The antonym of ‘entropy’ is ‘ectropy.’ Would ‘ectropic’ be a reasonable alternative to ‘ergodic.’

House of Leaves: ergodic? The wikipedia entry for it calls it an example of ergodic literature, and at first I just thought that was ridiculous – but then rereading this I suppose it’s just as ergodic as Apollinaire’s Calligrammes. The problem is, all the wikipedians want to add that sort of footnote-ish text as an example, which entirely skews the concept.

The Wikipedia’s great in some ways, but the entries about electronic literature, ergodic literature and so on and so forth are really not very good. They mostly read as though they were written by students after one course on new media where they’ve sort of half-read the textbooks, if that. Most of the discussions are clearly by people who haven’t read the literature at all but just form an approximate idea of something and fling in some links and assertions and examples based on that.

And yet the wikipedia’s entry on ergodic literature, say, is likely to be thought of as authoritative by students. Mine sure seem to assume the wikipedia’s authoritative, despite any of my I think instead of just telling my students that quoting the Wikipedia ain’t good enough and having them disbelieve me (I do tell them it’s often a very good place to start one’s research) I’m going to have to devise some kind of exercise where they actually research specific articles and consider the history of them and who edited them and compare sources and so on. Should have done that long ago, really.

As for the term causing actual trouble or not, I withhold conclusion while I await Mr. Bernstein’s elaboration, which should settle the matter.

Neologisms that confuse terms common within a specific knowledge domain might indeed be problematic, I suppose, but I’m not sure we could (or really need to) devise a ruleset for their coinage.

At any rate, I don’t quite see the logic behind the idea that it is ok to appropriate a term from a large linguistic domain (i.e. everyday language) but not from a specialized one, if the goal is to reduce confusion.

It’s quite common for science and mathematics to borrow common words for new concepts: game theory, strange particles, strange attractor, garbage collector, electrical resistance. But in almost all these cases, the common meaning is immediately understood and is clearly unrelated to the new technical meaning. Nobody expects a garbage truck to appear weekly to clean out your program’s garbage collector, or offers to introduce a strange particle to the other guests so it will feel at home.

It’s also common for science and mathematics to invent words, often from roots in ancient languages. This practice descends from the time when all scientists spoke Latin and Greek, but most laypersons did not; embedding a Latin term in vernacular signalled the technical meaning.

The catch with “ergodic” is that it already possesses a technical meaning that’s widely used in thermodynamics. In the US, for example, you’re almost certain to run into the term if your studies lead you to a 3rd-year physics or chemistry course. *But* it’s still a specialized and esoteric term, one that students quickly forget. (”Intensive” and “extensive”, similarly, are terms from physical chemistry that Steve DeRose borrowed literally for his taxonomy of links; DeRose borrowed both the words and the meaning, but I think students have a hard time decoding them)

And, as Espen says, the scientific meaning of ergodic doesn’t really illuminate the literary meaning. (There’s also an applied-math meaning that’s related to, but distinct from, the physical term. The technical term for this situation is, “Oy veh”)

I used to wish for another word — perhaps the Latin opus/operis or labor/laboris or factus would have been a useful root. Or you could reach for “toil” and its Latin source, “tudicula”, an olive press. Tudicular literature might have been less trouble for everyone.

But it didn’t happen that way.

Currently I am following two online discussions carried out in different platforms: Coglist email list discussion on conceptual metaphors Grantextauto blog discussion on ergodic and cybertext It is interesting to think about how (if?) the materiality o…

if my use of “ergodic” turns out to be problematic (if the other concepts could be fruitfully applied to the field of comparative media theory in a way that causes confusion because of the name conflict) then I will be the first to regret it. Until that happens, though, I don’t really see a problem. I explicitly appropriated a term, not a concept. Instead, as I point out in the book, my concept is very close to the original, very common Greek meaning. If, as you say, there are several techincal meanings of the term in your field, then I am happy this is not the case in mine.

Noah,

thanks for the wishlist. I’ll see what I can do, but I doubt there is room for thicker descriptions of the sample texts without a major revision, and that is unlikely. (And as for explaining ergodic using the term interactive, well…) There are a number of issues and problems with the book that could be fixed, but I’d rather let it float on by itself while it still can, and wait for someone else to come up with a more “systematic and rigorous theory” of these matters.

The problem you still seem to have with cybertext might stem from the fact that you are trying to peg it as a formal category, which it really isn’t intended to be, as I pointed out in the book. My critique of the concept of hypertext isn’t solved by the concept of cybertext, but by the multimodal typology, by which it should be clear that these broad concepts cover very different individual works and genres, which are always dangerous to lump together under one term. Instead, the formal categories of the typology could be used to find out precisely which characteristics of texts that are the important differences that makes a difference. Or a better typology, which can be built from scratch or by modifying the present one.

As an example of how the typology can be used to clarify the conceptual problems, let us look at your Queneau example. The problem here is that the hypothetical text you describe would be formally different from Queneau’s original. This cannot be explained in terms of ergodic or cybertext, but by applying the formal categories and concepts of the typology:

What you propose, it seems, is a book of 140 pages where all ten alternative page numbers for each following sonnet line are presented as choices on the first ten pages, followed by the next ten alternatives for the next ten pages, and so on, 13 times. So far so good. The scriptons in this case, however, would not be identical to the scriptons of the original, since they would only contain one line each, *not* the assembled 14. And the access to the scriptons would be controlled, not random, as in the original, where you can change individual lines in any order, unlike in your version. So you are not discussing Queneau’s work, but a hypertextualisation(?) which reduces the user’s possibilities and the format of the result. The original is configurative and random access with no links, yours is explorable and controlled access with explicit links.

Ian, I am completely open to use ergodic to mean auto-generated paths as well as user-generated paths, so by all means do (just don’t tell anyone I said so…). The main rationale for the concept was to distinguish between texts that are unicursal *and* static, and texts that are somehow different from this ideal. As you suggest, it would certainly be within the semantic frame of Greek. And we all know how non-trivial successful text generation is…

In terms of “ergodic” and Tale-spin, I definitely plan to read Meehan’s dissertation and spend more time with Warren Sack’s reimplementation. In the meantime, I think Espen’s comment about Tale-spin having an ergodic mode of operation, much the way Doom has a multi-player mode of operation, helps me understand what Nick was trying to tell me earlier. Basically, if I understand correctly, even if Tale-spin can produce batch-mode stories, it can also run interactively — as demonstrated by story kernel 6 in Sack’s version. So while the whole of Tale-spin doesn’t “require” non-trivial effort (it can be run with non-interactive settings) it is a system that’s built to accommodate experiences that do require non-trivial effort.

As for “cybertext,” let me see if I can summarize what I feel I’ve learned:
- The terms “cybertext” and “ergodic” are not two sides of the same coin.
- The category of “cybertext” explicitly excludes static hypertexts, so hypertexts are not a subset of cybertext whether we view the term “hypertext” as Espen does or as I do.
- When we say cybertexts “involve calculation in their production of scriptons” that can mean a number of things. First, it can mean that the scriptons are generated differently out of textons. In this case, Queneau’s Poems is a cybertext when it’s presented as re-arrangeable strips (textons) that are combined into different sonnets (scriptons). If Queneau’s Poems was, instead, presented in a choose-your-own-adventure format (with a page for each first line, and instructions of where to turn from each of these to a page with each second line, and so on) it wouldn’t be cybertext because the scriptons would always remain the same. However, you can still have a cybertext where the scriptons always stay the same, such as Michael Joyce’s Afternoon. In this case, the calculation involved in the production of scriptons is that the connections between the scriptons (and therefore the potential orders in which they can be traversed) change when the work is in different states. Also, if I understand correctly, the possibility of textons being altered or added would make something a cybertext.

Finally, in terms of the text of Cybertext, I think we’ve come to the conclusion that on page 75 Queneau’s Poems should be added to Afternoon as an example of things on the east half of figures 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4 that are cybertexts. I don’t know if JHUP would possibly add a note of this sort in future printings, but it might avoid additional confusions like my own. Personally, if they were willing to consider any changes, I’d also like to advocate for a note giving slightly more information about how The Money Spider functions. Reading through Cybertext as carefully as I could, I thought this was just a “typical gamebook,” and I think people would benefit from an explanation of how it has conditional linking. In addition, while I know this is probably much too much to ask, it would be great if JHUP were willing to add a note to chapter 6 that indicates in some way that Tale-spin can be run interactively, and this is when it is ergodic. Perhaps even if it’s not possible to add these to future printed versions, they could be put on the online errata page for the book?

This is much, much closer to the meaning of “ergodic” in maths (ergodic theory, to be more precise; there is another, possibly obsolescent meaning with which I am not very familiar).

>If I as a game researcher have offended economists or mathematicians by >appropriating ‘ergodic,’ I guess that would be simply poetic justice, given their >massive misuse of the rather common word ‘game’

Surely it is more permissible – or at least traditional – to appropriate very common words for technical use than to appropriate technical terms that already have another meaning? I have not yet met anybody who minds the (different) uses of the words “stack” in mathematics and computer science, say; yet, if you call your newborn concept after something completely different in an unrelated field, people will suspect you of choosing sexy names to get grants from confused committees. A curious example: this is the kind of suspicion that many mathematicians feel towards the chaps who chose to call their subfield of maths “quantum ergodicity”; here the filched sexy name is not “ergodic”, but “quantum”!

Of course, chance has it that “game” is by now a central technical term for people who have at least as much of a right to it as mathematicians and economists do
(but weren’t we there first?). “Ergodic” has at least two different meanings in maths, by the way — neither of which seems to have much to do with what I am reading here.

On (1), I was just curious. I’m not suggesting that your usage of the term is incorrect nor that one bears responsibility to every possible usage of a term. As I said, it was a pedantic question.

On (2), my point, however experimental, is that it is possible to tease out a few different notions of actual utility from the Greek terms ergon and hodos, including one between path and mechanism. One could, it would seem, adopt the term ergodic to both ends. This was not your goal nor is it necessarily mine, but it might be a possible extension/adaptation/perversion of the concept that could suggest resonances between non-trivial effort and generativity.

You are of course right in pointing out the omission of Cent Mille… from the sentence on page 75, thanks! I can only conclude that the use of a bottom-up empirical model once again works to correct top-down, error-prone categorizations. Having readers like you also helps, of course.

As for my confusion about what “cybertext” meant, when I wrote this initial post, I’m guessing it came down to (a) not knowing enough about The Money Spider, and (b) an error on page 75 of Cybertext, where it should have said “This criterion corresponds nicely to all the texts in the west half of figures 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4, while in the east it only applies to Afternoon and Cent mille milliards de poemes…“

To repeat: I don’t believe any of Espen’s distinctions are about traversing “the text you got” or about “traversing the output.”

A central point of Cybertext, as I understand it, involves enlarging the traditional concept of text to something more like text/machine. TALE-SPIN is a text/machine. Espen wrote about the system and about how his perspective could be used to learn about the entire system, not just about the “text” (in the more narrow sense) that it outputs.

As to whether or not TALE-SPIN is a cybertext, if you refuse to do anything different with a cybertextual system (don’t turn the strips of paper in Queneau’s Poèms, don’t click on Afternoon, type only “(micro-talespin-demo *story1*)” but never anything else), then, if it’s a deterministic system, of course you get the same output every time. But that’s just because you’re not looking at the whole system and what it can do, you’re just trying to guess something about it from reading the output.

It turns out that Tale-spin runs just the way I thought it did when I wrote my initial post: you load it, you run it, and it tells you a story.

You should really study the program further. You have made it generate more than one story, yes? In a discussion of cybertext and user agency, your reply makes me think of a user who believes “ls” or “dir” do the same thing every time because he always runs these commands from his home directory without parameters, and he never creates or destroys files in his home directory. MICRO-TALESPIN is not just a program that you load and run, resulting in a story. At the very least, some story kernel, chosen by the user, must be supplied as an argument to micro-talespin-demo, but you can also define your own story kernel.

Espen, thanks for setting me straight about Queneau’s Poems. It sounds like my confusion about the term “cybertext” may actually have, at its root, a small error on page 75. On that page the book says (as I also quote above):

I suggest the term cybertext for texts that involve calculation in their production of scriptons. This criterion corresponds nicely to all the texts in the west half of figures 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4, while in the east it only applies to Afternoon….

But Queneau’s Poems appears in the east half of figure 3.2, leading me to believe (when I wrote my initial post) that it wasn’t a cybertext. If you tell me that it is a cybertext, then the whole thing makes more sense to me. Basically, it sounds like a cybertext is any text that has some sort of built-in mechanism that can produce differences at the level of the scripton (rather than just, say, the connections between scriptons). So The Money Spider is only a cybertext because there are places for the reader to write things in, thereby changing one of the scriptons. Similarly, if Queneau’s piece were implemented as a choose-your-own-adventure poem (”if you want to now read line two from the second original sonnet, turn to page 15″) rather than as a way of flipping individual lines to make up a single page, then it wouldn’t be a cybertext any more (because each scripton, each page, would be unchanging). Or am I on the wrong scent again?

In any case, I appreciate everyone (and especially Espen, close to a decade after he wrote all this) taking the time to work through these two terms with me. BTW, we’re still having issues with people’s comments getting caught in the moderation queue. I believe the way around this is to provide a consistent email address and web address when you comment. (These can be made up, and, if you provide both, only the web address will be visible.) Once we’ve approved one of your comments with a certain set of addresses, your future comments with that set will show up immediately.

Boltzmann was responsible for the development of statistical mechanics, and I think the word was coined in that context.

I wonder if “conatus” or “nisus” might be more appropriate terms.

When terms become more important than the the models and concepts they support, we are in the field of ideology, not wissenschaft. I remember a psychologist once reprimanding me for using the word “multi-modal” in a way he did not recognize from his own discipline. Luckily for me this was at an explicitly interdisciplinary symposium, so others reprimanded him in turn.

Which brings me to hypertext, a concept I never found very useful as an analytical tool, since nobody could agree on what it was and was not. We’ve had this discussion before, Noah, so I will not repeat myself here, merely say that with my more detailed model of tetual behavior (or someone else’s better future model), we don’t need the term hypertext to distinguish between things like John Cayley’s Clock, Queneau’s Poemes and Crowther and Woods’ Adventure, all of which both are and are not hypertext, depending on who you talk to.

Queneau’s Poemes *is* a cybertext (according to the figure on p. 64), because the user configures the poem. The important thing to note here is that it allows the user some creativity in the *shaping* of the textual output, unlike, say Victory Garden. Given the table of classifications on pp. 68-9 the differences between the texts should be quite clear (or as clear as I could make them), and while there are probably better ways of doing this (e.g. using concepts like state machines, petri nets, matematical combinatorics and whatnot), I will leave that task to others.

Ian:
(1) no reason, at least none that I still remember. Probably carelessness mellowed by ignorance.
(2) Not really, no. A cybertext can be effectuated solely by the choices of a user following a recipe, as in the case of Queneau. I never meant to make a sharp distinction between way and mechanism. Instead, such distinctions are taken care of in the multidimentional model.
(3) I probably said too much, which is a problem when people quote from what I write in places like this, rather than, like Noah, actually bothering to read the book (the first chapter is still online somewhere). So let me instead correct myself: There are also ergodic, static texts that are not hypertext (linked fragments) or hypertext-like. Instead of simply constructing cybertext as a category, my idea in the book was to use it as a perspective. As an analytical category it is too broad to be of much use, as a perspective it draws attention to aspects and genres that other perspectives may have overlooked.