Writing Coding Writing: Electronic Textual Encounters

Daniel C. Howe, Media Research Lab, and Aya Karpinska, Brown Univ.
"Geometry and Recombinant Poetics"
This presentation will explore how geometry, which studies relationships of angles and surfaces, can complement recombinant poetry, which uses configurations and arrangements of words and phrases to generate meaning. We all have intuitions about how geometric shapes behave in the world around us. Shapes will fit with each other in a predefined and finite number of ways, just as words and phrases in a recombinant text only "fit" (have meaning) in certain ways. In our collaborative work, three-dimensional shapes often inspire the writing. The spatial relationships among these shapes are what matters - change the shapes, and the writing must follow. At the heart of creative writing lie constraints; geometry provides a logical basis for constraints in a visual space.

Stephanie Strickland, Electronic Literature Organization, and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Director, Integrated Design Curriculum, The New School for Design, "Dovetailing Details Fly Apart--All Over, Again, In Code, In Poetry, In Chreods"
Poetry and code--and mathematics--make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations, both those written by available pathways and patterns and entropy budgets, and those we conjure out of "nothing."

Nick Montfort, University of Pennsylvania, "Story, Discourse, and Re-Shaping Interactive Fiction"
Interactive fiction (IF) indicates a form of text-based computer game, a sort of dialog system, and a kind of literary art which has existed for about 30 years. Since Aristotle, theorists of narrative have distinguished between the level of underlying "story" (corresponding to the simulated world in IF) and "discourse" (corresponding to the way that events and things in that world are related.) But although IF has been around for 30 years, IF systems have not yet embodied this distinction by abstracting the telling from what is told. I describe an IF system that is based on this distinction, extending techniques from computational linguistics (specifically, from natural language generation) by using concepts from narratology.

Talan Memmott, Creative Director and Editor of beeHive, “Thinking/Reading/Writing the Multi-Modal"
Literary Hypermedia (un)rests somewhere between the visual, the procedural, and the literary. As such, it requires different modes of signification, and different way of thinking about writing practice. Text in works of literary hypermedia is more than the written word, with interface environment and interactivity having as much rhetorical value. Though it may seem that these modes of signification, when broken apart, are in competition with one another, it seems more valuable to consider the harmonics and resonances between them as an holistic meaning-making device. Through a demonstration of a number of works, this presentation will look at the process of multi-modal meaning making in literary hypermedia.