Through engaging and performing with new modes of digital creativity and authorship, the speakers on this panel seek to continue the ongoing work of venturing into potentially unfamiliar realms of textual production. Hybrid print/video essays, games created in online communities, and algorithmic Twitter updates: these are undisciplined texts. Their misbehavior asks us to reevaluate assumptions about what it means to have agency and a voice in nascent and vulnerable digital authoring spaces. Panels at last year’s MLA Convention and recent digital humanities discussions have attended to online publishing and computer-based methods of analysis and research. However, the evolution of creative expression takes many forms that (because they might feel different or discomforting) risk being overlooked by scholars of literature and media. Furthermore, theorizing about emerging digital modes rarely happens in these very modes. By bringing new media artistic and literary practice together with alternative scholarship, this session hopes to disturb traditional print-centric notions of how texts and their authors can and should express themselves. In turn, such disturbance may unsettle genre conventions, publishing processes, readerly expectations, and gender norms, and so give credence to much-debated principles of the digital humanities: DIY making, hacking, play, and experimentation.

Tensions in discussions of the digital humanities reflect the shifting boundaries evoked by and materialized through new modes of expression. In an opinion piece published in The New York Times in 2012, Stanley Fish traces a rigid line between traditional critical work and digital humanities work, concluding with a concatenation of oppositions “between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play.” Fish’s distinctions, though contentious, are useful because they articulate resonant and often unspoken biases that leak into thinking about texts. An important goal of this session is to bring marginalized and underrepresented voices (human or otherwise) into focus, not by disciplining them, but by celebrating their misbehavior and putting them in dialogue with past literary and artistic experiments.

The distinction between “what is serious and what is mere play” quakes when we examine the Twine platform: a tool for building choice-driven stories easily publishable to the web. Twine’s code-free interface combined with its flexibility of extension by more experienced coders make it a novice-friendly tool, and its free open-source status removes it from some of the associations of privilege that more traditional and expensive game development tools bear. As Anastasia Salter argues, works built in Twine hearken back to early electronic literature, such as Hypercard and Eastgate hypertext novels, but their relationship with these established digital forms is not straightforward. Twine creations have emerged into a communal space outside of both “indie” gaming and electronic literature. Several of these works (particularly Nora Last’s “Here’s Your Rape” and Anna Anthropy’s “Escape from the lesbian gaze”) invite a feminist reading, both in the marginalized voices and experiences they bring to play and in the very agency expressed through their creation. The “Twine revolution” rejects any limitations about appropriate subjects for play and games, fusing forms and techniques from electronic literature with narratives that reconstruct the female game character through text, shifting agency to new and previously unheard voices.

Daniel Anderson turns to another expressive form with an uncertain status: the hybrid essay. Continuing his work as a researcher and practitioner of digital and cross-modal composition, Anderson recently has experimented with essays that feature videos composed in concert with text intended for print publication. The experimentation tests the boundaries between print and video modes, highlighting a challenge associated with transformative digital texts: the implicit nature of their arguments. Texts featuring digital affect (Murray), resonating with ambience (Rickert; Morton), or representing digital ontologies (Bogost) may strike us as odd simply because they are cast through unfamiliar materials. Discomfort with digital texts, Anderson suggests, marks less a failure to deliver a message and more a successful intervention in the unspoken academic approaches codified through the communicative ease of print. As a case study, Anderson takes a forthcoming, published hybrid print/video essay to bring to light tensions between implicit and explicit registers of expression across print and digital modes. His presentation will feature scholarly/poetic video artifacts, ultimately proposing (and enacting) an alt-scholarship conveyed through visual, sonic, and verbal registers.

Extending the session’s focus on marginalized voices and contentious or peripheral modes of text production, Zach Whalen takes up a topic that has received almost no critical attention: Twitter-based literary creativity. Returning to Fish’s distinction “between what is relevant and what is noise,” Whalen’s treatment of tweetbots and text art shows that the noise itself is often composed and reflects networked instantiations that resist typical hierarchies and binaries. From @horse_ebooks to @stealth_mountain, many of the voices filling timelines are produced by algorithms, generating text in complex collaboration with datasets and distant authors. Complementary projects like @crashtxt explore the boundaries of expression in 140 characters—as well as some unstated ideological boundaries—by inviting anyone to create tweets from a restricted palette of non-Western and non-alphanumeric glyphs. These fragile, visual texts rely on Unicode characters that may not be supported by all browsers and devices, and such fragility underscores their aesthetics with the same machine-dependence inherent to _ebooks-style bots. From constraint-based production to Oulipean and Dadaist expressions of machine-driven aesthetics, Whalen excavates Twitter as a textual and typographic performance space, tracing antecedents in the resistive literary epistemology of electronic literature.

Stuart Moulthrop, the session respondent, will facilitate audience discussion. Moulthrop writes and teaches about gaming and digital media, and he has been a central figure in electronic literature for more than two decades. His perspective will help us think through the question of how new and changing modes of creative practice and scholarship are unsettling the boundary lines that Fish and others reference when determining worth. This session is committed to acts of opening, to interdisciplinary experimentation, to validating fresh objects of study, to alternative modes of scholarly production, and (perhaps necessarily) even to unruliness.

Panelists and working titles of their presentations:

• Anastasia Salter (Assistant Professor of Science, Information Arts and Technologies, University of Baltimore) “Bonfires, Lesbians, Depression and Rape: Twine, Feminist Voices and Agency in Game Narratives”
• Daniel Anderson (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Director of the Studio for Instructional Technology and English Studies, University of North Carolina) “Turn up the Opacity: Discussing Discomfort with Digital Modes”
• Zach Whalen (Assistant Professor of English, Linguistics and Communication, University of Mary Washington) “_ebooks, Typography and Twitter Art”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, and if there’s one thing I hope you’ll take away from my talk, it’s the perhaps less-than-profound realization that any CMS is both a gateway and a gatekeeper. A rock isn’t desirable or fun, unless you find yourself in a heated match of paper-scissors-rock, during which your opponent opts for scissors. A hard place is equally un-fun, unless you’ve just completed a terrifying skydive from 14,000 feet. In other words, both rocks and hard places have problems.  Of course there are more than just two alternatives. But for the purpose of narrowing down my discussion, I want to focus on what I’ll call the WordPress vs. “hard place” debate, which is what I have the most experience with.  I broadly divide out two types of course management systems: proprietary and open source, with the former rhetorically framed as promoting closed, cookie-cutter learning and the latter as promoting open, generative learning. On the side of WordPress, I locate systems like Moodle, Sakai, and Drupal, and on “the hard place” side I locate the “university CMS” which for many people might be Blackboard but for me it’s Desire 2 Learn (or D2L), Blackboard’s major competitor. Allow me to bracket Ning and PB Works here, since they are neither open source nor university-controlled–and, as I’ll discuss in a minute, the two CMS types I’ve just delineated don’t actually bifurcate so neatly anyway.

I want to stress that the redundancy or synonymy of the two options implied in my title (a rock and a hard place) says something more than simply “no CMS is perfect.” Both WordPress and the university CMS are two breeds of the same species: technology that both creates and contains possibilities. In this way, then, they are comparable to any learning technology that has come before. They both mediate knowledge and shape the process through which individuals collect and construct and co-construct knowledge.

The claim I’m making here is more than theoretical flag waving; it’s a critical realization that the relationship I have with my course’s web space is a choice. I am not choosing a channel nor utility, like selecting a cell phone service provider, but rather I am declaring my pedagogical relationship to knowledge. When I began teaching college writing, I treated the CMS as a mere utility or information channel. To set the scene: it’s 2004. The Blackboard precursor WebCT (web course tool) is en vogue. I jump right in, awkwardly manipulating and customizing navigation options, swooning over WebCT’s cumbersome easiness,  and feeling proud of my adventuresome spirit all the while. I am seriously amazed at the convenience of having an online space to assist me with administrative duties of teaching.  But gradually I begin to realize through my own observations, but also through becoming attuned to a surge of discussion on Twitter and academic blogs around 2008, that my course site is not just a supplement to “real” classroom activities.   I begin to intuit McLuhan’s dictum that “The use of any kind of medium or extension of man alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses” (McLuhan 90). Both WordPress and the university CMS are tools that foreshadow and forestall possibilities for writing online, whether we are conscious of it or not. And in this way, both WP and the university CMS are much more than tools.

Here are some of the characteristics or values that we could associate with wordpress in opposition to hard places.

1. Proprietary vs. open source (free), which leads to another “open”…

There is a lot to be said here about the legal and ethical tangles that hazily differentiate proprietary and open source software. One problem is the common pairing of “free” and “open source.” These are actually different software movements with different histories, and neither one means that the software is free in the sense of no price. The free software movement is at root a code of ethics, whereas open source is a license and a development model. [2] Jim Groom and the founder of the free software movement, Richard Stallman, have both convincingly shown that to presuppose any affinity between “open source” and ethical software or effective pedagogy is a mistake. Stallman asserts that a given program or web platform “might be open source and use the open source development model, but it won’t be free software [unless it] respects the freedom of the users that actually run it.”  Groom echoes Stallman’s distinction by pointing out that although Sakai and Moodle adopt “an open source model,” still “they smack of an outdated model of ownership, control, and management—which makes them administrative tools, not learning tools.” Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, open source platforms like Moodle and Sakai can be deceptively good at embodying icky values.

Thus, it becomes important to know what brand of mediation we’re sponsoring when we choose a supposedly open source CMS. I’ve talked to many people who assume that open source means zero cost, even though the labors of volunteers on the open source Debian project, for example, would total about 19 billion dollars by one recent (Feb. 2012) estimate. I’ve also talked to people who can’t say for sure if Ning and PB Works are open source or not, even though they use these platforms for many of the reasons that lie behind the free and open source software movements.

2. closed (private) vs. open (public) learning, supported by…

One critique of the university CMS is that it locks up student writing in an artificial space. I think that’s true, but I would add (and Jenn Marlow mentioned this too in her presentation) that it also locks up the instructor’s writing: my discussion comments, prompts, assignment sheets, and resources. This aspect of choosing a CMS is particularly relevant to the transitional status of graduate students. As Dave Parry points out, “If you are hosting your own [CMS], i.e. not on the university’s servers, you own your course material, making it easier to take with you when you go.” Moreover, since I’ll be looking for jobs with a digital-humanities-type focus, I want to demonstrate my competency with web sites other than D2L and Blackboard.  If edupunk is “about a culture, a way of thinking, a philosophy” [3], then one reason to keep my materials public on my own website where anyone can access them, is to not only to create an archive of courses I’ve taught, but also to perform the values I express in my teaching statement.

3. commercial vs. community led development, resulting in projects that are…

The commercial vs. community led development binary problematically grafts onto other pairings from my list here. The open source CMS then becomes generalized to mean participatory and inclined toward student engagement and collaboration, while the proprietary platform becomes a silent, teacher-centric study hall. That value transfer is reductive and not universally true.

4. standardized vs. tailored / custom / DIY, often appealing to the…

Darin Payne captures the standardized vs. tailored binary in his 2005 College English article when he writes “Because Blackboard is a one-size-fits-all product for mass consumption, the assessment practices it enables are not tailored for writing classes” (499). But, more broadly than assessment practices, many feel that the ontology of the whole CMS package–its DNA–is contrary to the critical thinking and creativity that many humanities courses value. But, to some extent, writing classes have always had some one-size-fits-all elements. For example, the technology of a curriculum itself.  The goals and outcomes we use to assess final portfolios at my institution are arguably “a one-size-fits-all product for mass consumption,” as all instructors and students across hundreds of English 101 and 102 sections must shape their classes around these goals. What would it mean for a graduate teaching assistant to commit to a tailored / custom / DIY CMS approach within a rather standardized writing program like UWM’s? Again, there is a tension here that often goes unacknowledged. In this respect, the edupunk and hacking the academy movements have been somewhat contradictory in attesting that “it’s not the technology but what we do with it that matters,” yet at the same time issuing a full-on assault against any proprietary CMS.

5. web novice vs. web expert

In this last binary of web novice vs. web expert, which we might align with student vs. teacher,  I see myself caught in between, as a student/teacher hybrid. I am also not in the novice category of instructors, who “happily use the high–tech CMS as a glorified copy machine” as Lisa Lane puts it.  But I am also not in a position (at least, without giving myself serious stress) to take big risks like debugging quirky wordpress plug-ins, as Joseph Ugoretz describes doing in Part 2 of a great series of blog posts on using WordPress (and only WordPress) for an online-only course he taught.

The ideological trope of the risk-taking hacker and tech-savvy academic gains a great deal of power when it’s mapped onto other values and characteristics on my list here. In her 2011 article in Computers and Composition, Virginia Anderson clearly defines the problems with the ideological trope of the tech-savvy academic who “hacks through the wilderness toward grand vistas” — this trailblazer whose “primary duty [is to open] new territory with the goal of seeing what’s there” — after all, the explorer’s task is not to hold the hands of those who follow but to give them somewhere to follow to” (136). She argues that class-based benefits of time, experience, and (to some extent) financial resources determine who is in a position to be a web expert and “edupunk their CMS” in the first place.

Her critique of instructors on the “bright side of the [digital] divide” (125) adds another layer of complexity to my schema: class. The very predicament of being caught between WordPress and a hard place seems like a luxury. I think of Anderson’s concept of taxation when I read Parry’s promotion of WordPress as a CMS. While WordPress is not exactly difficult, it does take some level of expertise to install the plug-ins and make the structural changes that will adapt the platform to be a CMS. In his well-circulated ProfHacker post which I mentioned earlier, he concedes that while “WordPress has a learning curve, once you invest a little bit of time it is actually exponentially easier to use than Blackboard.” Anderson might be wary of the implications behind this encouragement to “just invest a little time.”  She calls this a “tax”  which is a toll, “however small, imposed by technological culture as it asks users to invest more and more time and effort to perform necessary tasks. Each change, with the commitment it demands, carries a message about the value of a user’s time”  (132).

The complex issues I’ve sketched here ought to reveal the troublesome shadow cast by any rationale that rules out one type of technology only because it does not seem to exhibit a certain set of values. In affiliating the university CMS (what I’ve been calling the “hard place”) with values on the left side, it becomes easy–too easy–to associate WordPress (or similar platforms) with values on the right side.  But both options manage learning, despite Matt Gold’s overly broad claim that anything called a Learning Management System starts off on the wrong foot because “Learning is not something that can be ‘managed’ via a ‘system.’” After all, even if the instructor has designed and customized a system–even if he/she built it from the ground up–it is still a system that is managing learning in some way,

whether we’re talking about this paper or that paper,

this wordpress or that wordpress,

this blackboard or that blackboard.

Even a non-alphabetic oral culture deploys learning technologies: story-lines, cliches, rhymes, and rhetorical devices are, in a sense, oral learning management systems. [4] They are not by default less intrusive or less interfering because they are non-digital. [5] One of the consequences of the backlash against the corporatized, mass-marketed CMS is a radical and, in many cases, knee-jerk response to anything affiliated with values on the left side of the binary schema I laid out in the previous slides

So, where does that leave me? Recently, I have settled on a hybrid system for both my online and face-to-face classes: I use a self-hosted WordPress installation or a PB Works wiki for weekly announcements, mini-lectures, assignment guidelines, a hyperlinked version of my syllabus, and miscellaneous tidbits, jokes, or photos. I use the proprietary university CMS for things that are not exactly my property: recording student grades, attendance, and uploading readings with a copyright. In my online classes, I have not yet found a suitable open-source “web two point oh-ey” alternative for discussions, so last semester those happened behind closed doors. This semester, I am using Ning for discussions. It’s not true that a CMS divided against itself cannot stand. But it is harder to support. And it is harder for students to figure out.

Ultimately, I believe this sort of hybrid learning management system satisfies a number of my goals and puts me in a position of straddling some of these ideologies as I and my students work betwixt and between WordPress and the proprietary CMS.

[2] This is certainly up for debate, and I know there is disagreement between members of each community regarding how to define the difference between free software and open source software (or if it’s worth defining a difference). The statement here is my cursory summary of Stallman’s somewhat vague definition in “Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software.”

[3] I take this phrasing from D’Arcy Norman’s post on edupunk.

[4] See Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982. Print.

[5] This idea is an off-shoot of Carlo Scannella’s comment on Gold’s post. Scannella writes: “It seems to me, way back, before the days of computers, we always had a “learning managing system.” It was a classroom, and the lesson planner, and the folders my teachers kept all our essays in, and all the other artifacts that made up the learning experience.” Gold does address his comment, but I don’t feel he gives it the attention it deserves. I think the issue Scannella raises is really key and deserves more attention.

Logistically, this class was a challenge for me initially because of the schedule, but it became easier when the schedule changed after spring break. I would not take another online class again, because of my difficulty writing and the insane amount of time I had to spend each week writing.

How are you mediated differently through your project than through your seminar paper?
Oh, this is a tricky question! At first, I read it as “How are your ideas…” but now I see it’s “How are YOU mediated…” I am not sure I could ever step outside myself enough to say how I am mediated at all, let alone how I am mediated through different platforms. I have a very odd/uncertain sense of myself, or how I think others see me. If I think about how I HOPE I am mediated, I would say my seminar paper hopefully mediates me as an academic, but also as an individual with accessible and relevant ideas. As for my media project, I hope I am mediated as a narrative voice and a living memory, just as the objects depicted on my web site tell a story and are living memories.

What sorts of differing thoughts about your topic/area of interest arose for you because you approached this work through differing media?
I knew I wanted the focus of the media project to be a dominant visual element, so I looked to examples of vintage zoological drawings (like this one and this one) and photographs of “memory boxes” like this wonder cabinet, this butterfly display, and this Joseph Cornell piece. I wanted to find a “visual archive” that would structure the interface of my web site. It was helpful to think about how my own memories related to the essay I was writing, and what really mattered to me about my project. More specifically, in thinking about my criteria for what makes a “good” or responsible archive, as a mediation of the past, I tried to think about real examples. In my example of City Lights bookstore, which I connected to the larger Abkhazia-Georgia conflict, I was trying to find an example of what might be at stake in the “gathering together” (Derrida) function of the archive and the “knowledge-control” (Stiegler) function. My media project made me realize that there is a huge difference between “individual exteriorizations of memory functions to large-scale technological systems” vs. “networks that organize memories” (Stiegler 67). I decided to take up this idea in more depth in my paper.

Mediated Memories: Final Project

I am also working on coding the layout and preparing graphics for my final project, which will be a web-text or installation. I wrongly expected this media project to be a chore and just a “new version” of my “actual” paper. I did not expect it to be a thinking and learning tool through which I would come to know what matters to me! Certainly the web site I’m doing will be rough around the edges and perhaps incoherent, but at the very least, thinking about my ideas through a nonlinear web site (rather than a paper) has been helpful for me.

I am not sure what else to say. This reflection seems so generic and it repeats many things that others have said in their reflections! Reflecting on a week of reflecting is difficult.

One thing that is missing from the readings is a convincing theory of how humans can best use media for their own good. I am not saying I believe media could ever act as a mere tool, but certainly there are strategies and approaches to media that would best help serve human ends. For example, how can we use social media to form groups and effect social change? That seems to be a remaining question for me, especially in light of the Egypt protests. Another question is related to Wikileaks: how does the existence of a crowd-sourced public watchdog support democracy? Democracy is an ideal and an ideology, but there are democratic principles of equity and respect that (in theory) would benefit the human population. Could a platform like Wikileaks help preserve democratic values of transparency and freedom of information? So, I am curious about questions like this, that are indeed anthropocentric but also important, I think.

As for gaps in my own understanding, I am still confused by Baudrillard and how exactly he wants to shift or revise the sender-message-receiver model of communication. Also, I still have a lot of questions about the “Writing” chapter in CTMS.

I would focus on the issue of media, influence, and behavior. I see three different levels of influence: [1] media determine human behavior, [2] media influence behavior but don’t determine it, and [3] media simply support behavior with minimal influence. I would probably take Facebook as a specific example, since this is a platform almost all undergraduates use, and I think all the theories we have read could apply to Facebook in some way. I would want the audience to understand how a medium like Facebook is all three things at once: it does in some ways totally limit or determine our behavior; it does in some ways influence our behavior, while still giving choices; it does in some ways act as a tool we use and control. We could look at Facebook through all three overlapping lenses, like a Venn diagram.

The earliest work we read was Walter Benjamin. He is a really great example to look at for the theme I chose. He certainly recognizes changes in behavior due to photography and cinema as technologies of mass reproduction. His main question is about the spectator and how the desire for an “equipment-free aspect of reality” (35) changes art and our relationship with tradition. Once the nature of art changes in response to mass reproducibility, I think Benjamin is saying that other things (war, attention, space) must also be changing. He describes new behavior patterns of the masses as “symptoms” (41), as though the technology is an ailment. However, Benjamin is not a clear determinist, since he does imply that watching movies is a necessary part of being trained to live in a capitalist society. Obviously, he worries when war becomes aestheticized, and when aura is not just abolished in original artworks, but is also abolished in human life. Adorno and Horkheimer are next, but they seem more deterministic in their theory of the culture industry. As Ingrid and I explored their theory in our collaborative analysis, they seem very disappointed in the way that media shape human behavior, and they don’t see many bright spots. Debord contends with a similar theme, in discussing the “society of the spectacle” and how humans succomb to representations. In many ways, I see connections here with Barthes and mythology. The intersection between Debord and Barthes is language. When human language is leveraged as a distorting technology, and humans no longer have control over their language as it relates to specific practices/actions, then their behavior becomes totally controlled by media. This seems to tbe the argument in both Debord and Barthes, though I find Barthes more convincing since he gives more concrete examples and diagrams the break-down (or appropriation) of Saussure’s sign. We can literally see how the influence happens, and how behavior might be constructed in and through media representations.

Then, as the chronology continues, there are more openings for the idea that media influence but don’t exactly determine human behavior. I think Enzensberger and Baudrillard fit in this category. Raymond Williams explicitly works against techno-determinism; he sees media as “applied technology or a set of emphases and reponses within the determining limits and pressures of industrial capitalist society” (299). This is a complex statement that delicately walks a line between the two extremes [1] and [2] I laid out in the beginning of my post. Williams provides a nice counter-weight to Kittler, who certainly believes that media determine behavior. His analysis of typewriter literacy clearly places the agency with the machine subject, and human cognition and behavior collapses into the mold of the technological structure.

McLuhan would be an in-between theorist. Absolutely, he has shades of determinism, but I disagree with clean-cut claims that assign him to the techno-determinist camp. According to him, the media that we use—“extensions” of ourselves—are powerful influences, but we can change the course. He warns that we live in a state of “inattention and unawareness of the situation” (92) of media. Technological prostheses alter sense perceptions, restructure human consciousness, shape social norms, and disrupt political and economic patterns. McLuhan encourages us to start seeing again and to understand media in order to gain some control over the way technology arranges human activity and (re)defines what it means to be human. McLuhan’s apparent technological determinism is tempered by the hope of breaking the spell of numbness and redeeming human autonomy. Media change thus amounts to a power struggle between humans and their technologies. But humans can participate in this struggle.