FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
cont…@tiltfactor.org
603.646.1007

Dr. Mary Flanagan, director of Tiltfactor Laboratory and Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College, will deliver several talks this summer and fall on such topics as critical play, games as an art form, and games as a medium for social change. Scheduled venues include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Games for Change Festival, and the IndieCade Conference.

At MoMA, Dr. Flanagan, along with other artists, critics, curators, and scholars, will take part in the Contemporary Art Forum regarding Critical Play. Panelists will take on “The Game as an Art Form,” discussing how games influence art practice, and how they have changed the way audiences engage with and learn from art. The forum will take place on May 17th.
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/events/13985

Dr. Flanagan will also deliver a lecture at the Games for Learning Institute Day at the ninth annual Games for Change Festival, the largest games gathering in New York City. Games for Change aims to “catalyze social impact through digital games.” The festival will run from June 18th to June 20th.
http://gamesforchange.org/festival2012/

In fall, Dr. Flanagan will deliver the keynote address at the IndieCade Conference in Los Angeles. The conference aims to bring together the “freshest, most innovative and creative minds and works in independent game design.” It runs parallel with the IndieCade Festival, the nation’s only stand-alone, independent-focused game event, described as “the videogame industry’s Sundance” by the Los Angeles Times. The conference will take place from the 5th to the 7th of October.
http://www.indiecade.com/2012/conference/

Follow Dr. Flanagan @criticalplay

#####

Tiltfactor
301 North Fairbanks
Hanover, NH 03755
(603) 443 2725
cont…@tiltfactor.org

This Friday, Dartmouth is proud to welcome alumni in the gaming industry back to Hanover!

One experiment found that people who went through “experience-taking” while reading about a character who was revealed to be of a different race or sexual orientation showed more favorable attitudes toward the other group and were less likely to stereotype.

According to Kaufman, when people are able to forget about themselves, their own self-concept, and self-identity while reading, they merge their own lives with those of the characters they’re reading about. ”You have to be able to take yourself out of the picture, and really lose yourself in the book in order to have this authentic experience of taking on a character’s identity, ” argues Kaufman. For example, researchers found in one experiment that most college students were unable to undergo experience-taking if they were reading in a cubicle with a mirror.

One experiment found that people who strongly identified with a fictional character who overcame obstacles to vote were significantly more likely to vote in a real election several days later.

When participants read a story told in first-person about a student at their own university, the students had the highest level of experience-taking. When asked later, 65 percent of these participants reported they voted on Election Day.

Meanwhile, of the participants who were in the condition of reading a story told in first-person about a student from a different university, only 29 percent of them reported voting. The researchers argue that sharing a group membership with a character from a story told in first-person voice facilitates the “experience-taking” of the character’s life events. After, the act of experience-taking can affect the individuals for days afterwards. The researchers argue that experience-taking is different from perspective-taking, in which readers may understand what the character is experience while maintaining a separate sense of self. The act of experience-taking is much more immersive, and unconsciously replaces the self with the character.

Congratulations Geoff — fascinating work, well done!

Currently, Geoff is applying his work on experience-taking to research that compares the effects of a game narrative on systems thinking, and in our bias and stereotypes research at Tiltfactor with founder Mary Flanagan. Stay tuned for these results!

References Science Daily http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120507131948.htm

PCG has been used in interactive stories in the past, but usually in attempts to generate entire stories, plot points, or lines of dialogue from scratch. Rather than doing something so ambitious, instead I’m trying a sort of experiment: what’s the minimum amount of a generated text that could be inserted into an otherwise hand-authored story to produce something that’s both authorially sound and computationally interesting?

My approach with Goodbye is to generate the “satellite” sentences of a story (as opposed to the “kernel” sentences that move forward the plot) during dialogue scenes. These include all of the little bits controlling pacing between speakers (sentences like “He waited” or “There was a pause”) as well as the ones re-establishing the setting (“The moonlight shone on his face” or “Traffic growled from somewhere nearby”). While these sentences seem inconsequential at first, they can have a surprisingly strong impact on a reader’s perception of a scene. They are also relatively easy to procedurally generate compared to other types of prose sentences, and are amenable to variation based on the current narrative context (time of day, location, current speakers, mood, and the moment-to-moment rhythms of a conversation). The consequences of past player choices (such as changes undergone by the narrator) can also be factored in to the construction of these sentences. The result is (hopefully) a story that is personalized to the way you’ve been interacting with it in subtle yet constant ways, sentence by sentence… a different model than the large but infrequent consequences often seen in interactive narrative (i.e. getting one chunk of content instead of another).

You can play Goodbye at the link above; it takes about ten minutes to read through. The piece is a selection for “Avenues of Access,” an exhibit of new electronic literature that will be part of the Modern Language Association’s next conference, but I’ve received permission to post it online here early. Comments are always welcome. The curious can also read more about the technical details in a paper to be presented at the upcoming Workshop in Procedural Content Generation at the 2012 Foundations of Digital Games conference.

Because many people already lug mobile phones, apps such as SlimKicker may be the easiest to “level up your body.” Striiv bills itself as a “Smart Pedometer” that creates personal challenges on the fly as you go about your day. The Fitbit, is the least obtrusive and sturdiest made of the standalone movement tracking, calorie-counting devices, but it does not tie into later game systems (one model does, however, track your sleep, so if you play a lot of games, you may be shocked to see FitBit’s real assessment of how long it takes you to fall asleep and how much shut-eye you actually get.

These many  exergame products, if not specifically gaming, use gamification point structures as key motivational factors. Designed to track steps, stairs, and distance and motivate players to become more fit, I think the range and quality of these systems will continue to increase this year until we have some serious wellness device wars on our hands. Tiltfactor folks are interested, not only because we always pay attention to games as catalysts for behavior change, but also because we are embarking on some new games for wellness and health care delivery. Stay tuned!

The Spring 2012 Purple Blurb series comes to an end this week, not with a whimper, but with Christian Bök!

Thursday May 3
6-120
6pm

Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994),
 a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial
 Award, and of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of
 experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for
 Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two
 television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter
 Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso
 performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt
 Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of
 Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky
 Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök is
 currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

If you’re in the Boston area, and interested in radical play with language (why else would you have found this blog?) please come by.

Creative Material Computing in a Laboratory Context
Nick Montfort and Natalia Fedorova
TROPE-12-03

Download the full report

Abstract
Principles for organizing a laboratory with material computing resources are articulated. This laboratory, the Trope Tank, is a facility for teaching, research, and creative collaboration and offers hardware (in working condition and set up for use) from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including videogame systems, home computers, an arcade cabinet, and a workstation. Other resources include controllers, peripherals, manuals, books, and software on physical media. In reorganizing the space, we considered its primary purpose as a laboratory (rather than as a library or studio), organized materials by platform and intended use, and provided additional cues and textual information about the historical contexts of the available systems.

This MIT Press title is the third book in the Platform Studies series. Jimmy Maher has done an excellent job of detailing the nuts and bolts of the first multimedia computer that was available to consumers, and connecting the lowest levels of this platform’s function to cultural questions, types of software produced, and the place of this system in history. The book considers gaming uses (which many used to brand the Amiga as nothing but a toy) but also media production applications and even, in one chapter, the famous Boing Ball demo.

The Platform Studies series (which also has a page at The MIT Press) is edited by Ian Bogost and yours truly, Nick Montfort, and now has three titles, one about an early videogame console, one about a console still in the current generation and on the market, and this latest title about an influential home computer, the Amiga. We have a collaboration between two digital media scholars and practitioners of computational media; a collaboration between an English professor and a computer science professor; and this latest very well-researched and well-written contribution from an independent scholar who has, for a while, been avidly blogging about many aspects of the history of gaming and creative computing.

Jimmy Maher, not content with his book-writing and voracious, loquacious blogging, has created a website for The Future is Here which is worth checking out. If you were an Amiga owner or are otherwise an Amiga fan, there’s no need to say that you should run, not walk, to obtain and read this book. But it will be of broader interest to all of those concerned with the multimedia capabilities of the computer. Really, even if you had an Atari ST – do give it a read, as it explains a great deal about the relationship between computer technology and creativity, exploring issues relevant to the mid-to-late 1980s and also on up through today.

Star Wars, Raw? Rats!

… is a videopoem by Natali Fedorova and Taras Mashtalir. The text is a palindrome by Nick Montfort that briefly retells “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope,” making Han Solo central. The soundtrack is a remix of Commodore 64 music by Sven Schlünzen & Jörg Rosenstiel made by Mashtalir.

The palindrome is a revised version of the one Montfort wrote in 75 minutes for the First World Palindrome Championship, held in Brooklyn on March 16, 2012:

Wow, sagas!
Solo’s deed, civic deed.
Eye dewed, a doom-mood.
A pop …
Sis sees redder rotator.
Radar eye sees racecar X.
Dad did rotor gig.
Level sees reviver!
Solo’s deified!
Solo’s reviver sees level …
Gig rotor did dad!
X, racecar, sees eye.
Radar rotator, redder, sees sis …
Pop a doom-mood!
A dewed eye.
Deed, civic deed.
Solo’s sagas: wow.

Machine Libertine: http://machinelibertine.wordpress.com/

The big-screen premiere of Star Wars, Raw? Rats! will be at MIT in room 32-155 on Monday, April 30, 2012. The screening, which includes a set of films made by members of the MIT community, will begin at 6pm.

Lorem Ipsum Books
1299 Cambridge Street
Inman Square
Cambridge, MA
Ph: 617-497-7669

May 7, 2012 at 7pm

Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork (2012), the chapbook Tonal Saw (2010), and a collaborative work Excess Exhibit to be released as both a limited-edition book and iPad application in 2012. Her poems, essays, and translations have been published widely in journals such as the New American Writing, Los Angeles Review, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, and Columbia Poetry Review. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from USC and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies, Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT where she works on and teaches digital poetry, visual poetry, and creative writing workshops.

Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (2003), a pataphysical encyclopedia, and of Eunoia (2009), a bestselling work of experimental literature. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly Die Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). Currently, he is conducting a conceptual experiment called The Xenotext (which involves genetically engineering a bacterium so that it might become not only an archive for storing a poem in its genome for eternity, but also a machine for writing a poem as a protein in response). He teaches English at the University of Calgary.

Nick Montfort writes computational and constrained poetry, develops computer games, and is a critic, theorist, and scholar of computational art and media. He teaches at MIT and is currently serving as president of the Electronic Literature Organization. His digital media writing projects include the interactive fiction system Curveship; the group blog Grand Text Auto; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; 2002: A Palindrome Story, the longest literary palindrome (according the Oulipo), written with William Gillespie; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; and several works of interactive fiction: Winchester’s Nightmare, Ad Verbum, and Book and Volume. His latest book, Riddle & Bind (2010), contains literary riddles and constrained poems.

This makes it particularly apt that Christian describes my writing as potential poetic “fodder.” Why not treat this feed of texts as the gift horse that keeps on giving? Please, feel free to make the tweets of @nickmofo into your chew toy.

Steve McCaffery read at MIT in the Purple Blurb series on March 19, 2012. A recording of part of that reading (his reading of Carnival) is embedded above; the text of my introduction follows.

Thank you all for braving the cold to come out today. Did you know that today is officially the last day of Winter? Ever! Winter is officially over forever!

But I come not to bury Winter, but to praise Steve McCaffery, and to introduce him. Steve McCaffery is professor and Gray Chair at the University of Buffalo in the Poetics Program. He comes to us from there, and before, from Canada, where he did much of his pioneering work in sound and concrete poetry. He is one of those people who is know for his non-digital work but without whom the current situation of electronic literature, of digital writing, could not exist. He is in that category, for instance, with Jorge Luis Borges.

You would have me institutionalized for loggorrhea if I attempted to read Steve McCaffery’s entire bibliography and discography to you.

Know, however, that McCaffery was one of the Four Horsemen, along with bpNichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, and Paul Dutton. This groundbreaking group of sound poets, numbering almost as many mouths as there are vowels, released several albumbs: “Live in the West,” and “Bootleg,” and “caNADAda.”

McCaffery’s critical writing can found in “North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973-1986″ and “Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics” His two-volume selected poems, “Seven Pages Missing,” was published in Coach House in 2000. It earned him his second Governor General’s Awards nomination; his first was for his 1991 book “Theory of Sediment.” More recently, there’s his “Verse and Worse: Selected Poems 1989-2009,” which he and Darren Wershler edited.

And, I’ll mention two other books, his “The Basho Variations,” published in 2007, which consists of different translations and version of Matsuo Basho’s famous haiku, which could be rendered clunkily as “old pond / frog jump in / water sound.” A digital version of this haiku can be seen in Neil Hennesy’s “Basho’s Frogger,” a modified version of the game Frogger in which the first row of floating items is missing so that one can only … you know … jump in. McCaffery is pond and frog and sound, placid and salient and resonant, and we are very lucky to have him here with us tonight.

Finally, I want to mention his extraordinary poem “Carnival.” I’ve taught the first panel to dozens of students here at MIT, so it’s black and red and read all over. The two panels of “Carnival” are incredible documents. If only fragments of them survive in three thousand years, that will be adequate for archaeologists to reconstruct the functioning and history of the typewriter completely. Of course, there’s more to “Carnival” than that material writing technology. But instead of saying more, I should simply let our guest give voice to “Carnival” and other works of his. Please join me in welcoming Steve McCaffery…

…muaharhar…

THURSDAY // APRIL 19^TH // 5-7:30 PM

NORTH FAIRBANKS HALL ☜ green entrance behind Tucker

This Thursday, come greet the ✿spring✿ with the folks behind Tiltfactor, Dartmouth’s game design and research lab!

See what games we’ve been cooking up, as well as some science-themed classics. Meet our diabolical student interns, staff, and founder Mary Flanagan. Participate in a study and get a treat!

To participate in the study you must be at least 18 years old. There are a limited number of slots so please RSVP @ geo…@tiltfactor.org.

Be there or be ❒.

Hey gamers!

This weekend, almost 70K people will be gathering in Boston at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) for the ultimate gaming event. Game lovers of all forms–digital to analog, casual to hardcore, serious to playful–will be represented and you’ll play your socks off nonstop for three days. Are any of you attending? Sukie will be there, with Buffalo and other prototypes we’ve been cooking up this year. If you want to play some Tilt games or just meet up and chat with Sukie (he’s a cool guy, I promise), be sure to shoot Sukie an email at suki…@tiltfactor.org.

Tonight at 7pm in Silsby 028,  come learn about the mathematics behind the game SET with Professor Liz MacMahon from Lafayette College! If you haven’t played SET before, be sure to do so! Play online at www.setgame.com. Explore the card game through combinatorics, probability, linear algebra and geometry.  See how to use the geometry to explore the game and, even better, how to use the game to understand the structure of the geometry. Sure to be an interesting talk!

The researchers were interested in studying preschoolers’ math skills, specifically how children think about the relationships between numbers. According to prior research by Siegler, preschoolers do not yet have a linear representation of numbers, which is a concept that, once mastered, correlates with a variety of tasks related to superior mathematical performance (Siegler & Booth, 2004).

The researchers compared the performance of groups of children playing either a number board game or a color board game. The number game board consisted of 10 equal-sized, horizontally arranged, differently colored squares with the numbers 1-10 listed in the boxes. The color game board was configured exactly the same way except that the squares were not numbered. In the number game, players used a spinner to determine if they were to advance 1 or 2 spaces on the board. In the color game, the spinner had colors, such that one advanced their token to the next space with the color shown on the spinner. When a child moved a token, he or she would announce either the numbers shown on the spaces (e.g. 5, 6; number game condition) or the colors on the spaces (e.g. red, blue; color game condition).

The children who played the number game improved in comparing magnitudes of numbers, estimating numbers on a number line, identifying numbers, and counting. The effects persisted for at least 9 weeks. The children who played the color game did not show the same improvement. An interesting note is that, in a related study, the same researchers did not find the same math improvements using a circular board game (Siegler & Ramani, 2009). Considering that the researchers explored children’s linear representation of numbers, their findings using a circular board make sense.

Ramani and Siegler’s study has profound implications for early childhood education. If board games can produce measurable gains in math proficiency, then they can serve as viable tools for parents to teach their children or for children to engage in incidental (i.e. implicit) math learning while playing games themselves. However, before making these connections, we should consider a caveat to their findings: the counting-up rule the researchers employed limits the study’s transferability. For example, if a child played the number game and moved a token from 5 to 7, they would need to say “6, 7” as opposed to “1, 2” or else the researcher would ask the child to vocalize the move again. Although this counting-up procedure has been hypothesized to be instrumental to understanding numerical magnitudes (Secada, Fuson, & Hall, 1983), Ramani and Siegler noted that the more common way to play board games is to use the space one previously occupied as a zero point and to say “1, 2, …”. In games such as Chutes and Ladders, the counting-up procedure may work, although in games such as Sorry, it is unlikely that players will naturally use this strategy, particularly because the spaces are not numbered.

Future research to build from Ramani and Siegler’s study could compare two playing styles of Chutes and Ladders. In one condition, players would be free to play the game without any interference; in the other condition, researchers could ask players to vocalize their moves and to employ the “counting-up” procedure used by Ramani and Siegler. The groups could be compared for the same math skills that the researchers explored.

What do you think about the study? What interests you about it? What strikes you as odd or inapplicable to gameplay outside of the laboratory setting? Do you think that games should be used to teach math, or should play exist as a domain that is separate from intentional learning? What games have you played that may have helped you learn math concepts, either intentionally or incidentally?

References [in order of appearance]:
Ramani, G.B., & Siegler, R.S. (2008). Promoting broad ands table improvements in low-income children’s numerical knowledge through playing number board games. Child Development, 79(2), 375-394.

Siegler, R. S., & Booth, J. L. (2004). Development of numerical estimation in young children. Child Development, 75, 428-444.

Siegler, R. S. & Ramani, G. B. (2009). Playing linear number board games ­ but not circular ones ­ improves low-income preschoolers’ numerical understanding. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101, 545-560.

Secada, W.G., Fuson, K.C., & Hall, J.W. (1983). The transition from counting-all to counting-on in addition. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 14, 47-57.

Pictures:
1.) http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/41600/41660/1-10_41660_lg.gif

2.) http://hasbro.com

3.) http://boardgamegenius.com/wp-content/uploads/Sorry-Board-Game.jpg

The students I teach now, like other university students I have taught, have the ability to read. They are perfectly able to move their eyes over a page, or a screen, and recognize the typographical symbols as letters that make up words that make up sentences or lines.

The problems they face usually relate to a narrow concept of reading, which includes an unwillingness to read a wider variety of texts. These are not problems that are restricted to well-qualified, well-educated university students who are expert readers. As the networked computer provides tremendous access to writing and transforms our experience of language, all of are asked to rethink and enlarge our reading ability.

One problem with reading too narrowly is the view that reading is only instrumental. People who spend a significant portion of their lives speaking to their friends and family members about nothing – simply because they enjoy company and conversation – will sometimes refuse to believe that reading can a pleasure in and of itself. Reading is too often seen only as a tool, to allow one to follow instructions, determine the ingredients in packaged food, or to learn about some news event or underlying argument.

To try to enlarge a student’s idea of reading, I might present a text that, whether said aloud or imagined to one’s self, communicates almost nothing and is simply beautiful. To take a very conservative example:

Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven
With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven

  Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs,—
      Emerald twilights,—
      Virginal shy lights,
Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows,
When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades
  Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,
    Of the heavenly woods and glades,
That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within
      The wide sea-marshes of Glynn;—

This is from an American poem, Sidney Lanier’s The Marshes of Glynn, published in 1878. It shows that it is not necessary to turn to some almost unrecognizable avant-garde poem to see how sound can overflow meaning, providing a pleasure that has almost nothing to do with communication. Lanier had a very musical view of poetry, but this poem does not need to be sung or played by an expert musician. Anyone who can read English can bring it alive.

Another problem with a narrow concept of reading is not understanding the full range of what can be read. Students are comfortable reading pages and feeds, and reading emails and IMs, but it is not always as clear how they might read around in the library to explore as researchers, how they might read an unusual Web site or other complex digital object, or how they might read their daily urban environment. Those of us familiar with art and literature will habitually “view” something in the former category, perhaps not even noticing that it may be legible.

To address this issue, I do turn to an almost unrecognizable avant-garde poem, Steve McCaffery’s Carnival, the first panel. This Canadian concrete poem, typed in a red and black in an amazing configuration of characters, seems to many to be an artwork but was created by a poet and published as poetry. Unlike the most famous Brazilian concrete poems, this is an example of “dirty concrete” that many do not even see, initially, as legible. Students who are able to assume the attitude of readers find that it can be read, however, and that it has an amazing ability to disclose things about reading: Our assumptions in how to trace words and letters in space, our ability to fill in partly-missing and entirely missing letters, the question of how to sound fragments of words and patterns of punctuation marks.

The first page of Carnival, panel one, is from the
Coach House online edition.

When people learn how to speak a language – whether as an infant or later in life – they sometimes simply babble or chat. Everyone would agree that a learner should be allowed to enjoy speaking and listening, to enjoy making and hearing the sounds of a language, in addition to caring about the purposeful uses of that language. I believe it’s the same for reading. Reading is more than just a process of decipherment that provides an information payload. It gives us special access to the pleasures of language and to its complexities. Any sighted person, with or without any English, can look at the first panel of Carnival. But only a reader can both view it and read it, comprehending it as a visual design and as language. If a reader is unwilling to hear The Marshes of Glynn, it could be understood simply as a botanical catalog with some lovers traipsing about here and there. To hear, instead, the play of sound and sense, is to encounter something new, to understand another aspect of words and how they work.

An intriguing exception, however, can be found in the just-released Muggle Studies, a game by Flourish Klink that takes place in the wonderful wizarding world of Harry Potter. The player character is of the non-magical persuasion, but gets to wander, wand-free, at Hogwarts, solve puzzles, and discover things that bear on her relationship with her ex-girlfriend. You can play and download the game at the Muggle Studies site.

Apollo 18+20.

A few papers of mine are probably the least spectacular contribution to the show. There are three maps of interactive fiction games that I played in the 1980s and my first map of nTopia, drawn as I developed Book and Volume. The other work includes some excellent video and audio documentation of WoW actions and incidents; fascinatingly geeky video pieces; the RPGs Power Kill, Pupperland, and Steal Away Jordan; player-generated maps; a sort of CYOA in which you can choose to be a butcher for the mob or Richard Serra; and an assortment of work in other media. Plus, the performance piece “Lawful Evil,” in which people play a tabletop RPG in the center of the gallery, is running the whole time the show is open.

Which, by the way, is until March 29.

And, the catalog is excellent, too, with essays and other materials that bear on the question of how supposedly escapist role-playing tunnels into reality.

I made into New York in time to meet at Jon Agee’s sister’s house in Brooklyn with him and several other palindromists who would be competing that evening. (Agee is a cartoonist whose books include Go Hang a Salami! I’m a Lasagna Hog! and Palindromania!) The other competitors included a fellow academic, John Connett, who is professor of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota and an extremely prolific producer of sentence-length palindromes. Martin Clear, another author of many, many sentence-length palindromes, came from Australia. Barry Duncan, a Somerville resident and thus practically my neighbor, also joined us. Another competitor was Mark Saltveit, editor of The Palindromist and a stand-up comedian. And Douglas Fink, who won a celebrity palindrome contest with his now-famous entry “Lisa Bonet ate no basil,” was the audience contestant selected to join us.

I met Barry and Doug later that day, and had a great time sitting around and discussing palindromes with the others over lunch. We had plenty to talk about. It was interesting to see that we also had different perspectives, interests, and terms associated with the art. Jon thought “Er, eh – where?” was a good palindrome, probably in part because he was imagining how to illustrate it or frame it in a cartoon in a funny way. The others generally thought this one was bogus. A sentence was the desired outcome for most of us, while I was a fan (and writer) of longer palindromes. And, as we found out that night, the audience had their own tropisms and aesthetics when it comes to palindromes.

We had 75 minutes to write up to three palindromes that we’d read to the crowd, which was to vote for their two favorite. There were three possible constraints given: Use X and Z; Refer to events in the news in the past year; or refer to the crossword tournament itself. Here’s what I came up with, using the first constraint:

The Millennium Falcon Rescue

by Nick Montfort

Wow, sagas … Solo’s deed, civic deed.

Eye dewed, a doom-mood.

A pop.

Sis sees redder rotator.

Radar sees racecar X.

Oho! Ore-zero level sees reviver!

Solo’s deified!

Solo’s reviver sees level: ore-zero.

Oho: X, racecar, sees radar.

Rotator, redder, sees sis.

Pop a doom-mood!

A dewed eye.

Deed, civic deed.

Solo’s sagas: wow.

All of the results (and the text of the palindromes) are up on The Palindromist site – take a look!

Mark Saltveit became champ with a short palindrome about acrobatic Yak sex. John Connett got 2nd, Jon Agee 3rd, and yours truly 4th.

Which is the longest?

In mine, I count 54 words, 237 letters, and 327 characters. If “doom-mood” and the like are single words, we’d have 50 words. Mark says on The Palindromist site that it’s 57 words long; I’m not sure how the counting was done there.

In Barry’s, the only other possible contender, I count 70 words (as does Mark), 184 letters, and 311 characters. Some of those words are “7″ and have no letters in them, as you’ll note if you check out the results page.

So, they’re both the longest: Barry’s has the most words, while mine has the most letters and characters.

It’s a sort of odd comparison, because the constraint I used (employ only palindromic words, counting things like “ore-zero” as words) let me reframe the problem as that of constructing a word palindrome with a restricted vocabulary. Of course, you should be very very impressed anyway, with my general cleverness and so on, but I think Barry chose a more difficult feat at the level of letter-by-letter construction.

Does length matter?

Yes. A palindrome should be the right length. 2002 words is a good length if you’re trying to write a palindromic postmodern novel. For a snappy statement, a short sentence is a good length. I think some of the best palindromes are longer than a sentence and much shorter than 2002. My last edits to “The Millennium Falcon Rescue” were to cut several words (an even number, of course), and maybe I should have cut more? And, should I revise this one, I might cut the word that was included for the sake of the Z.

What about those palindromists?

The most interesting thing about this event, for me, was a gathering focused on palindrome-writing. Kids know what palindromes are, the form of writing has been around for more than a thousand years, many people have palindromes memorized, and there are a handful of famous books … but as I see it there hasn’t even been a community of palindrome-writers, discussing writing methods, coming up with common terms and concepts, sharing poetic and aesthetic ideas.

Well, perhaps there has been, in the Bletchley Park codebreakers. But I only learned about them because I met Mark, who is one of the people researching the origins of famous palindromes. And that was, due to wartime security, a very secretive group.

It was great having the Championship hosted by Will Shortz at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, with many puzzle-solver and -constructors who are interested in formal engagements with language. Of course, palindrome events would fit will at other sorts of gatherings that are focused on poetry and writing, too.

Whether or not we have another championship (which would be great), it would be nice to have another summit of some sort and to build a community of practice around this longstanding practice. Particularly if we can get someone named Tim to join us: Tim must summit!

was making a movie starring

Robert “can’t stop sparkling” Pattinson

based on a novel by

Don “say the word” DeLillo

…

Cosmopolis

…

about a fantastically wealthy guy trying to cross Manhattan in his limo to get a haircut

…

?

(Thanks to Mark Sample for alerting me to the trailer.)

This was good for 45 minutes of narratology discussion in the ol’ graduate seminar today.

In 2010, the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts convened a historic workshop — it was their first jointly funded project. This meeting marked the beginning of a new level of national conversation about how computer science and other STEM disciplines can work productively with arts and design in research, creation, education, and economic development. A number of projects and follow-up workshops resulted in 2011. I was lucky enough to attend three of these events and, in the midst of all the exciting follow-up conversations, I couldn’t help but wonder: What about the digital humanities?

After all, the digital humanities have made it now. A recent visualization from University College London shows more than 100 digital humanities centers spread across the globe. There are dedicated digital humanities funding groups within the National Endowment for the Humanities and Microsoft Research. The University of Minnesota Press published a book of Debates in the Digital Humanities in January.

So why doesn’t the digital humanities have more of a seat at the table? Why is there the stereotype that, while computer scientists and digital artists have much to discuss, digital humanists only want to talk about data mining with the former and data visualization with the latter? I believe it is because the perception has developed, helped along by many in the field itself, that digital humanities is primarily about data.

Read more…

The goal for Flanagan is to allow the conversation to follow a similar path to the design process:  How do each of these artist/designers decide upon their design question? What methodologies are developed that shape that question? What outcomes could be considered successful? And importantly, in the form of a post-mortem across several projects as a reflective form of practice, How does failure play into particular experimental design endeavors?

Join us Tuesday March 20 at Parsons: 6:30 pm. I believe the chat will be held on the 12th floor of 6 East 16th Street.

My first reaction was put my 2008 hypertext poem online now on my site, nickm.com, at:

http://nickm.com/poems/the_purpling/

Fortunately, TIWR has not vanished from the Web. I found that things are still in place at:

http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/

And “The Purpling” is also up there. Maybe I was using a non-canonical link to begin with? Or maybe things moved around?

I really began to understand new media art differently when analyzing interactive works. In many ways, interactive works become more forcibly engaging than static artworks are. For example, when passing by a classical painting or a photograph in an art gallery, a viewer can simply pass by with only a short glance to the work. Whereas, with interactive art, the person becomes the life for the work: a sound is heard, letters move, an image changes, a form is displayed on a screen. All becomes very apparent to the user that he/she is important to this work’s well-being. And so he/she stays.

Embodiment of an artwork was also foreign to me. To use one’s body to express something metaphorical or real was not clear until I became the designer. For my final project, I essentially had to become one with the Kinect. I had to search for libraries, understand its functionalities and data, and found the process to be much like a jungle; I was searching for the particular artistic medium to use for my project. I enjoyed the technicality, but I was amazed at how much information could be gathered about the body, and more importantly, used in different artworks.

In our project, which uses shadows and motion detection data, the body becomes a vehicle for figures on the screen. This type of engagement seems to be more telling of the human condition because of its ephemeral nature. Each installation of this work would never be the same; each would include new people, new location, and new understanding of surroundings. In this way, each viewer would implicitly understand that this work has to be experienced, and cannot be viewed online as a photograph or understood through a video clip; to get the full effect, one has to be there and actively engage.

My experience with new media has definitely changed my way of looking at and identifying art. It seems to be a much more encompassing term than I had previously imagined. I originally found myself attracted to the technical static artworks, which manipulated computer data and devices to produce high-quality photographs or digitally edited images. But now, I am attracted to the magic. This “magic” is the subtle engineering techniques and loopholes used in devices to create the illusions that the impossible can occur. They allow the user to understand the world from a new perspective, with the user being part of the learning process. Through trial and error, the user uses parts of his or her body to either trigger the work into performance or imbibe all the sensory input it expels.

Interactivity is a wonderful new medium to consider in creating artwork. And its uniqueness makes it incomparable to other mediums. It introduces the chaos of life, the volatility of people’s personalities, and can greatly add to a work’s appeal in this generation of connected, multitasking individuals.

The set of lessons about how others see the book come mostly from reading reviews. A number have been published since my last post on Expressive Processing reviews. In the rest of this post I’ll post my favorite excerpts from reviews (including those behind paywalls) and then offer some thoughts.

While scholars of new media will no doubt find Wardrip-Fruin’s discussion useful, one goal of the text is to reach beyond the relatively small conversations of software studies (an emerging strand of new media scholarship) and digital fictions. Within this broader project, we might locate a promising expansion of the various political projects of open source and free software.

— James J. Brown Jr., from “Open Process Software” in Criticism (an unofficial-looking version is online). This essay looks toward Expressive Processing‘s call for more people to be able to think critically about software operations, and its observations of how some software itself can help develop our understanding of software processes, situating EP relative the goals of the free and open source software movements.

There truly is treasure buried in this land of geekdom, and not just a few nuggets, but enough to lay the foundation of an entirely new scholarly approach for the digital humanities…. If Manovich drew the map, Wardrip-Fruin has opened the mine, and what may be extracted will benefit not only those working in digital humanities or new media but scholars across the curriculum.

— Doug Reside, from a review in Digital Humanities Quarterly (open access!) which also focuses on the issues of understanding software, taking up particularly the question of what kinds of literacies are needed for interpretation and project guidance in the digital humanities.

I believe that the groundbreaking approach this book offers will help humanists and computer scientists alike discover the potential of computational processes and digital media for the advancement of digital humanities. An invitation to embark in this fascinating journey is what Wardrip-Fruin accomplishes with Expressive Processing.

— Carlos Monroy, from a review in Literary and Linguistic Computing which is unfortunately behind a paywall. It is interestingly one that comes from a computer science direction, though written by someone currently working in digital humanities.

In Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive Processing, the field of “interactive entertainment” comes of age; its theories and methods are native to its medium, rather than borrowed from literature, film, or history…. He provides, then, a way to analyze this new kind of authorship that takes into account the scripting of dynamic and interactive processes.

— Annette Vee, from a thoughtful review essay about EP and Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games titled “Procedural Rhetoric and Expression” for the composition theory journal JAC. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s available except by getting a physical copy of the journal or doing a search through pay-access databases.

[Wardrip-Fruin's] wide interests and expertise, ranging from early computer games to artificial intelligence experiments and the most sophisticated electronic literature works, enable him to demonstrate the general value of the notion of expressive processing throughout various cultural and academic fields. As such, this book is the perfect volume to begin the new publication series in software studies. Rather than building the theory for software studies, it works as a model of how to do software studies.

— Raine Koskimaa, from “Reading Processes: Groundwork for Software Studies,” a detailed, thoughtful review in Game Studies (open access!).

Overall, I feel quite lucky to have had reviews in these five academic journals. Even just readership of the reviews has, I’m sure, helped expose more people to aspects of the Expressive Processing project. At the same time, it’s also interesting to note how the attempt to create a book that connected a number of different areas of concern allows for quite different interpretations. For example, some reviews treat the book’s political project as primary, while others explicitly see it as secondary (one actually says Wardrip-Fruin “buries the idea in the center of the book”). Similarly, some treat the theoretical ideas (e.g., the three “effects”) as the primary contributions, while others explicitly treat the theoretical work as secondary to the individual interpretations. Finally, some see the focus on games and digital fictions as unbearably geeky, while others see the book as primarily of interest in the discussions around those topics.

To me it is exciting to reach people who see the book from so many different perspectives. My hope is that I have also succeeded in at least planting seeds that will help grow an interest in other ways of seeing the subfields I hope to connect through Expressive Processing and future work.