Gimlé

Been exposed to a few inane comments on the web and weblogging in the last few days. I’ve also been the recipient of a few comments on weblogs from academics that would either have to be categorized as ‘rude’ or ‘ignorant’ depending on how charitable you feel.

Most of these links are a bit old, the trail is a bit ‘cold’ if you will. Most of you have already read these, no doubt, as they were linked to from enough people. Can’t even recall where I first saw them, myself.

The first one to annoy me was Andrew Orlowski’s piece at the Register where he compares webloggers to Polish teenage girls, claiming that webloggers don’t read, don’t go out, and flatly states that engaging in community debate and structured writing is less social than being a television-watching couch-zombie or going out and getting plastered with a bunch of vomiting frat boys.

Cuz weblogging ain’t social, y’know.

It’s nice to see that when writing is unpopular, intellectuals pick up on bad writing and post-modern masturbatory pseudo-intellectual essays as a hallmark of ‘being smart.’

Now that normal people are given the chance to write, debate and read, those activities suddenly cease to be intellectual activities. While other activities, such as watching television, and getting drunk get redefined by the poseurs as i. Why do you think snobbish, post-modern poseurs like Buffy? It’s self-refential and cancelled, a double whammy for the camp of post-modern, post-ironic, elitist exclusivity.

I might not like the kind of writing that takes place on most weblogs but my gripe is that I want more of it and of a higher quality, not that people should abandon their writing in favour of going out and getting pissed, or collapsing, braindead in front of TV.

And he berates the group he classifies as ‘A-list bloggers’ for not being inclusive in what they put the ‘weblog’ stamp on.

Ars Technica is a weblog in all but name. They’re not a part of the Movable Type/Blogger/Userland/Blosxom gang which is generally what forms our view of that ugly word ‘blog.

But it looks like a ‘blog, walks like a ‘blog, smells like a ‘blog, and so it must be a weblog.

You see, weblogs aren’t revolutionary like the software people like to tell you. After all, part of the reason they’re saying it is because they’ve got software to sell you.

What we’re seeing now is functionally identical to the web we had circa 1995. Personal websites with sporadic updates that use linking technologies to create semantic interconnections. Dialogue and debates taking place over vast distances, aided by that there thing in the corner called a computer.

Weblogs are not a revolution, merely the ‘one step forward’ in a sequence of ‘two steps forward, one step back, one step forward again.’

We’re just getting where we should have been in 1998-1999.

Which leads me up to the comments I’ve been heard amongst serious digital media academics up at college last week.

It seems that some people missed the whole ‘two steps forward’ thing in the first place, let alone the ‘bouncing back after a setback’, thing that the current state of weblogging represents.

People who don’t get that you can have a community engaging in serious, structured debate that is not be a closed, exclusively academic group. That you can have a large collection of professionals, intellectuals and academics all hashing a subject out in a thorough manner, resulting in texts and essays that are better written and make more sense than most journal articles would ever do in their editors’ wildest and wettest dreams.

People who would say that weblogs are merely the ‘usenet writing for the naughties’ if they knew what the usenet was in the first place. People who think that webloggers are sad Star Trek fans without a life writing for other Star Trek fans without a life on websites visited only by Star Trek fans without a life.

People who simply do not understand what online writing is about.

I’d say that it was their loss, except that they’re the people in the way, preventing the rest of us from integrating weblogs and online collaborative writing with university teaching and debate.

If they don’t get it, it won’t happen.

The third comment simply highlighted the ongoing identity crisis that post-modern, semi-intellectual, poseurs are going through these days. “They’re writing about stuff? Intelligently? But isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?”

It’s exactly these people that are threatened by weblogs, not journalists. Media people, generally get what it’s about, in no seconds flat.

It’s guys like this that will hopefully be out of a job. He makes a bad habit in this essay out of attributing his laziness and poseur ambition to the population in general. Go on, read it. It’ll make you feel happy about yourself. The more you read and write on the web, the more endangered this particular species of animal will be.

In this case we can safely say that it is their loss, while the rest of us continue to browse like it’s 1995.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

The fact that Happy Tutor was once a self-hating loser is an interesting point and shows the vast difference between the the old ‘loser’ Tutor and the current excellent writer.

I already regret that half-hearted swipe at Happy Tutor. Shouldn’t have, really.

But it does highlight the difference between this sort of post and Dorothea’s complaints.

Dorothea describes her experiences, her dad’s experiences as well as the problems she sees inherent in the system.

And then she says “I know others have had similar experiences,” or something to that effect.

It doesn’t rule out the possibility that others might have had different experiences.

It doesn’t rule out that some universities might not have these problems.

It doesn’t broadly insult a large proportion of the participants in the academic culture.

It states that the university system failed her and others.

Some questions arise from that.

Why did it fail her and why does it continue to fail a large number of people on a regular basis?

And…

What can we do to change that (or if nothing should be done, explain why)?

Stating that it works for you doesn’t answer either of those questions.

Nor do insults or broad, sweeping dismissive statements.

Mark Bernstein writes in response to a New York Times rant on new media (more on that one later):

Any tool for creating computer mediated work will either be a programming tool, or it will be a crippled toy.

I can pretty much quarantee you that most people that disagree with this statement have never put together a medium to large-scale computer mediated project, have never earned a living putting together works like that (or teaching how to put those works together)…

… Or, more likely, they’re selling you something.

Flash is a half-way decent animation tool that used to be a broken toy when it comes to authoring computer media. It has gradually been turned into a schizophrenic programming/animation tool that happens to sort of preserve the sanity of both sides.

The graphic designers are lulled into a sense of security by having all of their usual vector-graphics drawing tools and layers built in.

But before they know it they’re using Flash’s fairly nice programming tools to put together Actionscript control statements and event handlers.

Director is another schizophrenic tool. But instead of being, like Flash, a loony of the “kindly, softly, gently” type (think James Stewart in “Harvey”), the schizo nature of Director evokes memories of Hannibal Lecter or Michael Myers of Halloween fame (the experience of long-term use being akin to crawling legless, still bleeding from your oozing stumps, over three kilometres of broken glass and rough sandpaper, only to be run over by a large truck two metres away from escaping).

Simply put, long term use of Director and Lingo leads only to the schorching pain of frustration, anger and desperation until you simply give up and let yourself sink down into the tarry pit of compromise and bug workarounds.

Sit down with Python or Ruby for a day and you’ll only return to Lingo under the threat of having your eyes plucked out and your frontal lobe fried to a formless stew.

And you might actually prefer having your eyes plucked out.

I hate Director and Flash is comparative sanity.

Director’s main problem is Lingo. As a language Lingo has to be one of the most haphazardly created language in history. Every release Macromedia slaps “feature of the day” onto the language with little thought about internal consistency or language coherence.

Even if Macromedia replaced Lingo tomorrow with a comphrehensive ECMAscript impementation (compatible with Actionscript) it would still mean that Director is just a more extensible Flash with Quicktime support, and without the XML support Flash has built in.

In the long term, though, what holds us back are not the bad tools or silly toys that the software companies think we want.

It’s fear.

Throughout the digital media field, everybody—from the enslaved students to the bankrupt producers—is frightened of code.

That mythical code.

Even just getting students to “view source” in a webbrowser, or to look at a simple stylesheet is practically impossible.

They think Dreamweaver represents all there is to web-design and that, citing Dreamweaver as evidence, web-design sucks.

They ask for help on the simplest problems if it involves Actionscript, not realising that if they just tried it would turn out to be much easier than the timeline-twiddling they are used to.

Even Director and Lingo aren’t rocket-science. (I just happen to hate the application, that’s all.)

Imagine trying to tell a group people who are frightened of code when Macromedia’s holding their hand that “y’know, pygame’s cool, and python’s xml features sound like exactly the thing you’re looking for.”

The look of horror when you tell them that they’d have to code

Followed by an immediate dismissal of the suggestion that it might actually be a bit easier than some of the stuff they are already doing.

I despair sometimes.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

There are, in my view, three kinds of theoretical writing.

1. Analysis and debate. Analyse an idea, story or event using all the theoretical and rhetorical tools available to you.

2. Bullshit mumbo-jumbo. Pie-in-the-sky intellectual masturbation. Everybody who’s been in academia has encountered this. I figure that it accounts for at the very least ninety per cent of academic writing. Others might be more generous.

3. Provocation. Overstate your position to such a degree that people will have argue with them.

The best example of 3. is Roland Barthe’s Death of the Author. Suddenly after a relatively short essay by Barthe’s, the whole focus of literary debate had shifted. By pushing against the boundaries Barthes had changed the goalposts and forced people to at least consider a new alternate point of view.

I’m so-so at 1. too good for my own health at 2. and enjoy writing 3. more than I should do. Although I don’t pretend to be as good at aggravating people into action as Barthes was.

It’s about wandering off into one direction, going as far as you can until you find a wall, leaning towards the wall and then pushing with all your might. “Death of the Blogger” was one such essay, good fun to write, pushed a particular point I believed in as far as I thought it would go.

The fact that it was not even more extreme just goes to show how conservative in these matters I really am.

Another example would be the “In So Many Other Ways”. As Jeff Ward rightfully points out it would be very hard to imagine language and culture separate in any shape or form. Which makes quite a few of the arguments and points in the essay rather suspect.

As language is the carrier of culture it is downright impossible to find out where one ends and the other starts.

But anybody who thinks that language and culture are autonomous things is very badly mistaken. Culture and language are human products. They are by definition affected by human actions. And many cultures are fighting for their survival these days.

Unless you suppose that language laws, word councils, name laws, dubbing, legally mandated translations, word and language quotas, subtitling by fiat, film funds that only fund films made in the national language, strict teaching laws, language officers that read through every single script for every single radio show…

… must all be some sort of quaint European custom.

There is a cultural war going on. The winners’ cultures get to stay alive.

It is fairly likely, if the current trends continue, that Europe in two hundred years will be a Europe with only six or seven languages. The number of languages in Europe that went extinct in the nineteenth and twentieth century is frightening.

The reason why Icelanders and the Icelandic authorities behave as if the Icelandic language is under siege is simple.

It is under siege and losing simply isn’t an option.

Kinda puts a slant on how you view all these linguistic and cultural debates. I’ll be damned if I’ll let people continue to believe that language and culture are these symbiotic autonomous juggernauts that waltz over foreign cultures “just because.”

If you drive a car and run over a baby, you don’t put the SUV in chains and plonk it in solitary confinement.

No, you put the driver in the slammer.

A healthy respect of foreign cultures and domestic minority cultures in the American and English public would go a long way towards changing the slant in the English language culture. Even today the enlightened academics I work with, who are around foreign students every day of the week, treat foreign cultures in the same way you’d treat a friends’ new, cute pet doggie.

“Oh, really! How nice. I’ve always thought that those fairy tales of yours are soooooo charming.”

And I won’t repeat the vitriolic things some of them say about the Welsh language.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

Dust or Magic Conference Report (Part Two).

Ideas. My disgust for those who reduce a work to its ideas. My revulstion at being dragged into what they call “discussion of ideas.” My despair at this era befogged with ideas and indifferent to works.
Milan Kundera—The Art of the Novel.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with hypertext.

I remember sitting, locked in fascination, in front of my dad’s Mac SE, playing with a few Hypercard stacks that he had acquired from God-knows-where.

I remember being around sixteen when I bought my first modem ten years ago and had, for the first time, the freedom to explore on my own on the net, to wander from mad homepage to mad homepage. A world of personal story with barely a commercial venture in sight.

I was sixteen, hooked, and I remember being annoyed beyond belief.

The concept of hypertext has always fascinated me and at the same time infuriated me.

I’m a sap. If you can’t write a story that plucks at my heart’s strings then you’re incompetent (I’m a Capra fan for crying out loud). Loved Notting Hill, thought Titanic was the living equivalent of Purgatory (proving my ‘incompetence’ statement). I blubbered at the end of Toni Morrison’s Sula. Felt heartbroken at the end of The Third Man. Mourned at the end of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

When it comes to cheap, emotional closure, I’m easy. So why haven’t I found a hypertext that affected me?

Eastgate’s more famous hypertexts were an interesting exercise but if you want confusion then Pynchon and Paul Auster did it in a more emotionally effective way.

But there’s something there.

Social software? Bah, humbug. When I want people’s opinion or input in something I read, I’ll ask them.

I just want a well told story

A different kind of story. Told in a different kind of way.

It’s only recently that the web began to, in my mind, fulfill its promise of being a public medium. The well crafted equivalent of a good pub chat with the other regulars. Like being in a campus pub at a college that has the majority of the country’s best conversationalists as daily regulars.

Like a pub where you can tune out the loud drunk in the back but keep on chatting with the physicist and the priest on ethics in science.

And Mark Bernstein’s talk (The Eastgate Story) on the second day of Bob Hughes’s Dust or Magic conference makes me think that the same might be happening to hypertext literature.

You can quite fairly assume that anyting smart or profound in the following text can be attributed to the presention that I’m rehashing, summarising, pondering and analysing at that point.

Proving that I need to catch up with what he’s been publishing in the last couple of years. The HTML hypertexts in Eastgate’s Reading Room do not look promising. Ugly, ugly, ugly. I’d bin any print novel that had equivalent aesthetics. HTML with stylesheets does not have to look that plain.

And, yes, I have returned a book because its typographic design was horrid, unattractive and unreadable. I see no reason to give HTML works more leeway when i know web design can easily be much more attractive and readable.

Civilized Software and Cottage Industry Publishing.

Civilized software. Respect for art and science. Human values. Literate computing.

It seems that Mark, in the first few minutes of his presentation managed to sum up the hopes and desires all of us had towards computers. Conjuring up an image of digital culture rather than simple digital consumerism.

Balanced. He pointed out that the state of hypertext critique (or new media critique for that matter) was horrid.

But the fact that Eastgate, the epitomy of a niche publisher, is still around gives us hope for the future.

And the past. As he gave us an overview of how far hypertext has come in the last twenty years, one thing became obvious.

Most of the fears turned out to be baseless. Legibility, especially with recent flat panel screens is not an issue, anymore.

He took issue with the longevity/archivability argument (“It won’t last”) pointing out, quite rightly, that texts will last as long as somebody cares.

Although he conveniently ignores the countless times in history where we didn’t know we cared until it was too late. We only know the Greek tragedies that the Arab scholars cared about (scholars in the same city that we are now bombing the shit out of).

Quite a few of the texts that were noted for their quality in contemporary Greek writing are lost to us.

But archivability is not a digital problem. 90% of the 20th century’s literature and film is out of print. We risk future historians regarding the Twentieth Century as a cultural wasteland if we’re not more careful (although preserving some works might only emphasise and strengthen our future ‘wasteland’ status).

The problem in digital art is not archivability (which is something we’ve never had the knack for, really) but openness.

I can’t read Storyspace hypertexts on my iBook running Gentoo Linux. Nor can I view flash files.

I’ve got no issue with authoring tools being closed but closing the format and the player software as well is just begging for obsolescence, isolation and dissappearance.

At least Eastgate controls its own authoring tools. Others are beholden to Macromedia, vainly believing that Macromedia will continue to view Director as a profitable enterprise in perpetuity.

Want to release a FreeBSD and Linux version of your cd-rom work?

Tough.

Even if you could prove that it would be a profitable enterprise for your publishing company, you’d still have to prove to Macromedia that many more of you would be interested in a Linux version of Director as well. Which is not likely if you are a niche publisher catering for a specialist market (which, if you are a new media/hypertext publisher, you almost certainly are).

Being indebted to a large corporation and tied to a closed proprietry format is destructive for a small scale, cottage industry, digital publisher.

You are not independent anymore. You are just another soiled organ, a serf in our world of corporate feudalism.

Which highlights how advantageous it has been for Eastgate to be in control of their own main authoring tool.

That’s what allows them the luxury of being a small publishing house in an industry full of worn cogs.

Afternoon is still available, though. Allowing Mark Bernstein to prove his own point rather effectively.

And in turn it highlights why archivability and two-platfrom availability isn’t an issue, contrary to the worries of the academic herd.

Ideas that Worked

The power of imagination goes right to my head.
The power of imagination goes right to my head.
The power of imagination goes right to my head.
The power of imagination goes right to my head.
And I said…
Eurythmics—I’ve Got and Angel (Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This): Track 2)

“The audience is smarter than your think” and, to be honest, once you realise that, most of your problems and worries go away.

What matters is the quality of the writing, the structure and associations (otherwise known as links).

Virtual reality, the holodeck dream, will never really work according to Mark. Add a sensible person to Hamlet and the whole play falls apart.

What people want are stories, texts, and a chance to be engaged, immersed in a narrative (to use a word with about as much value as Baghdad currency).

Weblogs are a hope for the future. Not because they are new things (just homepages by another name) but because it gets people writing, criticising, analysing, debating and gossiping.

Things are happening. Tekka.net has just started. People are becoming authors in greater numbers than ever before. Opining and telling stories on their weblogs. Mark’s presentation demonstrated that the past, while not brilliant, was alright. That the present, although barren of money, has interesting things happening.

That if we work hard, the future might be alright for the small scale digital publishing house.

And he also proved that the subject of hypertext can spark a lot of thoughts, ideas and rubbish writing in a person like me, who prefers hack writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett over overblown noir clones like William Gibson.

Bob Stein

Ryan is better now.

The hallucinations have passed. Some dreams still disturb him, but not seriously.

He paces the spaceship. He paces down the central passageway to the main control cabin and there he checks the coordinates, the consumption indicators, the regeneration indicators and he check sall his figures, at length, with those of the ship’s computer.

Everything is perfectly in order; exactly as it should be.
Michael Moorcock—The Black Corridor

Bob Stein, a pioneer in digital publishing who along with his ex-wife Eileen Stein founded the Voyager cd-rom publishing house, had urgent questions.

Why are we doing this?

What kind of world are we going to invent here?

If we are to create any sort of long term vision for the new media industry we need something to aim for. Fumbling about, and competing aimlessly with mainstream media will only result in the same sort of zombie culture we’ve been living with in tv and other mainstream media.

We can encourage thought and reflection, publish our ideas, put them out for others to respond to.

Or we can recreate the same old dumb media we’ve been force-fed for the last fifty years.

Where does new media lie in the large scheme of things?

The original vision of a new kind of discipline.

New media workers for social responsibility.

The artificial separation between your daily work and your political work.

The internet is fabulous but is descending into a bogstandard broadcast model. The media expells their gunk, the masses consume/download. The pipes are controlled by a small number of people—the internet is not under our control.

It’s only a matter of time before we get too subversive and they come down on us.

The great firewall of China proves that the internet’s freedom of speach is an illusion the allow us because it sells.

Believing in technology does not make sense. People—not hardware—change the world.

Paraphrasing Bob Stein.

Bob Stein’s call to arms comes at a time where the last remnants of the naive nineties belief in an inevitable technologically created utopia is being torn to shreds by the Anglo-American war-machine.

And in a spirited presentation he pointed the other door out to us:

• Refuse to be hopeless about it.
• “My work should be my political work”
• Talk to each other about things that matter is how things work.
• Digital publishing, small publishing houses, personal stories, personal expression. Political expression. It’s all coming to a boil.

We’re faced with a medium with megatonnes of untapped potential. What should you do when you’ve got the cultural equivalent of an A-bomb in your hands?

And That Covers Only Friday Morning.

I can’t really do justice to the thoughts and ideas presented in Bob Stein’s and Mark Bernstein’s presentations, or the debates that followed. My rambling thoughts and summaries are inadequate. They don’t manage to represent to you that feeling of hope that was pervasive in throughout the conference.

That glimmer of faith.

A bunch of people. Jaded youngsters like me. Victims of the dot-com crash. Academics that have been ground to dust. War. People that, all things considered, shouldn’t really have any faith in humanity or progress.

But there’s one thought that the conference lodged in my mind, and I’d like to think that the same applies to all the others that went there:

“We can change things—

No.

“We will change things.”

More on the rest of the conference later.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

Haven’t quite finished the report for the second and best day. Can’t focus today after last night’s short battle with insomnia (happens rarely these days, used to be a frequent problem when I lived in Iceland). Mark Bernstein has made a few comments on the conference on his weblog. More eloquent than my directionless ramblings.

What you make, what you make it of, how you do it are all comparatively unimportant when compared with why you make it, your reason for action. The final cause is the first cause, and the end is the beginning.
Eric Gill—A Holy Tradition of Working.

It was excellent. My mind is still overloaded with ideas, new thoughts and discussions.

Me and Tom Abba arrived a bit late on Thursday. Missed the first presentations and were about as attentive as roadkill as Satinder Gill presented her research on something related to bodies and how we bodily interact with computers (I apologize, I was rather knackered).

The lunch was in the Hall at Wadham College, which looked like something right out of a Harry Potter novel (haven’t seen the movies).

The official theme for the first day was “What Computers are Good For” and, sadly enough, judging by some of the presentations on the first day, the answer would be one word:

Toys.

We saw a mass of interesting projects presented. Colin Holgate from Funny Garbage demonstrated some of the amazing things he could make the stumbling beast called Director do.

Brendan Dawes, author of “Drag, Slide, Fade” told us how he first, at the beginning of the internet boom, inflicted utter rubbish on the net (and being paid to do so, the clearest evidence yet for the theory that capitalism hates the internet) but also described to us how his work and his company grew up and began doing interesting work.

A quibble about Brendan’s presentation: His dismissal of the usability issues Jacob Nielsen raised is a bit hasty, though understandable seeing as how much of an inflexible robot personality that mechanical Danish guy seems to have.

The attitude difference between the usability guys and flash designers seems to be that the usability group wants people to say things as clearly and simply as possible even though things might not look as good that way while the latter group seems to want to look as good as possible while saying the stuff they have to say.

I do think that Brendan Dawes’ assessment of usability issues in flash and his refutal of the points made by “Uncle Filbert” are a kneejerk reaction to the writings of a very boring Danish guy. Although the problem might have more to do with Nielsen’s insulting writings than anything else.

It is time to consider whether Jacob’s condescending Useit’s are doing more harm than good.

This is a minor quibble, to be honest. Brendan Dawes’ presentation was a long one and a good overview of the history of commercial usage of Flash as well as its possibilities.

If only the Flash 6 format didn’t suffer from patent issues (the movie codec is a proprietary one). Macromedia only has to add even the slightest of Digital Rights Management support to the player to make the reverse engineering of that codec immediately illegal. Throw the patent issue into the mix and you have a file format that is closed tighter than a grannie’s arse.

Issues like these prevent comprehensive Open Source flash support which in turn prevents computers like mine (a PPC running Gentoo Linux) from having flash support (yes, I am annoyed by this and yes I am severely biased against flash as a result, adjust your readings accordingly).

Toys.

The feeling of the latter half of the day was that of watching master craftsmen demonstrating their skills, which is a good thing. The let-down came when I saw what they were working on.

The dissapointment was akin to realising that the master craftsmen eked out a living by making He-Man action figures for eccentric collectors who wanted historically accurate plasticine twinks to be used as sex toys at the dog pound.

And the craftsmen saying: “It pays the bills so it must be good.”

Eating and having a roof over your heads has to be your first priority, I know. But it is a bit depressing, nonetheless.

Maybe the reason why the multimedia industry (or what remains of it) seems to churn out doodahs with wiggly bits that go blong when you bling is that interactivity seems to be fundamentally about play. Click, something happens “Oooooooh!”

If you’re not careful, the play takes over the work’s structure and your project turns into a toy. The nonfunctional equivalent of a game without gameplay.

I’ve seen dozens of projects here at the University like that, and it seems to plague the commercial world as well.

Ask yourself this: If your project is not a representation of some sort of narrative structure but provides some sort of functionality, shouldn’t it be written as a normal application and integrated into the user’s desktop environment?

And if it isn’t a narrative or a game, and doesn’t provide some sort of functionality, doesn’t that mean you’ve just made a toy, a non-functional game?

Maybe it was the toy aspect of multimedia that made the last presentation by Scot Osterweil of TERCworks so good. After all, if it really is a toy then why not try and make it the best damn toy ever?

A functional toy being a game.

Scot presented some of the Zoombini series of games he created, talked about some of the issues inherent in gameplay design and the values he and his cocreators tried to imbue the game with.

The conference programme says: “Scot’s computer work is a part of a wider vision of human dignity and empowerment.”

And it’s right.

Scot was also remarkably valuable when it came to the debates at the conference as he frequently brought the two sides of an issue together by pointing out the similar values that lay behind the opposing views.

It does make you hope that the games industry won’t follow the same ‘hell in a handbasket’ route that the comic book industry (led by Marvel Comics) has been following in recent years.

The last productive thing of the day was Christian Wach’s presentation of the project Football’s Leaving Home. Have a look through the website. The idea is remarkably simple and human and well executed.

The evening ended with copious amounts of booze being drunk, incoherent (mostly me) but entertaining (mostly not me) discussions being thrown about and good food eaten.

I probably managed to frighten a lot of people off the very idea of coming within a hundred miles of Iceland with my incessant yapping and my surreal and indecipherable sense of humour. Most of the conference goers are probably under the impression that Icelanders are a nation of drunken loudmouths.

That probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark.

Baldur Bjarnason,
Clifton, Bristol.

How the Long List Became the Short List.

You can’t throw a pebble into a crowd these days without hitting a narrative theorist. This forces any sort of project based on narrative theory to begin by choosing the theories to be used. Narrow down the angles you intend to focus on, do it quickly, and know why you’re dismissing a theory when you do.

In this case, being an interactive media project, there is already a large body of work on hypertext and hypermedia by theoretical luminaries such as Landow, Bolter and Michael Joyce.

But I am not a hypertext theorist and this project is not a hypertext project. The hypertext theories need to be addressed at some point, for sure, but they are not a part of the fundamental nature of this project.

Hypertext is an associative form, it gains its narrative power from its associations, what is being associated with what and the nature of that association. It does not need to be an electronic text, any structure whose main strength is in its associations is a hypertextual structure.

The goal here was not to look at a text and analyse the inherent associations within it but to look at how a structure whose strengths lie in its language and form works within an electronic space.

Deliberate experimentation where we try and find out how traditional narrative structures and traditional narrative theories cope with electronic space.

That criteria quickly narrowed down the number of applicable theories.

M.M. Bakhtin.

Bakhtin’s theories focus on a specific kind of narrative structure, the novel, which he defines as the interplay between various voices and narrative styles.

This novelistic structure does not have to be what we normally consider to be novels, the examples he uses come from poetry and drama as well as prose.

And, although Shakespeare’s work would not be classified as novelistic by Bakhtin as it is too dependent on the dramatic act structure, Shakespeare does provide us with good examples of what Bakhtin means with voices or “linguistic images”.

The contrast and interplay, for example, between the boisterous gravediggers, the joking fool, the serious generals and the whining aristocrats in those plays is fundamentally novelistic. The voices of the gravediggers and the whining of the aristocrats gain meaning from being in context with each other.

The difference between Shakespeare’s plays and what Bakhtin calls a novel lies in the fact that the plays’ primary motive power and emotional engagement comes from the dramatic monologues and the act structure while a novel’s strength lies in the contrasts and interplay between the voices it represents.

One is a journey, the other is a tapestry, woven. Different things by nature.

It bears pointing out that there is nothing specifically that demands that Bakhtin’s novels be linear. That fact was one of main reasons why specific experimentation with Bakhtin’s structures in electronic space are of interest.

Claude Levi-Strauss.

Levi-Strauss is an anthropologist who has done a lot of work in analysing mythology and the structure of common myths.

His concept of binary oppositions is not really a structure in itself but a quality common in many narrative structures and Levi-Strauss’ theories describe a methodology, a process, for drawing this structural quality out of existing stories.

The idea is that picking out two fundamental oppositions in the text and analysing them will reveal, shed a light on, the other structural components related to the opposites, telling us something about who the story is built up.

One example would be to use this methodology to study a hypertext. You pick out a binary opposition and then analyse the associations that link them. That process will reveal the nature of those associates and the tensions in the structure. You can view this as a way for a theorist to test the structural integrity of a story and find its focal points.

This makes it particularly useful as a tool to find out how narrative structures adapt to their context, what works and doesn’t work when a text is transposed to electronic space. By analysing the binary oppositions before and after the transposition we can get an idea of what has changed in the text’s structure in its new context.

Derrida.

Derrida changed everything. His ideas and theories can be argued about but they changed the way we look at every single idea that preceded him.

I’m saying this mainly to give you an idea of how hard it is to refrain from analysing how his ideas inform and change the use of the other two theories the project is based on. But I’ll try.

In this context Derrida’s main contribution is that he gave us a theoretical tool to observe and analyse ancillary structures, which he calls Parergons. Constructs that are related to other structures, inform them, surround them and define those other structures but are not a part of them.

The specific example Derrida had in mind was the concept of a painting’s frame. It defines where the painting begins and where it ends. It comments on it by nature of association and context (consider for example the case of the gilded frame vs the plain one), it lies on the painting’s edges without being an integral part of it.

But the theoretical concept Derrida was looking at was not only the frame but the frame as a comment, and other ancillary structures that worked as comments on their associated structures. The veil over a statue or a footnote to a text.

So Derrida both gives us an alternative method to analyse relationships in structures, superstructures and substructures, and he gives us a tool to analyse a structure’s context by analysing the satellite structures around the text.

The web-browser interface is a satellite structure, a Parergon, to the browser’s content, and Derrida gives us the tools to analyse their relationship.

The Whys and Wherefores.

Narrative experiments have to have a subject. So I had to pick a narrative, a story, which I could use for this project, preferably a text that made my life easy.

It had to have a multivocal structure as defined by Bakhtin, with fairly clearly defined voices and characters.

It had to lend itself to analysis through its binary oppositions, so it had to have fairly clear polar opposites as a part of the text’s fundamental structure.

It had to lend itself to commenting to enable us to experiment with the use of Derrida’s ideas of ancillary structures.

And on the pragmatic side it had to be in the public domain, or otherwise free to use and distribute. Also, having a text that has been fairly well analysed in the past enables us to focus on analysing how it adapts to experiments in electronic space, giving us a firm foundation to refer to regarding the story’s structure.

Which pretty much ruled out using my own work as a basis, as that would have been a shaky foundation for analysis to say the least.

The public domain issue led me to look at the medieval texts which had been one of my primary focuses in my Comparative Literature Bachelor’s Degree, and being Icelandic I thought of the Icelandic family sagas.

Egill’s Saga stood out immediately.

That Story.

Egill’s Saga is possibly one of the most analysed and researched Old Norse text in history, third after the two Edda’s, the Prose-Edda and the Poetic-Edda. In fact, many believe Snorri Sturluson, the writer of the Prose-Edda, to be the author of Egill’s Saga. A fairly debatable assumption as the writing styles of the two works differ considerably.

It is also in the public domain, both the English translation and the Old-Norse original are freely available in proofread digital form which would make my work quite a bit easier. And it is easily abridged, the title character doesn’t enter the picture until almost halfway through the story, and the reading of the text in Icelandic schools has a history of skipping a large part of the first half.

Multivocality.

The story is also useful in the way that although it has relatively few voices represented in its structure compared to later novels those voices are very distinct.

The primary voices being the almost callously impartial narrator. Egill’s arrogant but intelligent voice, contrasted with his father’s and his grandfather’s less cultured but as arrogant voices. Then we have the voice of Egill’s daughter who helps nurse Egill through his grief after losing his sons.

And finally we have the Poetry, a voice, an entity on its own. This poetry is what you could call the historical voice of Egill Skallagrimson, preserved for years, and most likely composed by a real person named Egill Skallagrimson.

The relationship and contrast between Egill’s poetic voice and Egill’s prose voice is an important one. The story’s focal point lies in the binary opposition between the prose and poetry.

Oppositions.

So the story has a binary opposition at its centre as its main driving force. But it is littered with interesting oppositions throughout: Egill the killer vs Egill the father. Egill as a son vs His father. The young arrogant Egill vs the old, grieving Egill. Almost an embarrasment of riches.

Parergon.

Egill’s Saga is not only conducive to Derrida’s satellite structures, the comments, they are essential to the story’s structure. The structure of Old-Norse poetry is fundamentally based on references and Norse mythology as a superstructure.

They have to be taken apart, commented upon and analysed to be understood (even in the old days, the term “rada i kenningar” often used in the context of understanding a poem implies that you’ve taken the poem apart, figured out what is being said and referred to).

The reading of an old norse poem was a similar sort of process as the English tradition of solving a cryptic crossword puzzle.

Foundation.

Almost every word in Egill’s Saga has been analysed to death. Research has been done on almost every single variation of word occurences, statistical analysis of word use, every phrase has been linguistically analysed many times over. It has been read, reread, referred to, taken apart, analyzed, deconstructed and criticised in almost every concievable way known to man. The letterforms of the original manuscripts have been analysed. The composition of the old hide it was written on has been analysed.

In short, it is a very stable base to work from. Meaning that if it breaks or if something doesn’t work in the electronic context there will be a wealth of data to refer to to compare and contrast it with the original to teach us why it fails in that context and how.

And if something goes wrong it will be entirely my fault.

Post-Mortem.

I am occasionally reminded that I’m the only one around here with a Comparative Literature background.

These notes were used in my presenation yesterday to the rest of the Phd researchers here at UWE along with an assortment of UWE Art, Media and Design staff.

Most of it went alright but the discussion was taken over by one person in the audience who insisted that comparative analysis of works and tests as I proposed was relative, arbitrary, and in the long run impossible.

And he also kept on about asking what the point was, “the burning issue”, essentially wondering why the hell I want to do this.

He kept returning to the point of the arbitrary nature of the research, ignoring my points that

1. I can’t be expected to present anybody’s point but my own and that the reasoning behind my conclusions, the tests I intend to make, as well as the original piece of work will all be freely available so that anybody that’s interested can go over the data and decide to agree or disagree with my conclusions.
2. The methodology behind structural textual analysis is well tested and has a long history. It’s flaws are well known (Derrida pointed out a host of them himself) but it’s the only tool for this sort of work that he have.
3. The flaws being known makes the relatively structuralist approach a more reliable approach for analysing data than the relativistic stance he was taking.

Of course I didn’t manage to make those points that clearly yesterday, instead I, shaken, spewed them out one by one in a broken, rambling fashion because I simply couldn’t believe how contrary that person was being.

I guess we live and learn.

I might simply not have understood what he was talking about. I thought I had presented my idea clearly (judging by the questions I got), what I intend to do and how. He may have simply tried to get me to clarify a point or two about what I am trying to do.

But, unfortunately, he only managed to sound to me, as if he was simply stating that what I was trying to do was impossible, that I shouldn’t even be trying and that I must be trying to do something else and am not telling him.

Sheesh.

Baldur Bjarnson.