Digital Skulduggery & more
I'm spending July in Cádiz, Spain, with my family and a bunch of students from Davidson College. The other weekend we visited Granada, home of the Alhambra. Built by the last Arabic dynasty on the Iberian peninsula in the 13th century, the Alhambra is a stunning palace overlooking the city below. The city of Granada… Continue reading The Maze and the Other in Interactive FictionOn Labyrinths, the Infinite, and the Compass
A Call for Bots of Conviction In 1965 the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs told an audience that “a protest song is a song that’s so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit.” Ochs was introducing his anti-war anthem “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”—but also taking a jab at his occasional rival Bob Dylan, whose expressionistic lyrics by… Continue reading A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit
This summer I attended the first annual Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) at Hamilton College. It was an inspiring conference, highlighting the importance of collaborative faculty/student digital work at small liberal arts colleges. My own school, Davidson College, had a team at ILiADS (Professor Suzanne Churchill, Instructional Technologist Kristen Eshleman, and undergraduate Andrew… Continue reading Your Mistake was a Vital ConnectionOblique Strategies for the Digital Humanities
The Electronic Literature Organization's annual conference was last week in Milwaukee. I hated to miss it, but I hated even more the idea of missing my kids' last days of school here in Madrid, where we've been since January. If I had been at the ELO conference, I'd have no doubt talked about bots. I… Continue reading Closed Bots and Green BotsTwo Archetypes of Computational Media
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a massive novel about, among other things, a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems about, among other things, the expansiveness of America itself. What happens when these two works are remixed with each other?… Continue reading no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass
Below is the text of my presentation at the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston. The panel was Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media, and it was assembled by Lori Emerson, Paul Benzon, Zach Whalen, and myself. Seeking to have a rich discussion period—which we did indeed have—we limited our talks to… Continue reading An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing
One cannot help but observe the predominance of cupcakes in modern America. Why the cupcake, and why now, at this particular historical moment? What the fuck is up with all the cupcakes? Within five minutes of my home there are two bakeries specializing in cupcakes. Two bakeries two hundred yards from each other. They sell… Continue reading On the Predominance of Cupcakes as a Cultural Form