My final project is an attempt to visualize Shelley Jackson’s work of electronic fiction “my body – a Wunderkammer”.  I have made a map that visualizes the structure of Wunderkammer, representing each page as a node and each hyperlink that connects two pages as an edge that connects two nodes.

Here is a link to my map via Dropbox, please take a look and enjoy!

wunderkammer map.png

Shared with Dropbox

I was inspired by the developing branch of data visualization that visualizes text analysis.  In text analysis, the words of a work of literature make up the data and the words’ characteristics and relationships with each other make up the analysis.  Although it is up for debate whether the analysis of text analysis actually reveals anything about the text, I felt there was an interesting analytical opportunity in the difference between normal literature and electronic fiction.  With a book, the text is all there is to analyze; the structure is predetermined, one page (for the most part) always leads to the next page and only the next page.  With Wunderkammer, the hyperlink structure means that each page leads to multiple other pages and multiple other pages lead to each page. In the structure of the pages, there is an extra dimension of intentional design on top of anything to do with words.  The order of pages is no longer linear, but a cyclical web of possibilities.

With this in mind, my driving question was what I could uncover about Wunderkammer from analyzing the structure as a map.  Each page of Wunderkammer is about a specific part of Jackson’s body and her memories associated with that part of her body.  Reading through Wunderkammer, the presence of hyperlinks reminded me of the way your mind wanders during conversation, how talking about one subject reminds you of three other subjects to talk about.  Accordingly, I felt that certain pages being connected must reveal that those two body parts, or memories related to those two body parts, are linked somehow in Jackson’s mind.  Furthermore, pages that are linked to more often than others must be somehow more significant to Jackson’s memories.

My other driving question was how I could illustrate Wunderkammer in a new and interesting way, presenting it from an angle that cannot be seen when reading through it.  I was unsure if the end product of my map would be more of an analytical tool or a pretty artifact to look at.  Either way, I wanted to create my map in a style that emulates the white-on-black look of Wunderkammer and its hand drawn illustrations.

Before I drew my map, I collected the nodes and edges data by working my way though each page of Wunderkammer and transcribing which pages are reachable from that page.  This gave me an adjacency list that I could easily turn into a map (in computer science we called a data structure with nodes and edges a graph, but I am using map because outside of computer science graph can mean a lot of different things).  Next, I needed to layout my map.  To draw on Wunderkammer’s deep connection with the human body, I arranged the 41 nodes as close as I could get to the shape of a body and with body parts as close to where they should be as possible.  Drafting all the connections is hands down what took the longest. Even while collecting the data, I could not envision just how many connections I would be drawing until I started drafting them.  I had to go through several rounds of drafting to reach what I felt was the best and clearest organization.  I originally wanted to make a directed graph, meaning the edges have arrows indicating which direction the page navigation goes, but I quickly realized that would be an insane number of connections.  For the most part you can assume that an edge on my map means you can get to either node from the other, but that is not actually correct all the time.

Ultimately, I think my map is not much of an analytical tool.  There are a lot of nodes and edges on my map, I think it is a little too visually busy to expect that people will actually trace the paths to determine connections.  Furthermore, I am no longer convinced that you can gleam something significant from which pages are connected to which. If anything, Wunderkammer’s web of connections show that sometimes memories operate without rhyme or reason.  There is probably no specific reason why Jackson talking about her eyes should prompt her to talk about her toes, except that that is how it plays out for her.  That being said, I do think there is something to say about the pages that are connected to most often.  Nose and teeth are the pages that are most connected to.  The nose and teeth, positioned front and center on the body for everyone to look at, are two body parts that a lot of people feel self conscious about.  As most of Jackson’s memories in Wunderkammer are not positive, it makes sense to me that the most connections would lead to the body parts Jackson was the most self conscious about and thus thought about the most.

One thing I think my map captures and displays well is just how different the structure of electronic literature can be from a normal book.  The surprise of seeing how complex Wunderkammer’s map of nodes and edges is really hammers home the possibilities that electronic literature offers that traditional literature cannot. I am also very happy with the visual aspects of my map and the association with the human body that my map and Wunderkammer share.  When you navigate Wunderkammer, you deconstruct the body by jumping from body part to body part without discretion.  My map rebuilds that deconstructed body. This is why I also decided to add my own drawings of each body part on the map. Like Wunderkammer’s title page, you can see the strange patchwork totality of the body (the body of the text and Jackson’s body) in my map.  The long lines that connect nodes all across the body are inherently reminiscent of the nervous system or the circulatory system.  This text in this form, far more than most traditional literature, was begging for a body.

I think I have ended up with my visualization the same place I am at with text analysis in general.  It makes for pretty visualizations, it presents a work from a new angle, and it offers the ability to analyze (either words or connections) even if that analysis does not necessarily reveal things about the work.

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.

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.

As soon as I heard about this group project, I knew that Borges would be a good target, because his stories already exist in a literary gray space that subvert expectations for a straightforward narrative and beg to be played with.  To really understand Borges’ stories you have to dive deeper than what the words are telling you the narrative is; you have to interact with the structure of the text.  So, in terms of adapting a Borges story, I didn’t feel like we needed to strictly recreate a narrative.  As a video game consumer, I am much more drawn to games based on their usable systems rather than their narrative.  With this and with Borges in mind, I felt much more inclined to create a playable game that emulated the structure and themes of a text rather than the narrative.

A Pierre Menard game could have consisted of a playable version of Pierre Menard, his friends as a cast of characters, his writing as some kind of mini game.  In a way, such a game would get you closer to the actual narrative of Pierre Menard, but it would also get you further away from the themes.  Instead of keeping this barrier between reader and themes in the form of a main character, why not thrust the user into the primary role of author.  Rather than use this game to learn about Pierre Menard as a story, you can use this game to do what Pierre Menard did, and thus get closer to what Borges was really talking about.

Pierre Menard says so many different things on the topic of authorship, the nebulous definition of being an author, what an author brings to a work besides just the words.  When you turn something into a game and thus introduce a user, you are similarly blurring the definition of author.  In keeping with the theme of authorship, Don Quiquote positions the user as the author of a new Don Quixote.  The text you manage to match from Don Quixote creates a strange new version of Don Quixote that is (at least partially) textually identical to the original but also created uniquely by you.

I was the project leader as well as the main coder for Don Quiquote.  I will admit that Don Quiquote turned out almost exactly like I originally dreamt it up and pitched to the class.  We did, however, do a lot of brainstorming as a team about other avenues this game could have taken while still capturing the themes of the story, as well as how such a game could be fleshed out into a larger project that is more satisfying to interact with for the user.  Ultimately, our product is largely a result of what I could get Python to easily do.  We also did a lot of collaborative thinking about the themes of Pierre Menard so that we would have a well thought out presentation connecting our game to the source text.  After our collaborative brainstorming, I distributed and assigned the work load.

I really vibed with Bogost’s first chapter of Play Anything.  I hope this does not come across as someone reading a self-help book and saying “oh yeah I already do all of that,” but I truly do feel like Bogost is describing a way of interacting with the world that I do quite often myself and had never thought to assign the word “play” to.

For example, I really like my job.  It’s just a part-time, office administration kind of job here at the Graduate Center.  It doesn’t particularly utilize the skillset that my upper-level education has trained me for.  It isn’t where I hope to ultimately land career-wise; it’s really a placeholder until I graduate.  Some of my tasks are monotonous, some are tedious, some are boring.  And yet, I think my job is quite fun, fulfilling, and I’m good at it.  I do a lot of work with a big registration spreadsheet that I helped design and manage.  In accordance with Bogost’s terminology, I absolutely see this excel spreadsheet as a playground.  There is a lot of potential tedium and monotony associated with the kind of tasks that I perform within this speadsheet, but it’s not fair to become frustrated or bored with the spreadsheet that was intentionally designed with the structure that is best suited to the tasks.  I appreciate that the tedium of the task and the apparent complexity of the structure force me to increase my attention to detail.  This is something I only recognized thanks to Bogost.  I even feel the same way about responding to emails.  The system of Microsoft Outlook, my keyboard, me, and the person I am writing to become a playground for me where the name of the game is the most effective communication possible.  As it turns out, I am constantly playing at work, and that is a big part of why I like my job so much.

If I’m playing at work, I wonder if I am playing when I do other things I enjoy doing.  Maybe that is the secret to why I find so, so much enjoyment out of the things I love.  Particularly, I really like watching movies, and I really like listening to music.  I mean, like, REALLY like doing them, like these are my biggest hobbies, my biggest passions.  As I have grown up and into myself, I’ve started to realize that I think I like these two things on a level that not that many people can relate to, but I always struggled to explain that to myself or anyone else.  It is not uncommon for people to see movies as an opportunity to turn their brains off for two hours; to just escape for a while from the responsibilities of the “real world” and experience some braindead relaxation.  The same can be said for music which is often delegated to the background.  I really do not feel this way, and the idea that movies or music are somehow separate from the “real world” or that I am “taking a break” when I consume them confuses me.  One of the biggest reasons for this that Bogost helped me realize is that I meet the structures of film and music way more than halfway when I engage with them.  I work with them, I dig into them, I make use of them.  I pay all of my attention to the music I’m listening to or the movie I am watching.  I dive into them, I live with them. I swim amongst their rhythms and beats.  The same way Bogost’s daughter used the patterns on the floor to inject some fun into the tedium of shopping (which by the way I thought was a universal childhood experience), I use the highly addictive melodies of my favorite songs to inject some fun into my constant existence.  Anytime I don’t have to be paying close attention to something else, I am engaging with my music.  And maybe I look a little insane, but when I’m listening to music, I am mouthing the words, nodding my head, drumming my fingers, because I am not allowing it to lie dormant in the background like floor tiles to be trampled over, I am engaging with its structures all the way and on its own terms.  I am playing when I listening to music and when I watch movies, and as a result they bring me crazy amounts of satisfaction.

It is really helpful personally to have this vocabulary of “playing anything”, because I’m not perfect, and even though I find that I can naturally play at most things, there are tasks I don’t enjoy doing.  One of these things is cooking.  I’m not good at it, and it annoys me that I have to go through the process of cooking in order to obtain the sustenance I need to live.  Getting to eat what I’ve cooked in the end is not really a motivating reward for me like it may be for others.  But, considering my track record of enjoying routines and playing with tedium, I would be lying if I said that, when I get down to it, I find cooking boring or annoying.  I have some mental obstacles to do with the fact that I am biologically forced to cook multiple times a day, but surely there is nothing wrong with the physical structures of cooking.  Following a recipe can be fun, and there are a million new and engaging mini-games that fall within cooking.  If I play while cooking, then the fun of cooking itself can and should be its own reward.  And guess what, as soon as I had this thought, I got up and made myself a meal with the confidence that I was going to have fun while cooking it.

To wrap this post up, I really enjoy Bogost’s refusal to define play and work as separate realms that inherently do not interact, even though that distinction is actually a fundemental part of how Huizinga and Caillois define and categorize play.  Although I was initially taken aback by this disagreement, I came to realize that, although all three authors are using the word “play”, I think Huizinga and Caillois are really defining and categorizing “games” and using the word play to mean the way we engage with games.  I think it is only with the presence of an intellectual separation between what is a game and what is not a game that Bogost can then attempt to blur the lines between game and not, work and play, tedium and enjoyment.  Bogost is using the word “play” not to invoke the strict definition set out by Huizinga and Caillois, but rather the idea of enjoying what you’re doing, whatever it is, by relating it to a concept that we all remember from childhood and can relate to.