Writing and Digital Publishing

N. Katherine Hayles, Author and Professor at Duke University

N. Katherine Hayles is a post modern literary critic. She is currently a professor at Duke University and has made many meaningful contributions to the field of literature such as her book “How We Became Posthuman.” Hayles writes in her article “Electronic Literature: What is it?” about the different types of Electronic literature and how it relates to print literature of the past.

What is electronic literature? According to Hayles, Electronic Literature can be anything from graphic art to video games. As long as there is some kind of running story or message throughout. Even if there are no words, a piece can still be considered electronic literature. Just because the audience doesn’t read the work through words does not mean that it can’t be read through pictures and other interactions.

Combination of new technology and old

The only difference between video games and electronic literature is that with video games “the user interprets in order to configure, whereas in works whose primary interest is narrative, the user configures in order to interpret.” In other words, video games lead us on a certain path and we must interpret the meaning of the placement and order of certain items and later act upon those interpretations and configure the game so that the puzzle pieces fit and the game is complete. With electronic literature we have the piece configured and in front of us and it is our job to find out own interpretation of the piece.

The two parts at play in these scenarios are the interacter and the parser. The interacter is the person who acts upon the story. The person that plays the video game or interprets the electronic literature is the interacter. The parser is the computer program that understands and reacts to the interacters actions. In the video game case, the parser would be the game.

Interested in the vast expanse that is electronic literature, I searched the web with a new appreciation of what I was finding. I came across a funny video which I would definitely consider electronic literature created by Richard Holeton.

In this video, a Holeton describes the steady decline of his grown up life. The Holeton loses almost everything but gets it back, he writes, because of custom orthotics. In this form of electronic literature, the interacter does not play a role true to his/her name. Instead, the interacter is more of a viewer possessing little freedom based on the navigation of the piece. The interacter can pause and play the video and adjust the volume but they are otherwise incapable of configuring any part of the project.

Electronic literature is a field that will continuously expand over the next decade and beyond. New technological tools allow any average joe to publish their art and literature and the quantity of new artists will force the next generation to be more original further expanding electronic literature.

Ian Bogost, video game designer, critique, and researcher

Ian Bogost is a video game designer, critique, and researcher. In his article Rhetoric of Video Games, he discusses the educational part of video games. In his introduction, Bogost describes a video game called Animal Crossing. In this game, the main character who is controlled by the gamer enters a new town and attempts to start a new life for himself acquiring items and selling them to make money. While, on the surface, Animal Crossing may seem geared for children, Bogost sees the game for what it really is — “a game about the repetition of mundane work necessary to support contemporary material property ideals.” Video games are often seen as “playthings” but after reading Bogost’s article, I experienced a major paradigm shift.

The target audience for games like Harvest Moon is kids

Bogost admits that many games in the contemporary market are made simply as entertainment experiences but there are also many games that “use procedurality to make claims about the cultural, social, or material aspects of human experience.” Video game designers may intend to persuade their audiences in a certain way but many lessons are unintentional. As social media begins to have an increasingly substantial effect on the public, video games follow suit. Game designers have noticed this and have started to initiate procedural rhetoric in their video games. “Procedural rhetoric entails persuasion—to change opinion or action.” To make this idea clearer I will introduce an example of procedural rhetoric in a video game I used to play as a kid.

Harvest Moon; A Wonderful Life

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is a game similar to Animal Crossing. The main character is a town boy who moves out to the country. The goal of this game is to start a life on the farm. The gamer will raise farm animals from chickens to cows, develop relationships with country folk by giving them gifts, and eventually pick a wife out of the three choices designated. During a regular day in the game, the player will milk his cow, water his crops and find other ways in the game to pass time such as mining or fishing. The duties within the game are tedious and show the gamer how mundane and detail oriented running a farm can be. This is the rhetoric Harvest Moon aims to display for the gamer. The game also has other (perhaps unintended) messages. The only character a gamer can choose to play as is male. This may teach players that farm work tends to be a man’s job. The game also only gives three choices of women to marry. All three of these women are caucasian and the choices leave no room for sexual orientation flexibility. This may teach kids that a man should marry a woman because that is where his choices lie and that the man is the one to make the propose the marital question.

Harvest Moon along with many other contemporary games have the potential to shape children’s ideologies and to make older gamers question their beliefs. It will be interesting to see how video game rhetoric changes and advances in the future of gaming.

Using data display to explain

Visual language might be a confusing term. Most languages consist of letters, words, sentences and phrases which establish meaning in our brains either received through the ears or the eyes in the case of reading. In this case, the audience is reading symbols, lines, dots and numbers. Why would we read lines, dots and numbers when we can read words? Certain situations call for visual displays such as the rises and falls in the stock market. I could explain to you that Nike Co. stock rose in January, rose more in February, dropped a lot in March and was stagnant in April, or I could creata a line chart data display that tells you all of these details at one time and remains in front of you for further analysis. In some cases there is too much data to explain even in a table. The best part about data displays is their rhetorical value because “they greatly enhance our ability to compare numbers.” Though, data displays have their advantages, an orator using them still needs to use them effectively.

Three aspects that need to be considered when using data analysis are audience, purpose, and context. When planning for an audience, the speaker must consider that it’s hard to keep a large group’s attention for a long period of time. A data display will shorten the amount of time needed for explanation. Purpose focuses on what numbers must be highlighted in the data display. What parts of the data is one trying to concentrate the audience on and what reaction is one looking for. Context refers to how will the data display will be shown. Will it be on a projector for a short amount of time before the slide is changed? Will it be on a presentation board sitting at the head of a table for everyone to scrutinize for the duration of the meeting? To keep everyone’s attention, the data displays must be clear.

Different types of graphs

Most data in graphs are symbolized with bars, lines, slices of pie, dots and icons. Which graphs are the easiest types to understand? Which are the clearest in terms of explaining the data? Bar charts tend to give us the most accurate representation of data. By looking at the height of the bars, one can easily tell the number being shown. If a bar chart had added gridlines, the specificity of the graph multiplies. Pie charts, on the other hand tend to be harder to read and to understand. The circles and the curvy edge of the “pie” is pleasing to the eye, but unless labeled with numbers or percentages, pie charts are much more difficult to use to present an accurate reading for the audience to analyze.

There is also the question of whether or not the presenter of the data is actually trying to give correct data. It’s possible that the speaker is trying to prove a point but the data goes against the message he/she is trying to send. In this case, the presenter can do a couple things. Making the data vague and omitting numbers can keep the audience from grasping the situation. Focusing on a select part of the data that proves the point while ignoring the bigger picture which proves the opposite point. The grapher has immense control over the manipulation of the data and the audience must be ever weary of fishy methods of deceit.

…ethos in data displays isn’t just a question of developing the reader’s trust by looking professional, though that’s always important. Rather, ethos begins with the question of honesty: Does the display tell the readers an accurate story about the data, or does it distort the data?

Think of graphs like wikipedia. They usually do a good job explaining the answer to your question but you don’t know the tampering that might have taken place in its creation.

The biggest corpus of them all

The study of electronic text analysis has recently been growing. Text analysis used to be carried out manually and in many cases the conductors of the study would have to hand count the words being searched for. It wasn’t until the 1950’s that “the first electronic text analysis tools were designed” and even then, the tools could not be accessed by the general public. The accumulation of corpora and other various data is a valuable pursuit as electronic text analysis is becoming popular in a pedagogical sense.

With the multitudes of new computer programs which can better sort and quantify data, more complicated research can be conducted and human intelligence can reach another level. Education will change and become geared around these new technologies and their uses. Instead of learning how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, kids will learn how to use a calculator or some type of calculating program. The chapters that we read from Adolphs, speak mostly to the quantification and analysis of words, but these practices of counting and finding meaning apply to people too.

Facebook is my favorite example in explaining this phenomena. All of the information that we disclose to facebook thinking that just our friends will see, is data that can be accessed by many sources. This video will explain in more detail:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wogtTQs8Kzw

At 0:08 seconds, we can see a few of the many the different topics which can be sorted and analyzed by large corporations.

At 1:22 seconds, we can see certain ways in which the collected data is used.

At 1:35 seconds, we start to learn the value of the data Facebook holds when we see the amount of money corporations are paying Facebook.

At 3:16 seconds, we learn that the Information Awareness Office was created to collect data about everyone around the world so that the US could easily scrutinize it.

The large corporations have virtually no way of knowing anything about people outside of their customer base. Facebook is essentially a corpus of people’s personal information and is used by companies as a way to discover what the public interests are. After finding out these details, companies can gear their products towards what is “in” according to Facebook. Facebook is continuously changing in macro details such as size and ability. It also changes in micro details such as information on individual profiles. In this way, it’s similar to the COBUILD corpus which is growing all the time with hosts of new words flowing in all the time. However, I’m not sure Facebook will ever reach the number 500,000 million in profiles.

Cicero, the “good” orator

According to Cato, “An orator should be a good man.”

Quintilian talks a lot about the differences between a talented orator intending good and a talented orator intending evil on the world. In  order for an orator to be near perfection, he must have good intentions for the senate and for the state. A bad man who is an orator can be nowhere near perfection because no matter his skill, his orations would be dragged down by his hidden ill-intent. A man with the same skill set or perhaps a weaker one can be closer to perfection if they have good intent in their breast. Good intent can be shown by speaking honestly to the judge and following the laws of the court. Quintilian explains that”whatever is said with honest feeling will also be said with eloquence.” What this comment tells me is that Quintilian is willing to allow for poorer speech as long as the words are spoken with honesty.

This is one of the main reasons why Quintilian is such a big fan of Cicero. Cicero speaks strengthening his arguments with facts and calling out all of the hidden evil in the senate.

Lucious Cataline was one of Cicero’s contemporaries and a rival for the consul position. Cataline and Cicero had very different styles and methods of obtaining the sought after position. Cataline’s methods were violent and sneaky while Cicero attained his high position by gaining the trust of those around him. Because Cicero gained the trust of those around him, honesty was assumed in every speech he made.

Quintilian describes a good orator and a man similar to Cicero if not the great philosopher himself;

“if he were on the field of battle and his soldiers needed to be encouraged to engage, draw the materials for an exhortation from the most profound precepts of philosophy? For how could all the terrors of toil, pain, and even death be banished from their breasts unless vivid feelings of piety, fortitude, and honor were substituted in their place?” (Quintilian Orations, 28-29)

A good orator makes those around him know that he has their best interests in mind at all times in his speech and works.

Cataline struggled with honesty and broke many laws for personal gain and the possible opportunity to be consul using methods of deceit and even attempted murder.

“You were, then, O Catiline, at Lecca’s that night; you divided Italy into sections; you settled where every one was to go; you fixed whom you were to leave at Rome, whom you were to take with you; you portioned out the divisions of the city for conflagration; you undertook that you yourself would at once leave the city, and said that there was then only this to delay you, that I was still alive. Two Roman knights were found to deliver you from this anxiety, and to promise that very night, before daybreak, to slay me in my bed.” (Cicero Cataline Orations, 9-10)

Cicero sought to win the consul position by honest means and was therefore trusted by the judge (in this case the senate.)

Dana Boyd, a Senior researcher at Microsoft research writes about the similarities and differences of Blogging and Journalism. She also describes what a blog is so several different types of people and the various uses for a blog. I found it very interesting how Dana Boyd chose to compare Journalism and blogging. I, personally, never knew that there was such a comparison to begin with. I also didn’t know that people cared so much about  the differentiation of the two practices. It almost was as if Boyd set up a sort of rivalry between the two. Boyd touches on the misconceptions of blogs caused by Metaphors and shows the bias of the New York Times displayed in the title “Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps”. She shows that journalists are disgruntled at the fact that bloggers are being given the same rights as journalists.                                                                                    Dana Boyd