Category Archives: New Media

eLit Camp

November 9, 2009 – 8:48 pm

Come to eLit Camp. It’s going to be very cool. E-Lit Camp is an informal weekend gathering for writers, artists, and programmers currently involved or interested in electronic literature. Work on your projects, give a presentation, collaborate, and learn from others. If you’re a writer, artist, journalist, coder, or some combination of the above, E-Lit [...]

By Steve | Also posted in General Literature, Hypertext | Comments (1)

On Sleep No More

October 24, 2009 – 7:33 pm

Mark Bernstein on Sleep No More: This was extraordinary theater, an unforgettable penetration of the fourth wall. It is also extraordinarily difficult. It’s not improv: the story, it turns out, is scene 21 of Woyzeck. You’re acting across from a stranger. A different stranger every night. In a closed room. The rules are unclear, we’ve [...]

By Steve | Also posted in Fiction and Poetry | Comments (0)

Infamous and Ethics

July 27, 2009 – 7:40 am

Infamous was an interesting game. My son and I played through it over the last couple of weeks. A couple of quick ideas: 1. There’s no gore but the game does go for grit. 2. The game play is pretty tame though the combat can be psychologically relentless. Gameplay in Infamous is driven by an [...]

By Steve | Also posted in Comics | Comments (0)

Mind Mapping

July 14, 2009 – 8:46 am

Via Seed: Picture this: the whole of human knowledge as a figurative mind that can selectively focus on certain areas. It’s a profound notion, and visualizing such a construct is an enormous undertaking. But with last week’s release of a new “map of science,” a team of researchers led by Johan Bollen is attempting to [...]

By Steve | Comments (1)

Digital Ecology

June 27, 2009 – 1:47 pm

The notion of digital ecology seems a mess. It seems more simple than the complication of “virtual.” Digital tools and data pervade the environment and they’re works in progress, unfinished apparatus. Digital ecology appears to suggest perpetual critical questions. How should we publish? How should we share? How should we interact? What are the important [...]

By Steve | Comments (1)

Creative Moments

June 22, 2009 – 6:15 am

My wife sent me this article (perhaps sensing story struggle). In any event, there are some interesting conclusions and contexts: In today’s innovation economy, engineers, economists and policy makers are eager to foster creative thinking among knowledge workers. Until recently, these sorts of revelations were too elusive for serious scientific study. Scholars suspect the story [...]

By Steve | Also posted in Epistemology | Comments (0)

Lyric Rat

June 10, 2009 – 6:49 pm

Lyric Rat is an interesting application of Twitter that takes the service further into interface land, search, and info farming. Lyric Rat could just as well be Poetry Rat.

By Steve | Comments (0)

Moral Agents

June 9, 2009 – 8:09 pm

Wallach and Allen’s Moral Machines was an interesting read. There are a few principle conclusions: that ethics questions must be considered in tandem with systems, from the ground up; that some framework must be developed to guide the future of AI systems in technical, cultural, legal, and operational contexts, but that the nature of this [...]

By Steve | Also posted in Epistemology | Comments (0)

Plato and Games

May 20, 2009 – 2:11 pm

Roger Travis is doing an interesting series on Plato and video games. He asks this question: Plato and video games together, then, can be a way of looking at an essential question in video game criticism: How can, and how should, immersion fit into the rest of culture? It bears following. It’s provocative The familiar [...]

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Higher Math

May 19, 2009 – 10:55 am

Alan Bigelow has a new webyarn called Higher Math. It’s his third in a the running brainstrips series. Alan writes: This newest work combines comic strips and other elements in an exploration of key concepts in math: addition, subtraction, irrational numbers, multiplication, geometry, and the Googolplex. Each concept has a human element, and their commonality, [...]

By Steve | Comments (1)

On Jazz

May 18, 2009 – 8:02 pm

I’m driving full force into Alyn Shipton’s A New History of Jazz, although it is tough to read in bed due to size. But the size is worth the trouble. John Timmons and I have been doing more than a semester’s worth of work on the history and listening to lots of music and we’re [...]

By Steve | Also posted in Hypertext, Media Space | Comments (0)

More Thoughts on Canons

May 18, 2009 – 6:39 pm

George Landow concludes this about canons: Doing away with the canon leaves one not with freedom but with hundreds of thousands of undiscriminated and hence unnoticeable works, with works we cannot see or notice or read. We must therefore learn to live with them, appreciate them, benefit from them, but, above all, remain suspicious of [...]

By Steve | Also posted in General Literature, Hypertext | Comments (0)

Work

May 12, 2009 – 8:16 pm

It’s been a long and short semester. Lots of evaluations yet to get through. But it’s also somewhat sad to see the semester go. My commitments to our Ability-based teaching and learning system have come to formal close, as chair of the team that developed, put into place, then revised, and again put into place [...]

By Steve | Also posted in Teaching | Comments (0)

Code

May 1, 2009 – 6:03 am

I’m looking forward to this, from Mark Bernstein.

By Steve | Comments (0)

Games and Premises

April 26, 2009 – 8:20 pm

I took a little rest from work this weekend and picked up Mirror’s Edge. The game is fun, some of the play is interesting, but the movement gets tiresome and the controls are just odd for my hands; I’ve been stuck in certain areas simply because I couldn’t nail the order of buttons, especially on [...]

By Steve | Also posted in Fiction and Poetry | Comments (1)