Welcome to the Journal of Electronic Publishing

Editor’s Note

Aaron McCollough

Some Thoughts on Poetry and Pornography as Experimental Twins

Richard Nash

It is commonplace that pornography is the avant-garde of all media. When new technologies arise, the pornographers are there first, too. Every time there has been a significant shift in marketplace rules, even if the technology is broadly unchanged, the pornographers are the first to figure it out. What is however far less frequently discussed is poetry. Poets and pornographers have nothing to lose. No commercial opportunity in the former case, no prestige in the latter. Conversely, they have very clear goals, too: prestige in the former case, money in the latter.

Two Future Binaries

Michael S. Hennessey

This article chronicles the transition of the well-established online poetry journal Jacket to archival status hosted at the University of Pennsylvania and the parallel launch of a successor publication, Jacket2. The author addresses the new journal’s mission with special attention to the opportunities and challenges afforded to this digitally mediated resource.

WYSIWYG Poetics: Reconfiguring the Fields for Creative Writers and Scholars

W. Scott Howard

This article addresses a selection of accomplishments from RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry/Literature & Culture. Reconfigurations cultivates a vigorous blending of conventional and non-conventional forms of communication. Our work turns upon generative contradictions. We are both outside of established institutional hierarchies of process and production (we are online in the form of a blog) and we are the epitome of such systems (we are peer-reviewed). We seek to gather and present a judiciously selected diversity of genres/modes and forms of discourse. We exist as a dynamic space for readers, artists, writers, and scholars invested in tradition and innovation. Such dedication to both/and, such inclusion of opposition, is required by our project of reconfiguration.

4k Formalism: An Interview with Ian Bogost

Aaron McCollough

Aaron McCollough interviews author, programmer, and critic Ian Bogost about his recent book of “machined haiku” (including a game poem programmed by Bogost for the Atari 2600 VCS) and about the intersection of poetics and games studies more broadly.

The Literary and the Computational: A Conversation with Nick Montfort

James J. Brown, Jr.

James J. Brown, Jr., interviews author, programmer, critic Nick Montfort about his work as president of the Electronic Literature Organization and multiple projects including Curveship (and Interactive Fiction authoring tool) and the new volume of the Electronic Literature Collection.

Comedies of Separation: Toward a Theory of the Ludic Book

Brian Kim Stefans

To date, small effort has been given to create a general critical vocabulary for describing the wide range of digital literary works. This paper attempts to describe a range of effects in digital literature—relating to time, power, scale, duplication, being, and the ontology of the database—and introduces a new concept, the “simple,” here understood as a node of text/algorithm interaction. Several small-scale works that operate on one or two new media principles can be grouped under these simples. Cumulative works (such as the magisterial “88 Constellations for Wittgenstein” by David Clark) here known as “ludic books,” are described as being composed of several of these simples.

News That Stays News: Marshall McLuhan and Media Poetics

Darren Wershler

Beginning from the formative influence of Marshall McLuhan on the discourses of communication studies and media studies, this essay argues for a re-examination of the importance of poetics to these discourses. This re-examination would consist of two projects: an historical assessment of McLuhan’s own use of modernist avant-garde poetics (because of the deformations and transfigurations that McLuhan visits on poetic texts); and an investigation into the relevance that contemporary poetry and poetics holds for communication studies and media studies.

Language Technology Enables a Poetics of Interactive Generation

Antonio Roque

Computer poetry generation has historically been pursued from a number of different traditions: Digital Poetry, Oulipo, recreational programming, and language research. This article makes several suggestions for distributing interactive poetry generators given the contemporary technological environment. A number of case studies are provided to illustrate these points, and the popular n-gram poetry-generation technique is described.

Make It Now: QuickMuse and the Arrival of Fast-Track Composition

Ben Gunsberg

N. Katherine Hayles suggests that prolonged interaction with networked and programmable media may be tuning young people’s nervous systems toward hyper attention, a cognitive mode that manifests in preferences for high levels of stimulation and multiple information streams. This essay responds to Hayles’ call to examine interactions between hyper and deep attention, through an analysis of the poetry website QuickMuse.com. Focusing on relations between temporality and modes of attention, I argue that the site’s configurations of time foreground the role hyper attention plays in creative written expression, while simultaneously diminishing the role of deep attention. In light of Hayles’ pedagogical agenda, I conclude by proposing classroom-oriented “attention mapping” activities meant to encourage students to reflect on the styles of attention instantiated in and appropriate to different reading and composing practices.

Digital Orpheus: The Hypertext Poem in Time

Benjamin Paloff

This article addresses the problem of how hypertext poems composed in the late 1990s have aged relative to their counterparts in traditional print. The author pays special attention to the rapid pace with which digital modes become outmoded and to the relationship between this process and lyric poetry’s inherent ephemerality.

The Upright Script: Words in Space and on the Page

Amaranth Borsuk

This essay provides a critical analysis of the way pervasive data culture impacts the form of poetry and conceptions of authorship for those print and digital poets who let it enter their work. As depicted in popular media, the data cloud is a confusing and disordered space in which we lose all sense of privacy. However, a number of contemporary poets seek to get lost in this ether, reveling in the network of language that surrounds us. They do so in part because the very technologies that make such data visible in turn make the writer invisible, an authorial position more comfortable for poets of the networked age. Examined alongside the recent surge in interest in infosthetics, conceptual and digital poetry can be seen as embracing a “data poetics” attuned to the materiality of language.

From Hemingway to Twitterature: The Short and Shorter of It

Michael Rudin

With every status update and tweet, the millions of individuals on social-networking sites are more than staying connected—they are reading, writing, editing, distilling, and interpreting the written word more than any generation in history. In doing so, they are helping develop Fiction 2.0: a fascinating marriage of character-count restrictions and the network effect that has created a new category of short-form content and narrative experimentation. This paper explores five of these new fiction prototypes—twitterature, nanofiction, crowd-sourced narratives, infographics, and $0.00 stories—in order to better understand how the e-age will cross-pollinate foreign concepts like “install-base” with familiar ones like “readership.”

Why I Am a Net Artist

Jim Andrews

In “Why I am a Net Artist,” long-time “media poetry” practitioner Jim Andrews reflects on the consequences of computation on language, the fundamental virtues of networked digital computing as a poetic medium, and computing’s facilitation of combinatory operations that drive poetic work into emergent territories.

On Establishment of Environment in Limited Fork Theory Systems

Thylias Moss

Building on her notion of “Limited Fork Theory,” the author considers the implications of recent and forthcoming user-friendly developments in new media delivery systems. In the author’s view, nothing short of poetry’s utter redefinition will be obliged by the next wave of digital environments.