic) texts available for free to readers (in plain text format).

It seems to me also worth commenting that while ebooks inspired a degree of general interest in 2000-2002, they haven't been making much news more recently (NYTimes article listing). This may or may not be due to debated infelicities of porting a static print-based object to a medium ill-suited to traditional reader practices. Copyright and security "piracy" issues also constitute an area of concern, just as they do with other consumer published media products like music and movies.

Further references:
Wikipedia:Ebook
Internet Public Library
Amazon

Sarah's comment about the falling off of mass-market interest in the ebook is an important point. Her observation that ebooks represent "the most literal reinterpretation of the historical book form" is, in my opinion, precisely the reason for their disappointing growth. Although sales of ebooks continues to rise, (see Open eBook Forum for industry stats), the ebook shows no sign of replacing its print counterpart anytime soon. However, we are beginning to see the emergence of an electronic book-like thing that is more than just a print surrogate. These new book paradigms exploit the unique capacities of the digital medium.

Books as Social Space
The introduction of social software has caused a rapid evolution of the ebook. Mass market social reading spaces like eharlequin are proving successful. The eharlequin website allows readers to interact with Harlequin products in various ways. The site is divided into three sections: read, talk, or shop. The talk section is a virtual community that connects users with readers, authors, or editors. The Reading section features free daily and weekly online novels. There is also a Writing Round Robin which allows readers to co-author an online novel.

Serialization via web, cellphone, or podcast
In 2000, Stephen King began to self-publish an epistolary novel entitled, "The Plant," on his website. The book was released in 5,000-word installments. Readers were asked to donate $1 for each download. This experiment sparked widespread speculation about the future of books and serialization. Judith Shulevitz's Slate article "Will the Future Be Serialized?" gives this interesting assessment of the potential for electronic serialization:

The neo-serial novel would have to be interactive in a deep and thoughtful way, the way Greek poetry and Renaissance theater and the Victorian serial were. The callow interactivity of hypertext novels, in which novelists abdicate their literary responsibility in favor of some vague open-endedness, is not likely to have any lasting appeal.

Serialized narratives are also being delivered via cell phones and podcasts. This format is extremely popular in Asia, but has yet to gain ground in U.S. markets. Please see the microlit thread on if:book for more information.

Electronic Audio Books
The digital audio book is poised to gain a large share of the publishing market. Audible.com whose tagline is "heard any good books lately?" has over 25,000 books, radio shows, newspapers, and magazines available for download.

Multiplayer Storyspaces
Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games like Sims, Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Halo, and others set elaborate stages for playing out user-driven scenarios or co-created stories. Hackers are using these gamespaces to create "live action" narratives that are recorded and exported for sale and syndication. For example: This Spartan Life a talk show in game space.

Ephemera

[email exchange]
sarah to kim:

what counts as "ephemera"?
I've been reading a lot of comic strippy type things online lately...

kim to sarah:

I think of ephemera as: pamphlets, games, invitations, postcards, letters, political cartoons, advertisements and other non-book printed matter that is worth preserving for the cultural information it conveys. The comic strippy things would fit nicely into this category.

---

Here, as elsewhere, it's clear we're starting with a print paradigm and trying to look at the digital realm and work backwards. And once more the dilemmas become quickly evident: what are digital "equivalents" to the print texts, when the two develop for and within such different purposes and contexts? where do we begin and end? Just what qualifies as digital ephemera?

There seem to be two senses of ephemera that are emerging for me as I ponder this category. The first has to do with a text's situation in time-- that is, it's ephemeral, time-responsive and context dependent. The second is less explicitly graspable to me, but the best I can do is call it a quality of slightness.

Least substantial of all, there is the entire ever-shifting, ever-growing and morphing body of palimpsestic, fleeting construction comprised by email and personal web pages to take into account - which has to greater and lesser extents been "preserved" by endeavors like the Internet Archive project's Wayback Machine (which has archived the web from 1996) and specific listerv archives set up by their overseeing institutions (universities, libraries). Of particular note here is Usenet, the original dynamic newsgroup platform dating back the dawn of the internet (1980), which persists, most recently acquired by Google Groups.

At another level of concreteness within this broadly floating sea of the Internet are texts crafted with a formal audience in mind by auteurs-- similar in this sense to our Critical-Creative works, but substantively more "slight" in that problematic sense in which I'm using it here (and by which I intend none: they're my recent favorite works). These objects definitively don't seem to aspire, at least overtly, to the same level of canonical high literary seriousness that the Crititcal-Creative works do. I'm thinking of ephemera in this sense as gorgeous little bits, that are characteristically countercultural and resistant to commodification, like web-based "comics" A Softer World and Return to Sender. Comics as a genre have typically been constructed in the print world as effluvial, serial, and somewhat negligible next to their more monumental cousins, bound books-- however in an age of burgeoning popular appeal and appropriation and proliferation by Hollywood, graphic novels are gaining both momentum and cultural currency in both electronic and paper-based contexts (rendering my use of the descriptor "slight" even more problematic-- and yet I continue to think it's appropriate).

In this ephemera category I'm also placing digital texts that occur explicitly in time and of time: contextual cultural artifacts that respond to a specific sociolinguistic moment and then pass away into obscurity, like the Budweiser "True" beer commercial and its numerous "Whassup?" parodies.

In a pervasive sense, of course, Ephemera is useful simply as a catch-all category for "anything else"-- and likely to grow exponentially as the drain to a leaky, improvised structure.

• The Brittany Spears' Fetus blog

Collaborative Constructions

The ubiquitous interconnectedness of the world wide web, the nature of exchange taking place in social software environments, and networking behaviors like email and text messaging, have spawned a type of book that incorporates these new modes of thinking, imagining, understanding, and interacting. I've been calling this unique form of collaboration the networked book.

We can begin with a print-based model by first identifying certain electronic Collaborative Constructions with journals-- serialized collections of works by several authors. But, of course, it's not such a simple one-to-one equivalency-- the electronic version takes it a step farther through reader participation. Where many web sites, and in particular blogs, make use of reader commenting as a dialogic frame, Derek Powazek's fray is more fundamentally authored not only by the nominal contributors to each issue but as well by readers posting responsive stories that build on particular pieces. Here the Comments tool is used as a collaborative authoring device, leading to potentially open-ended expansion-- for which there is no real equivalent parallel in the print-based world.

Non-fiction is also fertile ground for networked collaborative constructions. Lawrence Lessig's Code v.2 uses a wiki to open the editing process of the second edition of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace to the public in order to "draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind. Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication." In other words, at some point the book will be declared finished and closed to further input and adjustment by the community. By contrast, the popular Wikipedia, an online wiki encyclopedia whose entries can be written and edited by anyone, remains entirely and indefinitely open.

Mechanical aggregators and reassemblers of granular content can sometimes be considered networked books. For example, Jonathan Harris' 10 x 10 builds its content from RSS feeds. The program selects the most frequently used words from the major news networks to assemble an hourly "portrait" of our world. I would argue that this visualization tool represents a type of structure that we will soon see in networked books. The human editor/programmer creates a search and visualization function that collects, edits, and presents large data sets according to the criteria built into the program.

Issues for Consideration: Standardization

In the mass-market section, we touched briefly on standardization issues. Variations in software formats, support platforms, and individual design/architecture make it difficult to create, understand, share, and preserve electronic books. The development and adoption of industry standards is seen by many as the solution to these problems. The Open eBook Forum (OEBF), an association of hardware and software companies, publishers, authors and users of electronic books, have come together in order to establish such standards. Their goals are to:
• Develop, publish, and maintain common specifications relating to electronic books.
• Promote the successful adoption of these specifications.
• Identify, evaluate and recommend standards created by other bodies related to electronic books.
• Encourage interoperable implementations of electronic book related systems and provide a forum for resolution of interoperability issues.
• Accommodate differences in language, culture, reading and learning styles, and individual abilities.

However, in spite of efforts like OeBF, the electronic book does not appear to be any closer to a standard format than it was five years ago. This makes me wonder if standardization is the right goal to strive for in a medium that is constantly changing. My hunch is that open source software, social software and other innovations will be absorbed into ebook formats in a highly individual manner. Rather than moving toward standardization, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction, toward diversity. Toward flexibility that allows for the customization of each and every book. I would also like to suggest that the lack of a standard form for the electronic book equivalent might actually be its strength. A networked, sharable, multi-modal, co-authored, "book" created with customized open source software may be the best medium for self-expression and communication in the rapidly changing era of networked digital technology.

Preservation

The lack of standardization and the move toward customized electronic books that live within networks will present new challenges for librarians, curators and archivists. These professionals will have to sort through a vast amount of digital material and decide what should be archived. They will also need to develop strategies for managing hardware and software obsolesence. In a February, 2005 if:book blog post Collecting and Archiving the Future Book I described the approach to preservation instituted by curators of the Digital Crafts.org project.

The project set out to document digital craft as a cultural trend. Digital crafts were defined as “digital objects from everyday life,” mostly websites. Collecting and preserving these ephemeral, ever-changing objects was difficult, at best. A choice had to be made between manual selection, or automatic harvesting. Curator, Franziska Nori and her associates chose manual selection. The advantage of manual selection was that critical faculties could be employed. The disadvantage was that subjective evaluations regarding an object’s relevance were not always accurate, and important work might be left out. If we begin to treat blogs, websites, and other electronic ephemera as cultural output worthy of preservation and study (i.e. as books), we will have to find solutions to similar problems.

The pace at which technology renews and outdates presents a further obstacle. There are, currently, two ways to approach durability of access to content. The first, is to collect and preserve hardware and software platforms, but this is extremely expensive and difficult to manage. The second solution, is to emulate the project in updated software. In some cases, the artist must write specs for the project, so it can be recreated at a later date. Both these solutions are clearly impractical for digital librarians who must manage hundreds of thousand of objects. One possible solution for libraries, is to encourage proliferation of objects. Open source technology might make it possible for institutions to share data/objects, thus creating “back-up” systems for fragile digital archives.

An alternate approach to preservation is taken by the The Internet Archive. This organization uses automatic harvesting to archive everything on the web. Their goal is to provide "Universal Access to All Human Knowledge." Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, this organization is creating, "an ‘Internet library,’ with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format." The Internet Archive maintains copies of the collections at multiple sites in order to guard against possible loss. It regularly migrates data to upgraded hardware. And it collects data formats (software and emulators) in order to preserve access.

Literacy

This topic has for many years already generated complex questions and investigations from cultural pundits on the one hand and educational theorists and pedagogues on the other.

Starting in the late '90s there began to appear a veritable avalanche of books with titles like Digital Literacy and Literacy in the New Media Age, all attempting to account for the expanding literate universe from particular, discipline-specifc angles.

Enormous energy from all quarters continues to be poured into scholarly conferences, academic institutes and publications that tackle a wide array of questions including multimodal textuality and visual rhetoric.

One trend that seems generally evident is that the proliferation of a graphical user interface through the web and desktop computers combines with the pervasiveness of video media to prompt a growing interest in visual semiotics.

Particularly within an American political climate where literacy more broadly instigates heated and polarized debate, the complicating factors of technology can only serve to turn up the flame.