Monthly Archives: November 2023

Project Proposal – Hypertext Analysis and Visualization

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While discussing Shelley Jackson’s My Body – A Wunderkammer in class, I said that I would like to know for each page, how many other pages point to it, and that knowing that would illustrate something about the body parts most on Jackson’s mind, the body parts that she mentions most while discussing other parts.  The more I thought about that, the more I felt like I had put my finger on something really interesting: a kind of text analysis that can only be done on hypertext literature.  A lot of work has been done in the field of text analysis as well as visualizing text analysis (as Kai mentioned in class, Hanna Piotrowska’s project “If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler: Text & Data”).  Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what ways visualizing hypertext analysis would differ from visualizing traditional text analysis?

For my project, I will perform some hypertext analysis on Wunderkammer and then design a visualization based on the analysis.  As I said before, I am interested in how and how often the different pages connect to each other.  By going through the website page by page and listing where the hyperlinks on each page take you, I will create a sort of adjacency matrix where the pages are nodes and adjacent nodes are the pages you can reach directly from a specific page (applying my computer science background here).  With this, I will be able to draw a map of Wunderkammer’s internal logic, where each node is a page and edges between nodes represent a hyperlink connection, and node size many represent how many pages lead there.

There is a lot I can do visually that plays on the same ideas of Wunderkammer, like laying my graph out like a human body, mirroring the collection of links on the image that makes up the front cover of Wunderkammer.  I will likely hand draw (or digitally hand draw) my visualization so that I have more control over the visual aspect of my piece and can try to capture the same feeling as the illustrations in Wunderkammer.  I hope that my visualization will offer an additional way to understand Wunderkammer by diving into the mechanics that make it so unique, the web of interwoven stories and what they say about each other by being connected in the way they are.

Disciplined online environment: MTA TrainTime

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In “Playing an Automated World”, before moving on to persuasive play and gamification, Sicart talks about “soft automation”, the process by which citizen services are being turned into apps.  It is hard to tell exactly how Sicart feels about these kind of service apps; he brings up the argument that it displaces labor, but that is an argument that has been used against most every form of automation for the last one hundred years.  Perhaps Sicart sees that the gamification trend blends dangerously well with service apps.  Either way, I immediately though of what might honetly be my favorite app, or at least the app I think is designed the best: the MTA TrainTime app.

This is an example of soft automation.  You used to have to go to the train station to see when the trains were coming, or look at a printed time table, and you used to have to buy your tickets from a person in a booth, or a machine at the station.  Now, it’s all an app.  In this case, luckily, it’s a really good app; disciplined, yes, but intentional, interactive and, as far as I can see, about as low on exploitation or gamification as possible.

There are many sections of the app that are so well designed and fun to interact with that they encourage exploration.  For example, on the Search tab, there is a list of all the stations and a detailed system map that encourage you to explore lines and stations you would never expect to travel on.  The Status tab shows the service status of all the train lines, and you can click into any service interruption to get a detailed explination. On the Trips tab, you select an origin and destination station to see the train schedules.  Clicking into a specific scheduled train takes you to a live trip status page, complete with another map with real time footage showing the location of the train, as well as organized information about where your stop lies and the fare specific to your trip.  There is a button that will find tickets in your wallet that apply to this trip and prompt you to either buy and activiate a ticket, but I do not feel that the point of the screen is to prompt me to buy a ticket.

Overall, the high amount of work that went into this app to create a higly user-friendly and interactive app shows through, and I feel the intention is to make accessing train information as easy as possible as well as to encourage me to gain more awareness of the whole train system.  There are no points, no measuring how many tickets you buy, no goals to reach, just a robust collection of important, easily accessible, and constantly updating information.

Interestingly, I have also used the NJ Transit app that serves much the same role as the MTA app but for New Jersey trains.  The NJ Transit app is so much worse.  It is distinctly lacking in maps, so there is nothing to visually explore and I do not get the feeling as much that I am being shown real time numbers, even if I am.  It is so much less intuitive from a UI perspective and frankly kind of ugly to look at.  I spend the least amount of time possible on the NJ transit app, while I quite literally enjoy my time spent on the MTA TrainTime app.

So, is it okay that we have soft automated train times and tickets?  I would say so.  But more importantly, I think the MTA TrainTime app is a good and important example of a service app that does its job, does it well, and does not do anything else.

Gorgar Speaks!: A Literary Pinball Adventure

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In 1979, Williams, a former leading pinball manufacturer, released the first pinball table to speak: Gorgar. It marked a major milestone in pinball, and game technology in general. The premise of the game is that you are a big, burly barbarian (think He-Man) fighting your way into the lair of a demon named Gorgar who has kidnapped your preposterously proportioned and barely bikinied lover.

To defeat Gorgar, you have to hit various targets and spinners, and based on which of these shots you hit, you trigger Gorgar’s speech mechanism. His vocabulary comprises seven words: Gorgar, speaks, beat, you, me, hurt, got. These are combined into the following possible phrases:

  • Gorgar speaks.
  • Me hurt.
  • Me got you.
  • Gorgar.
  • You hurt Gorgar.
  • You beat me.
  • You beat Gorgar.
  • Me Gorgar, beat me.

Inspired by The Pines at Walden Pond by Deena Larsen and Wunderkammer by Shelley Jackson, I will create an image map (using HTML and JavaScript) of the pinball table’s playfield. I will create “playable” (clickable) areas on the image map that are tied to poems. The poems will also be hyperlinked between one another. Even though I know Gorgar has been designed as my adversary, I can’t help but find him sympathetic. In the artwork on the backglass, you see a skull shaped the same as Gorgar’s head—could this be a relative (his mother or his lover)? Or is this an image of his fate, with all possible future timelines collapsing into one static depiction? Gorgar is the first pinball adversary capable of speech, so what burden does that necessarily bestow upon him? He was only given seven words, but what else would he say if he could?

Inspired by Kenneth Goldsmith and his repurposing of existing text to write poetry, I aim to write these poems from the words that appear in the Gorgar Instruction Booklet (the owner’s manual and official rules of play), through a combination of erasure and manual reordering of the existing copy. I hope this approach to writing each passage and presentation of interlinked text will capture some of the chaotic (and fun!) experience of playing the pinball table.

Another signature feature of the Gorgar table is its heartbeat. Once you start a game, a heartbeat sound starts, and the longer you keep your ball in play, the faster the heartbeat gets. And it keeps beating, even as the other table sounds take over. I’m very fortunate as my friend has this table (and so I could play it alone, without the usual competing soundscape you encounter when you play in a bar or other pinball venue), and so I’ve already played it through multiple times to capture as much of the sound as I could. I will use Audacity to edit these sound clips and then layer them onto my image map so that it is also an aural map and further replicates the experience of playing this table.