Blog posts 2, 3, 4 are grouped together in one post below:

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What a MARATHON.

I’ve been told by the site that the zine I created will be embedded at the end of the post.

I feel embedded in DHUM 780. The course was truly great — I took inspiration from everyone’s creativity and general koolness, and tried to generate a final project that did justice to what everyone brought with them to class.

The process of creating this final project was trying. I am a creative thinker in many ways, but not necessarily when it comes to design. So, I consulted a creative director on this project (my partner), and they helped me conceive of a zine that would be eye-catching, clean in design, and importantly, accessible to the user.

I did my best in this endeavor to discuss play and metagames, and apply these ideas to sport. I do think the final product is a fairly decent entry point into a topic that could use a lot more study and conversation. I want to go back and re-work some of the layout, retool some of the ideas, etc. But in general, I rock with what I produced. I’m most excited that there is a submitted product that I would feel comfortable and happy sharing with others because they might actually read/use it. I don’t even bother sharing final papers with family, friends, comrades, etc., because I love them too much to do that to them.

Is sporting play in jeopardy of being metagamed to oblivion? I think the trends are troubling, and so it makes me feel validated that I’ve chosen sport (and politics through sport) as one of my core sites of political study and struggle. I think the topic is fascinating, and I hope anyone who takes the time to read the zine comes away feeling something similar.

Jeff, if you’re reading this, I left you a surprise on pg 12 😁

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.

My end of semester project is a proof of concept for a tool called myopic appliance. Myopic appliance takes it’s inspiration from and is a response to Voyant Tools. This web application takes in plain text, performs natural language processing (NLP), and produces quantified data visualizations and tables for the input text. In the context of the humanities, this type of analysis is called distant reading. The question explored in creating myopic appliance is: can computational techniques like NLP be used to conduct close reading, a method used in literary study where observing word choice, syntax, and sentence sequencing as it interacts with the content to inform the meaning of a written passage.

I used the phrase “proof of concept” above purposefully, rather than “prototype.” The coding completed over the past three weeks demonstrates the feasibility of applying NLP and web styling in aid of close reading. What was built in this time period can be used on any plain text, albeit with a threshold of tech knowhow as a barrier to entry. The steps for that are as follows:

1. Clone the repo git clone [email protected]:klp/myoptic_appliances.git
2. Create one or many .txt files and save it to the source_txt folder in the project
3. Install the required python packages pip install -r requirements.txt either at the system or in a virtual environment (i.e. python -m venv name_of_virtualenv)
4. Open the process_text.py file and update the file_paths list with the files to process (e.g. "source_txt/example.txt")
5. Run process_text.py with a python interpreter, which generated a JSON file in processed_txt that maps all NLP operations
6. Open the script.js and update jsonPaths variable with the process_txt path(s) to files you want to ingest into the tool (e.g "processed_txt/example.json")
7. Start up a web server to host the index.html page — at the CUNY Graduate Center, students are fond of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, and use the Live Server extension

This is far from a prototype, which would represent a step towards a final product. But it is possible to experiment with different source texts following this simple, if not easy, process.

As is often the case with digital projects, the final output deviates from the initial proposal. I moved away from a deformance based meshing of two texts published the same year in different countries with similar culture impacts (Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches). Two factors when into generating this deviation. First, before working on the web presentation layer, I cobbled together a brittle command line utility to experiment with combining sentences and swapping parts of speech between the two texts, and found the results wanting. I opted to use three chapters from Second, after receiving feedback in multiple class sessions, the consensus was that this project appears to veer into pedagogical territory. Because the first functionality focused on parts of speech emphasis and de-emphasis, it seemed a natural fit to divert from the deformance angle to a more straightforward and predetermined method of manipulating text.

Challenges, I’ve had a few, but not too few to mention. After a significant break from using popular Python NLP libraries like Natural Language Toolkit (nltk) and even the industrial strength spaCy, I forgot how much the output requires finessing. To avoid context switching and frankly strength a particular skill, perhaps advisedly, I moved some of that finesse to the clients side JavaScript. The concern with that decision comes from previous experience trying to process text in browser, and the potential for poor performance (see Our Mutual Language Processor). The fear of performance issues lead me to the type writer like display of text across the screen in myopic appliance. I stuck with that effect even when no performance issues emerged because it felt in keeping with the close reading ethos of the project.

In any event, the in-browser text process resembled Whac-A-Mole at times. At first, all punctuation was treated as words, creating all sorts of spacing. After six hours spent trying to convert text between underscore into italicized words, I’ve given up for this particular iteration. Dashes (i.e. ‘-‘) weren’t labeled as punctuation, and required their own special handling that sometimes works predictably.

Another challenge for me: my still nascent frontend web skills like CSS, Javascript and UI design. Most of my programming experience includes backend APIs, micro services, and data processing. My standards are high enough in the technical realm that I think that’ll translate into the world of frontend engineering. Not entirely so. While the digital humanities mentality welcomes projects that have some rough edges, unintentional stylistic choices that verge from what’s recognizable on the internet risk dismissal from the interactor. Getting margin, padding, flexbox concepts to work exactly as I want them still presents a challenge. Intuiting UI/UX is also not a real thing, though I think building a crumby UI and refining it feels faster/easier than sweating the interaction details ahead of development. I also split out the UI into a logical set of steps, which introduced a number bugs. For instance, there was a state in which you can both emphasis and de-emphasis parts of speech.

When looking at the iteration completed for this class, relating the output to the course material can be a stretch. I never quite got to the exploration of alea or mimic, though Ilinx could sneak into the idea of collecting parts of speech when related to the original text. I liken the play at work here as more similar to playing a piece of music.

One neat idea I had during the development process was using Github releases. This allowed me to bundle up versions of my application into zip files. I also included releases available on the Github Pages site, linked below:

• https://klp.github.io/myoptic_appliances/versions/v0.2.0/
• https://klp.github.io/myoptic_appliances/versions/v0.3.0/
• https://klp.github.io/myoptic_appliances/versions/v0.3.1/
• https://klp.github.io/myoptic_appliances/versions/v0.4.0/
• https://klp.github.io/myoptic_appliances/versions/v0.5.0/
• https://klp.github.io/myoptic_appliances/versions/v0.5.1/

Finally, if we were pushing toward a v1 of this project, uploading your own text would have to be the bare minimum, I would wager, as it provides the most value to someone using this tool. Expecting most users to go through the process above to get going on a text of their own is not realistic in my scenarios. My guess is that the distance between v0.5 and v1.0 would be much longer than v0 to now.

Another Mark on the Wall (AMW) is a digital remediation based on The Mark on the Wall, written by Virginia Woolf in 1917. In the original short story, the narrator becomes fixated on a black mark on the wall which sparks a series of other thoughts. While these thoughts are entering and leaving the narrator’s mind, the focus periodically returns to the mark on the wall until the narrator finally realizes the mark on the wall is a snail. The intent of this digital version of the story is to experiment with the stream-of-consciousness narrative style, collaging the text to provide pathways for the interactor, to borrow Montfort’s terms for the user who reads, writes and plays interactive fiction. AMW falls somewhere between the interactive and hypertext fiction genres. While the interactor does not write or type responses as in interactive fiction, they do choose pathways as in hypertext fiction. The story is fixed with a beginning and an end but the interactor is generating their own experience of reaching the end. AMW also goes beyond hyperlinked actions to provide the interactor with ways to “play” with the text–make it move, disappear, enlarge, focus, etc.

To make the text “playful”, I used coding methods and typography to visually represent thoughts entering and leaving. To counteract the flat, two-dimensional aspects of text games and electronic literature, the narrator’s thoughts move along the z-axis (the axis that is perpendicular to the x-axis and the y-axis). The opening page hints at this–the first paragraph is presented while you scroll and then the black mark enlarges, taking you inside the story.

The “marks” page

The “marks” page contains all the times the narrator’s focus returns to the mark on the wall. Hovering over the sentences makes these thoughts come toward you. Hovering away, pushes them to the background. Clicking on the black mark brings you to a page of thoughts. The full text of the story was divided into seven pages, each with a different motion effect. Some pages (2, 3, 4, 7) are interactive where the text thoughts perform based on your mouse movements. On other pages (1, 5, 6), the text performs without any interference. You may choose to read the full thoughts in order or not read them at all, perhaps catching words on occasion. Each page contains motions that simulate how thoughts enter and leave our minds–they uncontrollably come from all directions at various speeds, they might invoke anxiety or calm, depending on your state of mind. In AMW, the typography is the graphical element that simulates the three-dimensional. Instead of literally showing a room, with walls, fireplace, etc., I chose to focus on the mind, thinking abstractly what this might look like.
Interrupting the thoughts on each page, a black mark and a snail randomly move across the screen. At any point, you can click on the black mark to return to the “marks” page and navigate to another set of thoughts. Clicking on the snail brings you to the end of the story when the narrator realizes the mark on the wall was simply a snail.

Inspired by the computational poetry and literary art published in Taper, you are encouraged to view the source code (⌘-Option-U or Ctrl+U) to read brief instructions for clarity. The source code also contains the full text itself, offering another way to experience this story. The contrasts between the written story of the code, the written story of the original codex, and the digital story reveal different types of persuasive and expressive practices at work, as Bogost outlines in his analysis of procedural rhetoric. Other points of departure which informed this project are Hayles’ mention of perspective and the z-axis in IF, Murray’s description of kaleidoscopic narratives, The River Poem’s transformation of an existing literary object, and John Cayley’s study of the materiality of language in Windsound.*

*To be honest, all of the readings and projects from this semester have been inspiring. So, thank you Jeff for an enlightening class! And thanks to everyone in the class for contributing to our magic circle!

Unpacking

Created with FigJam

I posted about this in October, but now that you’re working on final projects, know that you can schedule time with Nicole, our Student Advisor, and/or our GCDI team to talk through ideas. Here’s Nicole’s self-introduction, with contact info:

I am a PhD candidate in English at the Graduate Center, where I broadly work on topics related to the environment, media studies, and the history of technology. I have also taught various coding and tech skills at the GC and elsewhere—for example: JavaScript (w. HTML/CSS), D3, git/GitHub (w. Markdown/Command Line), Python, accessible design ideas, & etc.—and have worked broadly on applied digital media and digital humanities projects.

I am reaching out to share that I am available to meet with students to discuss coursework and project-based questions as well as program related queries (i.e. advising on course selection and the like). I will be holding office hours for students this semester by appointment.

Alternatively, for quick questions, students can always just message me on the department’s Slack or email me.

Friends, it’s time to pass Go and collect $200! We’ve reached the end of the Syllabus Proper, and it’s time to flex some direct democratic muscle. I’ve created a Padlet that we’ll use to generate ideas for the final two sessions and vote for them as well:

People’s Choice: topics for the homestretch

Made with Padlet

Feel free to add new ideas or comment on the ones I’ve created. We’ll work on this in class, too. I believe I’ve configured the link properly to allow all to access it, but LMK if you have issues.

I struggle to remember the headspace I inhabited in 2019, when I took this photo. Three years out of AdTech and three years into HealthTech, I likely still believed that mobile phones could contribute to well being, and that marketing driven apps could reveal a key insight about behavior that could be pointed in “the right direction.” I captured this image three years after Pokémon Go launched. I believe we’re seeing an iPhone 6, plus two separate Samsung Galaxy phones in action.

In hindsight, three thoughts seem poignant:

• The exploitation of Axis Infinity for cryptocurrency forms a coherent lineage with behaviors observed previously
• I often underplay the pervasiveness of surveillance capitalism because I’m attuned to the failures in technical execution, rather than the behavior changes in physical space
• The endurance of Pokémon Go lasted way longer than I remember it

I suspect I took this photo because I thought it was exotic. Perhaps I underestimated how consuming this game was?

Currently circling around two main questions:

How does our perception of “play” influence how we value artistic labor?  
AND 
How is labor portrayed through games and play?

“Play” as a term calls to mind the imagination, childhood, and freedom; it carries a certain frivolous quality. Accordingly, play can easily be seen as an inessential and extraneous component of society, one which largely serves to distract our attention from the more pressing functions of the human body within modern society – namely, labor. 
 
Labor permeates our world. And so, when our prevailing view of artistic endeavors is that they are “play” – relegating them to the realm of children – what does that say about how society values art and artistic labor?

Where play does find an “appropriate” place in labor, it’s often where it improves labor efficiency or employee retainage, all to the direct benefit of the employers rather than the workers. Through gamification mechanisms, the structures of games can be readily applied to the workplace as a means of capturing the employee’s attention and engagement and directing it wherever management deems necessary.

And so employee training modules come with corresponding badges and stickers, and reaching certain metrics lets you select from different tiers of gifts in the employee store, and IT will purposefully send phishing emails to test their employees. All of these have taken place in my workplace within the past week, and despite my knowledge of gamification and all its pitfalls, I can’t resist engaging because I want to beat IT at their game, or because I want the cute NYC DEP beanie at a discounted rate. These gentle prods and motivational schemas inherent to game structures certainly carry a more pernicious quality once you’re outside of the magic circle. 
 
How do the fantastical possibilities afforded to game designers by modern technology and computing power, square up to the more mundane renditions of labor within the medium and play’s application to the modern workplace?

Popular early arcade games like Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Missile Command, all attempted to simulate some form of alien invasion or warfare, slotting the user squarely into fantastical simulations of warfare. However, limitations in technology at this stage meant that users could only ever perform a limited set of tasks and functions in a given game ; so although you could face off against different variants of enemies with their own unique movement patterns, the goal was typically singular – you aim to survive as long as possible within a strict rules-based environment. The structures that motivate this type of repetitive work-like behavior inherent to these games find many analogs in the gamification mechanisms employed in workplaces. In this case “survival” takes on a more tangible, economic form.
 
Of course, as opposed to actual labor, the stakes are low with these games – typically a few quarters – and the play is completely voluntary. Nonetheless, the narrow scope of these games already lends them some labor-like qualities, particularly in the clear delineations on user behavior and the repetitiveness of the tasks at hand. This would be more common with early game design philosophy, allowing for – I believe – cleaner, clearer readings and interpretations of this older material as opposed to the more sprawling blockbuster games of today.

But with advancements in technology and in the field of game design, games generally grew more complex, engendering a heightened sense of player agency and decision making. These newer games gradually became less labor-like, and more “fun” – but how did depictions of labor develop alongside the evolution of the medium?

I’ll be referring to Huizinga and Caillois’ definitions of play to introduce a general definiton and framework for understanding games, and will draw contrasts between these definitions and the more colloquial uses employed throughout society. Along the way we’ll discuss the distinction between serious/playful play, alongside heavy references to Flanagan’s Critical Play when discussing the redemptive or more radical potentials in the game medium.

I’d also like to refer to some history of sport and play, specifically to the mesoamerican ball sports of the pre-Columbian era and their place within  indigenous cultures and rituals (thus rendering them non-voluntary and essential parts of society), alongside the development of organized sports out of their more playful and disorganized beginnings  (like soccer in the public schoolyards of 19th century Britain) into an actual world-spanning entertainment industry built on athlete labor.

There’s also room for passing mention to games like Euro Truck Simulator, Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and other various “labor” simulators. I think there’s a strong argument to be made that even the most “innocent” of these idle farming simulator games still carry with them the underlying capitalist logic that your cute little farm still has to constantly grow and expand and produce more cash flow. No matter how cute or how friendly the experience may be, it’s predicated on the same market logics that dominate our not-so-innocent real world. Could these games just be sanitizing our world for us, using play specifically to keep the world as it is?

There’s also room to make an example of a “big” game like Skyrim or Fallout (sorry I dont know any similar games from the past 5 years) by exploring NPC behavior and how labor manifests itself within some alogrithmically defined space.