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 generat…
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…
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, duplicatio…
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 th…
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.
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.
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…
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, t…
Digital publishing—loosely defined—has had a remarkable impact on the world of poetry and poetics. This shouldn’t be surprising, of course. “The digital” has transformed nearly everything. Why should anything be spared? In the minds of many, …
Substratum issue 02 (Visual Systems) is out and it features interviews with myself and Ben Fry.
My colleague Zach Schrag wrote a guest post on Mike O’Malley’s blog two weeks ago with some significant criticisms of what we are trying to do with PressForward. He expressed a general worry that we were out to destroy a proven system of scholarly review, and a particular worry that we were casting off what [...]
Framing/Strategies for Action Date and time TBA Our next meeting will involve us in thinking about our core values, the frames that surround those, and how we might develop action plans from those values and frames to speak to particular audiences. Thi…
Thanks to the input of Travis Brown, Assistant Director at MITH and the programmer working on this project, I am now revisiting the organization of the project and its constituent files. We are now working with a central text, that will be pre-tokenized [broken into discrete and uniquely identified units . . .
For years historians have wrung their hands about how long it is taking our doctoral students to complete their PhD degree. Six years? Seven? Eight? More? In fact, a 2008 report by the American Historical Association indicates that eight years is the average, with the range being 4-11 years to complete a PhD in history. The [...]
Badges for Lifelong Learning
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