HyperStudio Blog

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

For HyperStudio’s first studio talk of the spring semester, Nick Montfort spoke on “Curveship: Interactive Fiction + Interactive Narrating.”

Nick’s blend of literary, historical and technical interests and skills makes him the perfect model for the new digital humanist as described by Elli Mylonas at last fall’s HyperStudio workshop. Poet, programmer and scholar, Nick is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Media in Writing and Humanistic studies here at MIT — a title which speaks to his interdisciplinary interests — and is the author of the first book-length study of interactive fiction, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (2003). His latest work is Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009, co-authored with Ian Bogost), the first in a new MIT Press series Platform Studies, which he also co-edits.

Last Friday, Nick shared his current project: a new system for writing interactive fiction (IF). Every work of fiction distinguishes its content (the events happening in the story) from the way the narrator relates that content (the expression), usually through a change in story order, pacing, the time of narration, or the focalization (from whose perspective is the content examined?). Of course, there are other ways the expression of a story juggles its content, as readers familiar with Gerard Genette’s work on narratology know — but for now, focus on a few of the ways the narrator can change how a story is told.

As a limited, designed “microworld” that operates through a natural language dialogue, IF is (as Nick argued) the perfect sandbox for playing with the basic tenets of narrative systems. Yet current interactive fictions don’t allow for more than one narrative voice unless each alternative focalization or tense is hand-coded. In other words, the player’s command is parsed (”TAKE LAMP”) and processed through the world model to generate a set output (”You have now taken the lamp.”).  However, Curveship — the system Nick is designing — incorporates a narrator into its underlying structure, so that the player’s commands are parsed not only according to the world model, but also according to a narrative voice that can change the order of events, shift tense or focalize the narration according to a particular character’s point of view.

At HyperStudio, our project work demands that we consider the affordances (and foreclosures) of particular media forms. For instance, to use the Serial Experience Project as an example: how does the process of serializing fiction change how authors told their stories in the nineteenth century? Dickens was confined to 32 pages per month and 20 installments for most of his novels; how did this change the order in which he told the story, or the voicing and tense he used at the beginning and end of each installment? And how does posting these serials online as facsimiles, viewable along a timeline, remediate the original? What does the reader gain by experiencing serial fiction online — and what does she lose?

It’s exciting, then, for us to see Nick put similar questions to traditional interactive fiction systems. How has the difficulty of changing narration influenced the kinds of stories that get told in IF? That is, how have the limitations of expression influenced the content of IF? And how will the new affordances of Curveship shape IF of the future? By combining humanist theory with a deep knowledge of programming and its relationship to storytelling, Nick’s talk was able to analyze not only the artistic value of IF, but how the underlying structures of its medium, its language, can shape those values.

Many thanks to Nick for an interesting talk. He plans to release a version of Curveship by August 2009; in the meantime, you can read more about it here, and read more about Nick at his website, or follow him at the group blog Grand Text Auto.

Our ongoing studio talk series has been a great success. First we had Amber Frid-Jimenez come speak and most recently, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh came to speak about flap books. Jacqui is an enthusiastic and engaging speaker, and her talk was illustrated with many photographs. We couldn’t reproduce them all here (below are some of my personal favorites). However, we did record the talk and you can download an .mp3 file in case you weren’t able to join us.

Jacqui has done fascinating research on the history of children’s interactive narrative media, digging up paper doll games, puzzles, and flap books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. This talk was an introduction to her work. The history of flap books, like their design and construction, is intricate, and their themes draw from disparate realms like the bible, theater or other forms of popular performance. As flap books rose to popularity in the 17th century, they were primarily religious in theme. In the 18th century, the scope of their themes enlarged to include an educational aspect, teaching good behavior and conduct. Toward the end of the 18th century, the books also began to be seen as opportunities for game play. Their history is also a little mysterious. There exists no complete bibliography – no one has any idea how many there are or where they all are. They seem to have been primarily created in England, Europe and America, but again, this is conjecture.

What is truly incredible is the way in which flap-books tell a story. Through words, images, and movable parts, a reader/user of these objects becomes an interactor, more than just an observer. Their actions and interactions become part of the story. Moreover, these objects were not limited to an elite echelon of society. They were relatively cheap and were offered in two versions: one already colored in (more expensive), and a plain black and white version not yet colored in (less expensive.)

Near the beginning of her talk, Jacqui recounted an anecdote that I think captures the gripping and delightful bafflement with which a modern viewer experiences these objects. Jacqui was in the Opie collection at the Bodleian Library at University of Oxford, researching early flap books. A curator came up to her, showing her an object, and asked, “Is this a book or a toy?” And Jacqui remembered thinking, “What is this? What am I looking at? How do I even read it?

Fascinating though they may be, the materials she works with are fragile and little-known, and the very nature of these wonderful little books creates an archival dilemma. What gets lost in the digital archive? How can we recreate the interactive, tactile dimension of these books online? Much of our Q&A session discussed these problems, and this is certainly something that all of us in the Digital Humanities think about and must work toward solving.

A fellow member of the Hyperstudio, Whitney Trettien, introduced Jacqui and is writing her thesis about a related topic, seventeenth-century volvelles, or spinning paper discs used to generate language. She’s posted some wonderful writing about moving parts in books on her blog, and has some amazing images of anatomical flap books.

On Friday, November 7th, the HyperStudio held the first of a series of workshops on scholarly, educational, and institutional aspects of Digital Humanities (+ Arts and Social Sciences).

The Workshop was introduced by Deborah Fitzgerald, Kenan Sahin Dean of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and Kurt Fendt, Director of the HyperStudio.  The keynote speaker was Elli Mylonas who leads the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University.  Her areas of expertise are digital humanities, hypertext, and electronic text. Before coming to the Scholarly Technology Group, Elli was Managing Editor of the Perseus Project at Harvard (now at Tufts), a multimedia database on classical Greek civilization.

The Workshop also provided first-hand experience with digital projects by some of our SHASS colleagues:  Jeffery Ravel, John Tirman, Pete Donaldson, and Gilberte Furstenberg.  There were very interesting  discussions about the challenges of the emerging field of Digital Humanities.

The keynote speaker will be Elli Mylonas who leads the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University. Her areas of expertise are digital humanities, hypertext, and electronic text. Before coming to the Scholarly Technology Group, Elli was Managing Editor of the Perseus Project at Harvard (now at Tufts), a multimedia database on classical Greek civilization.

Last Friday’s studio talk by Amber Frid-Jimenez was both inspiring and informative. We had a lively question and answer session as well, in which we talked about questions ranging from surveillance to the commercial art world to the dilemma of ending an online community.

In the talk, Amber positioned her work, “participation art online,” as an intersection of performance art and early-networked communication. She began by citing Ed Ruscha’s work, whose collection of writing “Leave Any Noise at the Signal” inspired the title of this talk as well as her thesis (S.M. 2007) for the Media Lab. She covered ground from Fluxus and the Situationists to early BBS communities and Alternative Reality Games, just to name a few. Viewing her work in the light of these earlier artistic and cultural movements, one can see the implicit political and artistic power present in online interaction and collaborative creation.

There is so much to explore and think about! Below, are some links to Amber’s work as well as some of the artists she mentioned. In the comments, please feel free to add links of your own.

Zones of Emergency: http://www.zonesofemergency.net/

Reflect Delay: http://plw.media.mit.edu/people/amber/public/mistydawn/
PLWire Telephone Tag: http://plw.media.mit.edu
Emma On Relationships Call-In Show http://www.amberfj.com/emma
OPENSTUDIO: http://www.amberfj.com/openstudio
Creative Browser: http://www.amberfj.com/highlights/browser.html

Frank, Ze. The Show. http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/
etoy Corporation: http://www.etoy.com
i love bees: http://www.ilovebees.com
Google Will Eat Itself: http://gwei.org

There is a Digital Humanities & the Disciplines Conference coming up at Rutgers this weekend, October 2-3.  Topics include New Directions in Digital History (Dan Cohen, Gorge Mason University), and Cyberinfrastructure and Cultural Heritage (Gregory Crane, Tufts).