Cool site?

http://www.eclecticflash.com/home.html

Final Paper/Images

To read the final paper that came of an independent study, visit the GoogleDoc and see the figures on the Picassa Album.

The End: Costs and Benefits of Giving the User More Control

In Chapter 11 on Graphics, the Web Style Guide, although geared mostly toward informational webpage designers, discusses how the internet and age of personal computers has allowed for greater use of multimedia and graphics. While there are more possibilities, images must be edited to meet the requirements of the internet; web formats include jpeg, gif, and png, and images need to be as condensed as possible to load efficiently; images can be reduced in size with an image editor to display at proper size at a resolution of 72 ppi (pixels per inch).

With those requirements met, the chapter authors argue, “we still have to answer the same questions communicators have always asked: What are the most effective uses of graphics, and what’s the best way to integrate words and images into an understandable story for the user?”

While an informational webpage might want to a picture in place of a thousand words, I wonder, is that appropriate for ELit? In my original story, I can try to convey long pauses and crying through words, but is it more appropriate for me to set the pace through the speed at which words appear and disappear and to show crying through animation?

In ELiterature in EPublishing, Susana Pajares Tosca discusses the characteristics of electronic literature (as opposed to e-books) in “Brave New Book: How to Recognize Electronic Literature When You See It. While many of the characteristics are the same as those cited by Hayles and other authors writing after 2002, one comment still seems to ring true today:

“Many online works take advantage of the language fusion. [Here the author mentions several works using Flash to integrate images, sound, and text.] The new hybrid literary works are neither totally textual nor absolutely cinematic, but make use of a mixture of both sets of interpretive conventions in a way that has yet to be analyzed.” (160)

Perhaps that is why so little is written on the subject of creating digital literature; while I can find texts about web design, gaming, video, etc., I find little to guide me in terms of what is "too much"...Of course, I just found this book, Digital storytelling: a creator's guide to interactive entertainment (by Carolyn Handler Miller), but even that seems to look at digital story telling more from a pragmatic purpose than any artistic or literary one.

So, while I am still looking for more information on the features, standards, and possibilities for digital literature, I think I finished my first attempt. The interactive Flash movie should be available at Nightmare.

A few reflections on the process and recommendations to anyone in the future...

Finalizing buttons: If you are creating menus to give the user more control, it is essential that your buttons jump to the proper frames. To this end, it is imperative that as you finish a section, you write down it's starting point. When I tested the final movie, I found that some of the buttons linked to the wrong frame. I would have spent may more hours debugging if I hadn't written down the points on the timeline for each section--this way I could edit the buttons and type in the correct frame number, rather than going back through the timeline at random trying to find the right place again.

Writing: Write visually. I suppose you could say this means writing like a playwright or a poet, but keep in mind the "stage" you are composing on as you write/revise. I know my planning and production would have gone far more smoothly if I had envisioned this as a performance during the initial composition.

To this end, I would have done more with visual mock-ups, which would have helped me find or set up photo/video shoots that might have added more interest to the piece, and also help me decide on the overall visual design for the piece.

Control: Decide up front how much control the user will get and how this will manifest. I know I would have liked to try different command options within the threads of the story (i.e. if the user puts the mouse over this, then...), but given my time constraints and the fact that I am still learning the ins and outs of actionscript, it could have meant 60 more hours of work to go back and retroactively update.

Final thoughts...

Bugs

So, I thought I was almost done. Before adding sound effects, I decide that I will be good and consolidate my layers to save space (and download time). You see, when I composed each thread, I made each part of each thread a layer (or two if there were overlapping effects--not to mention the constant background, buttons, actions, and sound layers). This really helped keep me organized, and it saved me some time when revising, since I only had to click on that layer to find where that part of the story picked up and left off. My plan was to consolidate these layers when I had finished. And the plan overall seemed to go rather well.

Only I forgot about bugs. For whatever reason, what might work perfectly well one set of layers apparently doesn't work as well when those layers are merged into others. There is no logical reason for it, according to experienced users, and sometimes when you try to modify these layers, they act "funny." I experienced this when I first started, but I chalked that up to inexperience, and luckily, since I save each version I complete successfully as a different file, I was able to go back to the last version and insert the working layers in place of the buggy ones.

Well, after two hours of trying to fix the (many) bugs in my almost final version, I finally realized that I could do the very same thing (duh). After trying for nearly an hour it fix a fire effect that I had successfully created in a previous version, even having the previous version open to confirm that the layers were of the very same timeline and order as the working ones, it finally dawned on me that, well, space be damned, I should just insert those three layers into movie.

Yes, I increased the file size, but in retrospect, I would do it again if only I didn't have to spend another hour trying to fix illogical bugs.

Interesting Pieces

I found this piece, "Girls suck at video games / Les filles sont nulles aux jeux vidéo" by Stéphanie Mercier linked off the blog Grand Text Auto, which is "a group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art."

It is one of those pieces that has very little text and a lot of graphics, but the combination in a streaming movie has a definite characters, tone, and theme; I'd argue it is literature. This really resonated with me, and while the subject matter of double standards and barriers for women has certainly been done, the framing of this story as a parody of a video game is clever--and I'd argue especially relevant for newer generations where video games are increasingly how boys AND men spend their leisure time: a virtual boys club.

The commentary on the piece asks the question, "Could a generally similar idea have been expressed as effectively in an actual video game?" I too thought of this after watching, and it made me think of how I make decisions about when to give the user control in my own work.

Also interesting is the web hosting site this video was posted on, Vimeo, which has a variety of videos, some of which might be interesting to debate: is it literature?

One of these is a video that uses audio from StoryCorps, which I often listen to on NPR. Often the stories on NPR are moving; I think if I were to listen to this video without watching it, I would instead have found it confusing. The unfortunately sick male narrator is a bit difficult to understand, and sometimes "Danny and Annie" go off on tangents. However, this video is moving precisely because it adds cartoon animation to their story, providing context and properly conveying the tone, which is both whimsical and sincere.

Grand Text Auto also tipped me off to a new collaborative blog on digital writing, NetArtery, maintained by Jim Andrews together with Andy Campbell, Chris Funkhouser, Cliff Syringe, Gregory Whitehead, and Jhave Johnston. It is very up-to-date and includes links to new pieces of digital literature, like Nawlz.com, an internet graphic novel, which I plan to check out despite the critique that the text is far too small to read (a concern I know I take into account; smaller text means fewer frames, but at what price?!).

On another note, Jim Andrews muses on "Pulsate" by Andre Michelle, which is a neat interactive Flash audio piece I recommend you try.

NetArtery also linked me to a new online journal, called SCRIPT, which has a section for ELit. The current issue has a commentary on the visual poem "Language is Hell"... and maybe it was because I was never big on modern art, but I still don't get it.

Frames vs. Pages

Frames are changing the way I write/revise.
I've always preferred composing on the computer, perhaps because when I write longhand, I tend to sprawl all over the page, invading the margins, writing vertically and circling around words. (I'm sure my dyslexia plays a part in that too.) On the computer, I can simply hit enter and type my thought, or add a "comment" in word and insert my idea there for further consideration; then, to revise, I can simply cut and paste, and the computer will sort out the line breaks, etc. for me.

Not so with Flash (or any other design program). Parameters are always set by the composer, and the visual frame has to be small enough to be a viable option in a Flash movie of several thousand frames (the maximum before crashing seems to be 16,000, though I don't plan to approach that with my current piece). Often frames are repeated--in my longer pieces of text, it often takes well over 30 frames of the same text (at a frame rate of six frames viewed per second) to provide time to read one section of text (quickly)--and to prevent the user from growing bored staring at one screen, such long pieces of text need to be broken up and shown through different *keyframes.

(*FYI: In Flash, a keyframe is like an anchor; that frame is set as a starting point, and that frame will repeat in all future frames unless the author inserts a new keyframe with new (or no) content--this is how an empty pot, with the insertion of new keyframes that show a step in the growth process, can become a flower pot, as in the illustration above. Thus, while Flash can automatically create this necessary repetition, the author must determine the parameters, testing the sequence--repeatedly-- to see how many frames are necessary to show the entirety of the content to the viewer.)

Thus, I found that in converting the text of the threads of my story into this format, I needed to be much more aware of the "space" it would be occupying. Paragraphs don't always fit on one frame, and line breaks consequently occur much more frequently. After composing the first two parts of my six parts painstakingly, finding I had to constantly revise on my feet to make things fit in the frame and break appropriately to emphasize the meaning of the sentences and create appropriate rhythm, I decided I needed to plan this out better: "storyboard."

Now, in film, storyboarding involves a mock-up, drawing scenes to get a sense of placement for people, objects, etc. However, given that much of my piece is text driven, I used this idea to instead mock-up how my text would play out. I started by taking each thread and dividing them into six parts; I then tried to imagine how I wanted each part of the thread to progress in terms of speed and emphasis, and revised/cut as needed to eliminate text that could be conveyed through image, sound, or movement (and keep the parts as equal in length as possible).

Even then, as I began revising parts two, I realized that my thread that relied very heavily on text needed something more--otherwise, it was just text rolling by on screen. It then occurred to me, as I began revising my mock-ups again to show line breaks, that the use of color and movement might allow me to embed text within text. Thus, the red poems within the reflective thread were born, each expressing--in the same, yet different words--the feeling behind the reflections. This was exciting, and I believe I never would have been so cognizant of my diction and use of space if it were not for jumping off the page and envisioning movement with frames.

Issues of Intellectual Property, Sound, and Memory

I decided to add sound and a few more animations to my piece. However, it occurred to me that finding music and images might be difficult given issues of intellectual property. While I don't intend on distributing the piece and using it solely for educational purposes (which allows for exceptions along the lines of fair use), one issue I could have run into was faces; in publications, you have to have permission to include the faces of identifiable persons. Had I wanted to include a forward facing image of a whole person or face, I would have had to blur the image or, potentially, have a waiver signed. Now, while I was able to make do with some alterations on photographs and animations I made myself, I could see how music could be a different issue, especially given all the issues with illegal downloads in recent years.

I was able to find a website, free SFX that allows people to use sounds and some music in their productions. While I would have liked some different sounds included (such as TV background sound, which I could have made myself if I had a recording device and software), I did find some sounds that I would not have been able to access without great difficulty (like helicopter sounds and gunfire). The site also included some music, some of which was appropriate to help set the mood of the story lines.

However, one issue I ran into when trying to integrate the sound into the Flash movie was starting and stopping. While I was able to script the start and stop of music, and while I was able to use the "Fade In" effect to make the start of some sounds less pronounced, there was no such way to do this when stopping a sound--unless of course the entire duration of the original sound/song was played. So, while I liked the repetitive melody of one song, unless that part of the movie lasted the entire duration of the song, it would just end abruptly at the stopping point. I found that I might be able to fix this with a sound editor like audacity, but that would have required adding more sound files than my memory could have handled for one file. I could have let the song continue until its end, but if I started a new part of the movie that contained a different sound (without stopping the original sound), then I would have heard both sounds, which was neither pleasant nor the desired effect.

If I were to create another piece of ELit, I would definitely have to keep such issues in mind; more time would be required--likely through advanced planning, searching, and editing--to find and edit the images, movie clips, and sounds needed to pull the entire piece together in such a way that it creates the right tone, balance, and polish of multimedia.

Digital Text

I've been thinking quite a bit about the text I've been using in my digital writing. While I know about design principles from my experience teaching publications, it's worth remembering and reflecting on the criteria that make text accessible to a digital reader.

In The electronic word: democracy, technology, and the arts, Richard A. Lantham answers the question, “What happens when text moves from page to screen? First, the digital text becomes unfixed and interactive. The reader can change it, become writer. The center of Western culture since the Renaissance—really since the great Alexandrian editors of Homer—the fixed, authoritative, canonical text, simply explodes into the ether.” (Lantham 31).

He continues by reviewing reader expectations for traditional text, as described by Marinetti: “No pictures; no color; strict order of left to right then down one line; no type changes; no interaction; no revision,” (Lantham 34). In attacking this convention, Marinetti attacks the printed codex book and its typographical conventions.

However, one cannot completely disregard these conventions. While digital text opens up the possibilities for color, visuals, movement, interaction, etc., readers (at least for the present) still expect a certain amount of predictability. When (western) children learn to read, the still learn to read from top to bottom, left to right. To totally disregard these expectations would be to the reader's and writer's disadvantage, since, as design and visual literacy text Picturing Texts points out that " readers typically follow a predictable path, starting at the beginning and reading to the end" (53). Even when observing webpages, people still tend to read the same way, unless, that is, if something breaks that pattern:

What we see depends on what gets our attention, on what details we observe, and on our own experience and memory. Usually the more important, extreme, unexpected, or disturbing something is, the quicker it catches our eye and also the more memorable it is. (55)

Therefore, while I had fun creating cool effects in Flash, as I reread, I keep in mind whether breaking the patterns in text type and appearance is worthwhile (or simply an exercise in "Look what I can do"). I've likewise found a helpful resource in the online version of Web Style Guide. Chapter 8 is all about typography. It too talks about pattern, and how breaking that pattern without purpose can be distracting, confusing and creating "doubts" in the reader:

As in traditional print publishing, high-quality web sites adhere to established type style settings consistently throughout the site. Consistency gives polish to a site and encourages visitors to stay by creating an expectation about the structure of a text. If sloppy, inconsistent formatting confounds this expectation you will decrease your readers’ confidence in your words, and they may not return. ("Consistency")

To this end, I decided that while each thread of the story would have its own set of patterns, the patterns within those paths would be consistent; in other words, dialogue would use one font (although it might vary in size depending on emphasis), description another, and electronic "voices" would mimic the fonts associated with them everyday.

This brings up the need to think rhetorically about type and the ways in which the typography itself can be part of the message, expressing a tone, style, or feeling. In discussing the ways in which desktop publishing software such as Quark can affect the way text is presented and interpreted, Lantham points out, “Typography becomes allegorical, a writer-controlled expressive parameter, just as it does on an electronic screen,” (36). In essence, words become images, and images function as icons, as meaningful and symbolic. In Picturing Texts, the point is made that "Our choice of typeface depends on the TONE we intend-whether we want our text to look serious, playful, traditional, trendy, or so on" (441). The Purdue OWL's page on Visual Rhetoric: Text Elements illustrates this well with the following example:


The first example is a serif font (it has "little feet") while the second is sans serif. Both are used commonly for large amounts of text because they are extremely easy to read, though serif fonts generally have a more formal, traditional tone than more modern sans serif fonts. The third and fourth examples, however, call on our cultural consciousness:

The "Medieval History" text looks like our cultural conception of Medieval script. That is, the font looks almost like it was hand-written. Likewise, we've all seen tabloid papers in the checkout lanes of the supermarket, announcing in bold, loud text all sorts of incredible news.

Thus, when I chose to represent email text in my piece, I picked the Verdana font common to html email, and when I chose to represent TV closed captioning, I picked a more mechanical looking typeface.

Another point I took into account was increasing "legibility" through contrast.

Good typography depends on the visual contrast between one font and another, as well as among text blocks, headlines, and the surrounding white space. Nothing attracts the eye and brain of the reader like strong contrast and distinctive patterns, and you can achieve those attributes only by carefully designing contrast and pattern into your pages. If you cram every page with dense text, readers see a wall of gray and will instinctively reject the lack of visual contrast. Just making things uniformly bigger doesn’t help.

Nearly all of the text in my piece is either black on white or bold white on black, providing maximum contrast, setting the mood for the passages, and providing the option to colorize some words for additional emphasis.

The chapter also discusses line length, something I hadn't considered initially writing the story in word, but something I had to take into great account when composing on the "small screen" of Flash frames.

Text on the computer screen is hard to read not only because of the low resolution of computer screens but also because the layout of most web pages violates a fundamental rule of book and magazine typography: the lines of text on most web pages are far too long for ideal reading. Magazine and book columns are narrow for physiological reasons: at normal reading distances, the eye’s span of acute focus is only about three to four inches wide, so designers try to keep dense passages of text in columns not much wider than that comfortable eye span. Wider lines of text require readers to move their heads slightly or use their eye muscles to track over the long lines of text. Readability suffers because on the long trip back to the left margin the reader may lose track of the next line. ("Legibility")

Given that shorter lines seem to work better in digital texts, I began reworking my piece, looking for good places for line breaks, much as I would a poem, trying to choose the proper opening and closing words for emphasis. Given my choice to use centered text for much of the piece, this made the line breaks especially visual, allowing in many cases one word or phrase to dominate an entire line in the center of focus.

All of these elements are specific to text, but influence how text can work as image. Given that, design elements such as balance, point of view, emphasis, description, and other elements of visual and verbal texts will continue to be of primary importance during my composition and revision.

TAP: Topic, Audience, and Purpose

When teaching writing, I often have to remind students to stick to the basics when planning and revising: remember your topic, audience, and purpose. If the piece strays too far off topic, the audience will be lost and the purpose confused. If you fail to consider the needs of your audience, confusion may likewise set in about the above trio. And, if you include things without a solid purpose, then they will likewise be distracting and relatively useless.

I keep this in mind as I create and research electronic literature.

For example, in "Digital Discourse: Composing with Media in the Writing Classroom," Karen Gocsik begins by pointing out that:

Those of us who teach the academic essay and its attendant critical thinking and research skills have long recognized that our students are engaging in increasingly diverse discourses, delivered to them by increasingly varied media. Our students typically don’t read newspapers; they don’t thumb through news magazines; they don’t watch the network news. Instead, they scan websites, from CNN to YouTube to Digg, where information is constructed via text, hypertext, video, and audio. Equally important to writing instructors is that students are writing with this new media, composing blogs, contributing to wikis, creating web pages, and crafting podcasts and videos.

I suppose this is something those of us on the digital divide must keep in mind. While I read news, most of it is from the internet version of the paper. I write essays, but I also maintain webspaces. And, while I love to sit down and immerse myself in a good book, I (apparently) can surf the web for hours on end, conducting research while simultaneously checking email and following links to work-related sites. For proof of this, just look at the tabs open in my browser: this is the future of reading (and the Western attention-span).


Gocsik explains,

New technologies have created a new type of audience—one that regularly interacts with the author and with other readers through message boards, wikis, and blogs. And they have created several new genres—each allowing the writer to structure information and reach readers in a variety of ways.

So, the question is, how does one effectively create "literature" for those native to "new literacies"?

This is not just a question of meeting the needs of a digital audience, but also fulfilling the purpose(s) of the piece. For example, if you are writing about a character's sadness, might a visual representation and audio enhance that effect, or is it sufficient to describe the action of crying? Is the addition of multimedia elements like animation, interactivity, video or audio effective at conveying the ideas and themes, or are they simply gimmicky?

To help determine this, in addition to putting myself in the position of my audience, I plan to read through the online version of Web Style Guide to find pointers on typography, graphics, and multimedia, and I will be reading through Picturing Texts (as soon as it arrives) to find additional information on multimedia authoring and interpretation.

Buttons!

As it turns out, much of the navigation in Flash is controlled by buttons. Buttons can be made from pictures or created from a graphic and can be scripted to perform actions. So far, I've created buttons that go to a specific frame and play the movie from there.

I know that doesn't sound too impressive, but there are many variables that make that simple action difficult to achieve. Firstly, all the frames in the movie (or at least the segments of the movie you are working with) have to be perfectly aligned and each layer needs to be contained by keyframes. I found that putting the layers unique to each segment in folders (which collapse for easier view of the timeline) really helped streamline this process and keep the actions organized. Only when the frames are properly aligned can you create an "Action" layer in which you can actually create a command to stop the movie. So, if you put the stop command in the wrong place, you will either interrupt the movie with no way to return, or Flash will ignore the command all together because it doesn't make sense.

With that obstacle overcome, you can then create what I call a MENU frame using the background layer and a button layer which appears at the point at which the movie stops. This allows the user to choose a button, and thus choose a thread of the story to follow. You then have to create "Go and play" commands for each button. This sounds simple, but selecting the button layer of the film and isolating each button you want to act is a time-consuming and tedious task (although I became more proficient with the hours of practice I had!)...and even then, sometimes the button, no matter how you edit it, still doesn't work, and you have to create the button and script it all over again. However, once this task is completed for each instance of the menu (i.e. every time the menu appears, you have to rewrite the script...or as I found, copy the working frame so the action script carries over), the user can navigate the different threads of the piece, going back to one, returning to the beginning, or moving ahead to the next scene!

What I found in creating this was that it not only made the movie more user-friendly, but it also made testing a lot easier. You see, the only way to know if the segment of the movie is playing the way you want it to is to CTRL+Enter and watch the movie. If the movie has no stops or navigation, the only way to see if a particular segment of the movie works is to watch the movie all the way through to that scene. On the other hand, with (working) navigation, you can jump to the scene you want to view...saving me a lot of time and, frankly, frustration at having to read the same parts of the story 20 times or more in an hour.

I also found that buttons can do much more than "Go and play"; I would love to learn more about conditional commands (i.e. if, then actions), but after looking at sample code, I think that might be a bit more than I can chew for now. Instead, I will relish in the fact that I completed parts one of the story (although final editing still remains to be done, based on my findings about the effects of visual elements on my audience and a period of revising and reevaluation of each element as it relates to the topic of the piece and purpose), and plan how I will format menus and visually (and auditorily) present the other parts of the story.

Creation...

is hard. Inspired by some of the works I've seen, I decided to try creating my own piece of digital literature using Flash.

A few years ago I tried an experimental short story, intended to be a collection of thoughts, dialogue, emails, newscasts, and a speech that could be read "segmentally" in any order and still create a cohesive whole story. It didn't work very well once I printed it out; although I used different fonts to distinguish the different voices, people still wanted the "traditional" trappings of printed literature: reading from top to bottom, page one to page two, "he said/she said" attributions, etc. I tried rewriting it more traditionally with these trappings, but I found that made the story a little too saccharine, slightly less confusing, and a lot less like what I had envisioned.

Having seen the possibilities that digital literature had to offer in terms of layering, looping, and user choice, I thought this might be the format this narrative needs. After a quick tutorial from a generous and helpful colleague on how to make a ball bounce, change color, and disappear into the distance using Flash studio, I began working.

My first task was to create an opening worth following to the finish. One thing I notice about what I consider "good" digital literature is that it hooks you in the beginning with a premise that makes you care enough to keep interacting with the piece. One of my favorite pieces, Dim O'Gauble begins with text appearing and disappearing on the intricate layered background (which, having worked with Flash, I know contains "buttons" that trigger actions such as moving around the screen). The opening is mysterious, appearing from nothing and disappearing just as quickly as it entered, and itself introduces a mystery, inviting the user to try to unravel the "patchwork" of clues to make sense of these things "She didn't understand" that unfold as the user interacts with the piece, triggering movies and text actions.

“I saw myself reading the eulogy at your funeral”--The opening sentence was punchy on paper, but once I had finished creating it in Flash and people walked by to watch me test the execution of the layers in the first "frames" of my first "scene," I saw how much power the movement of font and timing of the reveal gave the words; flash enabled me to divide the sentence, allowing the first four white letters to gradually appear out of blackness in the center of the screen, then moving up as the rest of the sentence likewise revealed itself, swelling and contracting as if the words themselves were heaving. "Wow," and "Oh my God" were the reactions, and this was only the first nine words.

(Granted, making those first words move like that took me the better part of a few hours, but I suppose that is why they call it the learning curve.) The fact that I could control how the user read that sentence did, admittedly, take some of the control from the reader, but I was able to achieve a "reveal" (come on, out of body eulogy experiences need that kind of build up) that would be unavailable to me on paper, unless I made the publisher cut the sentence and begin it anew after a page turn. The first few seconds of my piece were actually accomplished by creating three layers acting independently: a background (black), a white text layer (the first four words), and another white text layer (the last five words). In order to make the words move in the manner they did (independent of each other, and yet in harmony), each segment had to be its own entity, and yet the layers had to be viewed together to create the full effect. I suddenly had a much greater appreciation for the idea of "layers," both in the physical and metaphorical sense.

And in retrospect, creating those opening frames was the easy part. I quickly realized that the segments I had written and even those I had revised would not play well on screen without some reformatting. The following sentences made a neat paragraph on paper, but to keep the user's focus and really punctuate the important ideas, I realized I would have to divide it and add images onscreen to "punctuate" ideas that would carry throughout the piece. Much as I did in my original typed piece, I decided a different font would be appropriate for giving the "thoughts" of the narrator, but unlike that piece, I felt little obligation to be true to sentence structure, instead deciding to utilize line breaks where I felt it appropriate; it reminded me of writing poetry, except that I didn't feel like I had to define myself by those conventions.

The possibilities continued when I played with adding an image layer. I wanted it to creep in, but in a happy accident of learning, I only put the image in for 3 frames (which, playing at 6 frames per second, means the image only flashed for a fraction of a second) and it blipped almost indistinguishably across the screen. While this wouldn't do for the final scene, I realized that I liked the idea of having that "dream/nightmare" image reoccur, appearing suddenly in the middle of the frame and swiftly enveloping the "stage" (the screen of view) before disappearing just as abruptly; in that way, I could reinforce the FEELING of the nightmare, and that all the threads worked together as pieces of this confusing whole. This also helped inspire what I hope will be sort of the "menu" screen, since the line it interrupted, "But I just kept seeing that image, as if it were a freeze-frame from the dream" really seemed to tie the pieces together; thus, I picked it as the center of the frame at the conclusion of the opening scene.

And after finishing the first scene (for the most part; there were some bugs with the last frames...which I will address later), I found myself overcome by another difficulty: how to channel all my ideas and learn how to make all the possibilities I wanted to try work. I began to look more into the tutorials online about how to create action scripts and buttons, and the next day was successful in making a working button that one could click to move from scene one to scene 2.1...only, I realized that to allow the user to navigate the piece as freely as I wished, I would have to learn more.

For example, when I retested my movie, I realized there was a bug in the last frames of scene 1, which did indeed "stop" as commanded, but instead of staying stopped, allowing the user to choose one of the buttons to navigate to a different scene, it restarted or ended all together (depending on which unsuccessful version I tried). After consulting with my resident expert, I realized I would have to research how to create some sort of "pause" action...or make the frame sequence long enough so the reader could choose an option. I wanted the user to have many options, with the ability to navigate between different segments in different "threads," but soon realized this would not be as easy as I'd first thought after creating my first working button. After working on scene 2.1, I also realized that my inability to "pause" also meant that instead of navigating between five "scenes", stopping or picking up as the user wished using buttons, I may have to create many more "scenes" and create many more buttons....

In retrospect, perhaps I was once again inspired by Andy Campbell, whose use of layers in authoring and in visuals to show different thoughts is truly expert. As seen in the first "scene" after clicking, two "voices" seem to be present in the static text (top left in big white, bottom right in small black font), interrupted by the event of mouse-over text appearing line by line (screen captured in nearly 100% visibility center-right). While I think complex actions like floating screens and other mouse over events are much too advanced for me, I can see how looking at the craft of other authors would be inspirational and helpful. I plan to look for more tutorials (both from my colleague and online) and see what I can find out about how other Flash authors created their effects to (hopefully) incorporate these ideas into my piece.

I also plan to read more about the effect of fonts and images on the way people read; although I intuitively understand (and know from experience creating/teaching layout, readings, and conferences on the subject of the use of these elements as graphics in publications), I want to know more about, for lack of a better term, the "science" behind these effects. Hopefully, this will help me better use such tools in my "creation" experiment.

After Reading

After reading an interview with Professor Jessica Pressman (Yale) on the subject of digital literature, I found this site. So far I've watched "Dakota," and I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet, but I know I want to watch it again. It seems to be a Flash execution, but I'm not sure. I love the use of the percussion instruments to punctuate the flashing of the words/phrases on the screen and the use of different fonts and times on screen to create emphasis and speed of thought. At first it seems to be a bunch of kids kicking around with some beers, but then it rapidly descends into a crazy story laced with pop culture references that I haven't yet been able to follow (and maybe that's the point). In any case, it's worth seeing.

Issues Surrounding Electronic Literature, Digital and Multimedia Literacy, and Digital Humanities, to Begin…

When I took the course “Electric English,” I had to write a final narrative about my experiences and my conclusions, “Running the Digital Forest.” I concluded:

Digital literature may employ different techniques, drawing from the established genres of poetry, prose, and film to form a new genre, but it meets the essential criteria for literature, using language in a powerful way, providing a vicarious, meaningful experience with enough ambiguity to allow for multiple interpretations, and shedding light on truths we may or may not want to see.

It seemed that digital forms of literature were taking advantage of the computer age to integrate the message and the medium in exciting new ways, and yet, as I searched for more new, exciting examples of this, I found myself somewhat stuck: why was there still so little for me to explore? Certainly, the fact that digital literature is different from the “traditional” literature of ink and paper makes it difficult for people to understand, let alone study without a common vocabulary, but as I began my search again, that “roadblock” alone didn’t seem sufficient, so I began to ask myself what other issues surround the widespread acknowledgement and acceptance of electronic literature?

First of all, there are many answers to the question of what electronic text is; in many of the sites I found under my first searchings of “digital humanities,” electronic text seemed to mean merely an electronic transcription of a literary text or text put online for collaborative purposes or for keyword or contextual searching. The Official Google Blog’s statement of commitment to digital humanities refers solely to the digitization of books and the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, in its Why the Digital Humanities, emphasizes the use of technology-based tools and methodologies and collaborative, interdisciplinary work in the humanities. Much under “digital humanities” seems to focus on digitizing what was once or would be considered “print,” and although sites like A Companion to Digital Humanities, acknowledge the existence of “hypertext”:

A very different category is hypertext. Works of this type are generally original and not representations of previously published works. Hypertext would seem to have great potential for expression, allowing for a multiplicity of narrative choices and making the reader an active participant in the reading experience. Hypertextual content is generally bound inextricably with hypertext software, making productions in this format even more ephemeral than other kinds of electronic text. Some hypertext authors, such as Michael Joyce and Stuart Mouthrop, recognize the impermanence inherent in the genre and incorporate it into their hyperfictions, but this fundamental aspect of its nature will make it difficult or impossible for libraries to collect hyperfictions for the long term. Eventually, even if the medium on which the hypertext is stored remains viable, the software on which it relies will no longer run. While early critics such as Robert Coover believed (with some hope) that hypertext would lead to "the end of books", others, such as Tim Parks, dismiss the genre as "hype."

In this same chapter “Electronic Texts: Audiences and Purposes,” Perry Willett discusses another reason that scholars may dismiss electronic texts in all their forms: copyright.

The effect of copyright means that researchers and students interested in twentieth-century and contemporary writing are largely prevented from using electronic text. A quick check of the online MLA Bibliography shows the number of articles published after 1962 dealing with twentieth-century authors is nearly double that of all other centuries combined, covering 1200–1900 ce. With the majority of researchers and students interested in writers and their work after 1900, it is no wonder that they may consider electronic text largely irrelevant to their studies.

On the same site, in the chapter “Multivariant Narratives,” Marie-Laure Ryan defines a truly digital text as one “that cannot be transferred into the print medium without significant loss. It depends on the computer as a sustaining environment, and it uses the screen (or any other display device) as a stage for performance.” She then goes on to determine certain properties of digital media and digital text, citing new media theorists (Murray 1997; Manovich 2001) as sources for her list, which she calls “a distillation of the features I regard as the most relevant to the issues of textuality and narrativity”:
• “Algorithm-driven operation.” (The invisible code of the machine language determines the behavior of digital objects such as text and images.)
• “Reactive and interactive nature.” (The ability to react to changes in environment and actions and to interact with deliberate user action.)
• “Performantial aspect.” (Since the digital text is executed like a script and its reception depends on feedback from the user, it is like a performance in nature.)
• “Multiple sensory and semiotic channels, or what we may call multimedia capabilities, if we are not afraid of the apparent paradox of talking about multimedia media. Digital environments can combine text, sound, still pictures, and animations.”
• “Networking capabilities.” (Brining people and machines together, allowing the possibility of multiple users and communication.)
• “Volatile signs.” (Digital texts are fluid, able to be refreshed and rewritten.)
• “Modularity.” (The independent objects combined to create digital works can be transformed, recombined, and reinterpreted during the course of the work.)

While these abilities, she argues, allow for the creation of a vast number of versions, with variable plot, point of view, and discourse, she concludes by echoing the sentiment that:

While computer games have taken popular culture by storm, generating a billion-dollar industry that rivals Hollywood and Disneyland, hypertext is an arcane academic genre read mostly by theorists and prospective authors. What remains to be conquered for digital textuality is the territory that lies between the stereotyped narrative scripts of popular culture and the militant anti-narrativity of so many experimental texts: a territory where narrative form is neither frozen nor ostracized, but recognized as an endlessly productive source of knowledge and aesthetic experiences.

This too sheds light on the issue of accessibility (not in the literal sense, although I will talk about that later) to a broader audience. The novel was once dismissed by fans of epic poetry as a crude form of writing for lesser minds, but became the preeminent form of literature in the last few hundred years because of its popularity. Thus, Ryan argues:
For digital texts to establish themselves within the cultural middle ground – the narratives of the educated but not professional public – they must do the opposite of what the twentieth-century novel achieved, and perhaps learn a lesson from computer games, without succumbing to their propensity for repetitive themes and stereotyped storylines: naturally spatial, these texts must reconquer the narrative temporality that fuels the reader's desire.

Another impediment to the understanding and acceptance of electronic literature may also be its physical accessibility. While critics have worried that changes in software may make it impossible for such literature to be preserved, organizations like the Electronic Literature Organization or ELO have been working to make sure these works persist. Just as epics made the transition from oral tales to stone, papyrus, and print, so too might these works with the will to preserve them. So, what keeps these works on the periphery? In his article in Digital Humanities Quarterly, “Communitizing Electronic Literature,” Scott Rettberg indicated that part of the reason is the lack of a common marketplace:

Many writers who had authored hypertext work in the Storyspace platform were frustrated that their work, published by Eastgate Systems, had not reached a wide audience. There was a also sense that the mess and clamor of the World Wide Web were drowning these literary efforts for the computer in a sea of commercial noise, and that the platform they were working in was becoming obsolescent.

Indeed, while one can easily go to a physical or online bookstore to purchase a print novel (or e-book version), the collections where one can find truly digital literature are more obscure. Also, because much electronic literature is published on the internet, it is distributed largely for free and must then overcome the old notions that nothing worth anything is free.

At this point in the history of electronic literature, the question is not how we can monetize it, in the sense of getting people to pay money for things, but rather how we can communitize it. We don’t need to build a market for electronic literature, but rather a culture that will support and sustain its development.

In addition, he points out that:

While use of the Internet has become an important part of everyday life in many parts of the world, most people have no idea that electronic literature exists, or at best, have heard of "e-books" and think that by electronic literature we mean print books distributed as PDFs or some other electronic format.

Furthermore, to access and understand these works, users need to have a certain degree of multimedia literacy, defined by StateUniversity.com Education Encyclopedia as literacy that

extends beyond reading and writing the alphabetic code, and should include a variety of audiovisual forms of representation. Associating multimedia with literacy also highlights a belief among many scholars and educators that conceptions of literacy and how it is developed should not focus exclusively on printed materials, but should include electronic media that have moved into the mainstream of communication, especially at the end of the twentieth century. Implicit in these views is that research and practice related to literacy must be transformed to accommodate new ways of accessing, processing, and using information.

In his article in Digital Humanities Quarterly, “Communitizing Electronic Literature,” Scott Rettberg also grapples with this issue, discussing the United States National Endowment for the Arts reports in 2004 and 2007, "Reading at Risk" and "To Read or Not to Read," which are generally skeptical of the benefits of digital textuality, and in fact rather slyly imply that the computer might well be the culprit behind the downfall of literary reading. Rettberg suggests:

While the methodology of the study and the conclusions one can draw from it are themselves disputable, if we accept the NEA’s claim that literary reading is in decline, and that the current generation of teenagers is the first of what the Kaiser Foundation has labeled "Generation M" (for Media) [Kaiser Family Foundation], then it seems to me that the culture at large ought to be concerned not with blaming the Internet for the decline of literary reading, but rather with finding a way to better utilize the networked computer to further literary reading.

He points to N. Katherine Hayles’s discussion of the current generation’s use of “hyper attention” over “deep attention” as a reason for the promotion of digital literature, which has the possibility to encouraging both types of cognitive processes:

In order for literature to appeal to Generation M, it may need to be produced in forms that can capture the interactive, multimodal, and fragmented interests of hyper attention, and yet also provide opportunities for deeply attentive and immersive close reading.

He continues, pointing out that with new technologies, newer generations are growing more “literate” in terms of multimedia and “hyper attentive” texts, but may be missing out on the opportunities and will to experience texts that require deep attention and interpretation:

Right now, the Internet is still primarily a textual medium. At the same time as the NEA is decrying the death of American reading, it is not taking into proper account the hyperattentive forms of digital textuality which have become part of the routine daily lives of people in most economically developed nations: reading and writing email, sending and receiving text messages, participating in online social networks, and so on. […] The important open question is what forms of literature will appeal to readers for whom the hyper attention is the primary textual mode, who are more likely to "read" machinima, YouTube videos, and Flash games than they are to read anything remotely recognizable as poetry or fiction. I argue that many works of electronic literature can appeal to the configurative desires and cognitive behaviors of Generation M and yet also make the type of contemplative and interpretive demands we have historically associated with literary reading. I can think of no literary medium more suited to straddling the divide between hyper attention and deep attention than electronic literature, and I’m frankly surprised that the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other funders are not yet furiously writing grants to support and further the development of e-lit.

I hesitate to claim that the popular adoption of electronic literature is inevitable – it is equally likely that literary reading of all sorts will continue to decline. I am certain, however, that if writers don’t continue to experiment with digital literary forms on a more widespread basis as the broadband Internet becomes less textual and more dominated by video and other communicative modalities, the written word will lose out. Within academe, within reading and writing communities, within library and archival culture, it is important to recognize that we are participating in the formation of a field. The decisions we collectively make now about what sorts of digital artifacts we should describe as electronic literature, how to document, distribute, archive and preserve, assess, and critique those works, how to encourage audiences to read them both critically and recreationally, and how to encourage writers to create more of them, will have an important impact in years to come.

I think these questions and this new frontier for literature are interesting, but exhausting; how can writers be encouraged to write more electronic literature? Could the future of electronic literature be the collaborative novel? Already there have been many attempts to use wikis and social networking sites to create fiction, but the appreciation seems to stem from the process of creation, rather than that of interpretation. (The Comedy Central show Tosh.O’s “Twitten By” video shows the hilarious possible consequences of letting the reader take part in the authoring process via social media tools like Twitter, and there have been.) Could electronic literature be more widely read with more intervention from educational institutions? From increased exposure to it in their youth? I know that after showing some examples to students in a digital media class I guest attended, I had students coming up to me for weeks afterward wondering where they could see more, and wishing that there could be a class on it.

What are the possibilities of and for electronic literature? Much of this depends on its gaining widespread appeal, acceptance, and understanding. First and foremost, to interpret this literature on a deeper level, one has to be able to understand how it works. Just as a traditional print novel has structures, so too does electronic literature, and yet part of the structures of electronic literature remain hidden. Much in the spirit of those of the free open source software movement and the Creative Commons movement, electronic writers like Jason Nelson (netpoetic.com) are releasing the codes for and explanations of how they created their work so that it cannot only be better understood, but also encourage writers to produce similar electronic writing. Scott Rettberg points out that, “In the absence of more formal institutional avenues for the education of new digital poets, these types of efforts will help to give writers with limited computation literacy the tools and educational resources they need to begin creating new electronic writing.”

What other questions and possibilities are out there for electronic and digital literature? That is what I hope to find out.