juliannechat

ELO 2021: session report links, self-intro, & 2 stories from the 90s

The conference team is doing a great job! Wit and wonder abound. Links to my session reports:

• GIF from Katie Schaag's workshop "Queer/Femme Internet Aesthetics"
• Notes from Laura Hyunjhee Kim's workshop "Feeling Without Touching" 

[the following were awesome
and I hope to write about them later this year]

Wednesday Keynote by Lai-Tze Fan:
"Unseen Hands: On the Gendered Design of Virtual Assistants and the Limits of Creative AI"

Thursday Keynote by Archana Prasad (and many collaborators):
"RadBots: AI Augmented Writing towards Radical Video Bots"

Friday Keynote by Olga Goriunova:
"Subject-making and aesthetics of data practices"

Since 1998 these conferences have been respites from my career (LinkedIn) and regular life. This week I am on PTO (=paid time off, vacation) from my day job but my regular life is fraught, so I decided with a heavy heart to witness the tools and art sessions via video "later" (as a treat for myself throughout the summer) and actually attend: 

• One precious workshop each day
• All the keynotes
• Events I'm doing with Deena (WRITEPODs being the one I worked on most fiercely) 

The New Work is usually my favorite part, which means when I meet artists I have just seen their work and am able to react/enthuse. Missing that. 

 

A partial self-intro

This blog subtitle "let's play follow the reader" references my career-long obsession with how people read online. My other obsessions include games and collaboration, summed up by this text from inside the early Frisbee:

Flat flip flies straight. Tilted flip curves. Play catch; invent games!

Those sentences used to be my Twitter intro, but now they're just on Medium. My read | play list (to the right), last updated in 2010, was a mix of people I had worked with and people I wanted to work with as of that date. My own works (some in the list on the left) have suffered from my "create one per platform and move on" approach but I learned something from each one. As part of facilitating the work of inventor/creators, my best skills are editing, facilitating collaboration, and continuous process improvement.    

My first full time job was with an interactive TV startup, then I moved to tech writing and usability, then to working on interface "personality." For awhile I gave conference talks on online help and what I then called "object-oriented documentation." I was a fan of early hypertext (multiple platforms) and wrote erotica in Storyspace. In the 90s I was doing tech writing and usability at a CD-ROM division of Lotus and assigned myself to keep track of the early internet on top of that ... 

Career highlights: the infographic

I met "this community" when Dan Bricklin sent me to ACM-HYPERTEXT (now SIGWEB) in 1998 to demonstrate Trellix. Since I'd been tracking pre-web-HT I knew well how most works invented their own user interfaces. Discovering how each one worked was part of the adventure. But many creators chose to sit with each reader to help them discover their work, so I started sharing basic UX observation techniques (including "sit quietly, on your hands, and watch") and I helped Deena Larsen organize the conference | house | party that was the CyberMountain Colloquium. Now we have page metrics and eye tracking, but low budget "fresh reaction" techniques still work and have informed my work with this year's WRITEPODs; I'm still joyfully collaborating with Deena!

I've also had the honor of working with (and learning a great deal from) Stephanie Strickland. Projects have included a non-standard Tumblr in honor of Dragon Logic and coordinating the work of two programmers for her "code project for print," Ringing the Changes. 

And in order to work with Markku Eskelinen I learned enough Finnish to say, "Puhutko Suomea? En puhu." (Do I speak Finnish? Nope!) But it was Raine Koskimaa who laughed. I was glad to discover that word-magicians as featured in Kalevala are still with us.

Nowadays, as a small part of my current day job, I help two colleagues manage a dozen customer support chatbots. As of April 2021 this link goes to the chatbot for Sage Fixed Assets. Naturally I'm watching all the machine learning content with great interest.

 

Note re embodiment and archiving

A former therapist told me there are three ways to think about one's body: what it can do, what it "looks" like, and how it feels to inhabit it. 

I've always been grateful for what my body can do (dance, row, hike) but have disliked how it looked and "felt". Cross-dressing helped a bit. I have brain chemicals that allowed me to talk easily with strangers (I recently did some coaching on how to talk to strangers at conferences, and here's the flyer) and a big voice, and for much of my career I weighed over 300 pounds. Being loud and large made me feel less specifically gendered.

Now that societal changes are making it easier, I'm using Jules and they/them pronouns, and I chose the nonbinary X on my drivers' license, and Deena used Rose Language to help me engage with the change. Of course I haven't gotten around to rebranding any of my web content, partly because I value the history. My first web site was at the nation's first public ISP, and it's still there! Not forever of course; I'm in the process of archiving and saving just the good stuff.

 

Two old stories (that I think are funny) about presenting Trellix to the eliterature community

At ACM-HYPERTEXT 1998, Doug Engelbart looked at Trellix, and asked tough questions such as, "If you change the name of the link there, does it propagate to the actual node (=lexia)," and fortunately the answer to that was yes. I chatted with him for awhile and got some of the pioneers' history confused ...

The next day I came up to him and said, "I wanted to apologize for something I said yesterday. I think I mistakenly attributed one of your ideas to Ted Nelson." 

And he looked at me completely deadpan and replied, "It kept me up all night." 

 

The other story is from TP21CL 1999, during the era in which large groups of people sat and watched as each presenter came up with their own laptop, connected to a projector, and rebooted. (Pretty soon after that, events started requiring you to give them your slides way in advance. But this was partly a tools/tech conference and most of the tech was new enough to require its own machines.)

Anyway, we were all in a lovely, steeply banked, wood-paneled auditorium at Brown, and I was presenting head-to-head against a hyperbolic text (viewer? or something) tool called The Brain. I'd created a work that showed off the Trellix features that were most useful for eliterature, but I failed to fully connect my laptop to all the pins of the projector so everything onscreen was too orange and white. (Afterwards Jim Rosenberg said kindly, "At least you engaged with the community.") 

Then the guy representing The Brain took the stage, looking Matrixy (The Matrix had just come out), with glossy black hair edgily cut, wearing black jeans and a short sleeved black t-shirt, moving around the stage athletically.   

He said, "I hear you people are into books so I decided to make a Brain using my favorite novel of all time!"

And much of the audience leaned forward a bit.

And he unveiled an interesting-looking web of words onscreen and said proudly, "Atlas Shrugged!"

 

[1] Footnote: Lily Zheng's excellent To Dismantle Anti-Asian Racism, We Must Understand Its Roots.

My name(s) in Rose Language

Are you familiar with the communication innovations of Deena Larsen? New ways of writing, linking, and gesturing seem to fly from her brain and fingers. 

Since her childhood Deena has experimented with adding additional meaning to characters in handwritten English. (Valences? Inflections? Here's her explanation.) These characters are sprinkled throughout her forthcoming work Chronic, and for one magical summer I used them in my own writing, to see what effect they had on my brain. 

Now Deena is sharing her characters, and the ideas behind them, through The Rose Project. There is a related Kickstarter that could be described as its own evolving literary work, perhaps a new genre; see for yourself. Read the updates (in order, earliest at the bottom) for a new story, "The Thorn of the Rose", in which characters communicate using the characters. 

Virginia Woolf said (paraphrased) that English words had been so over-used and mis-used that writing in English was like playing on a piano with half the keys broken. When I share this I often use the word love as an example of a word that has lost its juice. But Deena is re-charging words such as love with multiple possible meanings. 

How am I using Rose? I have started calling myself "Jules" in certain contexts. (I'm branded online as "juliannechat" and unlikely to change that.) To help me think about the possible implications, Deena wrote both of my current names in Rose characters, as shown below.

What adventures could Rose have in store for you?

... and ... 

Deena Larsen >> South Africa

Update: You can follow Deena's adventures in South Africa here. She also writes, apparently in answer to numerous inquiries, "no, I have not yet seen an elephant here."

Original posting: Hypertext author Deena Larsen will be spending this coming summer in South Africa. (That's their summer, the Northern Hemisphere winter.) Her life threatening medical conditions will be helped by the additional sunshine and rest, and she will be working on a new version of her classic Marble Springs.

If you are a South African digital artist or educator, below I'll list reasons why you might enjoy meeting with Deena, having her address your class, or collaborating with her. But first, for friends and fans...

This year's Deena projects

In addition to coding Marble Springs 2.0 (with Leighton Christiansen), planning for Marble Springs 3.0, and holding down her day job, Deena also finished the coding on A Modern Moral Fairy Tale, co-authored with the late MaJe Larsen, and completed another large chunk of Chronic Bio, another of her many works that have involved inventing new ways of writing and therefore reading. (Let me know if you'd like to see a slide show about plans for unleashing this work on the world.) She invites all sister/brother hypertexters and their friends/families to stay with her next summer at a natural hot spring 8000 feet above sea level where she intends to complete the third and final section of Chronic Bio.

Speaking of her day job, Deena originated the idea for the brochure Federal Workers Keep America Running, Every Hour of Every Day, (mirrored here by me), wrote/edited the countless versions necessary to get it approved by her union and her work group, and then fought through the additional layers necessary to get it published...and in this climate of relentless budget cutting it was picked up by the Washington Post...

For those who don't know her, here are my opinions about...

Why it's fun to work/play with Deena

(1) Deena can push any digital platform beyond its limits and use it in new (usually unintended) ways that we can all learn from.

I vividly remember how she created a new work on Trellix, along with a "wish list" of about sixty new features that she would like included in future releases, in a single day. Her successes in pushing the boundaries of HyperCard, StorySpace, Flash poetry (e.g E:Electron with Geoffrey Gatza), games (The Princess Murderer with geniwate), and so on are even better known. 

(2) Deena's brain is not normal. She stores information and makes connections differently than we neurotypicals do, in extremely interesting ways. Another way to say this is that Deena seems to use more of her brain than most people. You will not be bored. (Having said this, she is sensitive to NT issues and consults frequently to make sure students and collaborators are getting what they need.)

(3) Deena is generous and inspiring and down-to-earth. She tends to leave people with a sense of new possibilities for their own work...

Due to a chronic condition called MHE (which is not her most severe medical problem, but it's the one I have a Wikipedia link for), Deena has some issues with mobility and chronic pain. And she is face-blind, so it's helpful to remind her of your name every time you change your clothing (once a day, in the morning, does it for me), at which point she will be fine. She totally knows who we all are, she just can't identify us by our faces. And she blasts right through all of these problems in teaching rhetorical techniques for interactive literature or whatever else you might find helpful.

Deena herself is contacting South African teachers and artists. I am happy to provide references for her if necessary, but the strongest references are the works themselves. Deena, I hope you have a wonderful second summer and I look forward to working with you again upon your return.

read | play link updates

I have updated the "read | play" list (to your right), a selection of people whose work with electrons has inspired me. You are invited to hover over the links to see WHY I think you might enjoy clicking each one. I have also collected list metadata & trivia for those of you who have read the hover text and want to have fun with it.

Many of the people listed create poetry as a primary or secondary activity, or just because they can. Grappling with their work takes everything I have. By now I know not to even start when I cannot pay full attention. That says more about me than about poetry, but I'm just explaining this because I don't like to hear, "I tried a poem once but I couldn't get into it." Rita Mae Brown recommends preparing physically for mental challenges and mentally for physical challenges. So a few hours of Pilates (or equiv) should set us right up...

No attempt has been made to be comprehensive; many more digital objects | opportunities to read | play can be purchased from Eastgate or the MIT Press and found in the directory maintained by the Electronic Literature Organization. I hope that if you find the list wanting (too many poets and visionaries? not enough history and theory? needs more Australians?), you will be inspired to update your own and send me a link.

As I checked all the links just now, several pieces in particular struck me.

 

Secret rules from within Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature

This node offers an alternative path into Deena Larsen's e-literature teaching site. It contains the most concise statement of ... I dare you to click it, that's all.

 

Torill Mortensen's thinking with my fingers entry "It feels final"

Excerpt: Living in Volda, the distinction between "real" and "virtual" world feels meaningless. What's real about living here? It's so secluded, so filled with its own rules, concerns and moving by its own rythm that living in the flesh world of Volda is like living in a virtual world. The insane beauty of the place, combined with the ruthless weather, the heavy darkness and the dreariness of the third month of rain and sleet, it turns Volda into something on the flip-side of other flesh world realities. At the same time - this is it. This is the reality, because reality is made up of a million little spots like this, places of heartbreaking beauty and equally numbing mundaneity, spread like random handfuls of marbles all over the planet.

Torill, your poetic way of ... *weeps quietly* Hope the move continues to go smoothly.

 

Elin Sjursen's posting on Barriers to Understanding Twitter

Excerpt: Journalists continue to fall prey to the most outrageously ridiculous claims from those with titles within fields like psychology who claim to understand something about human interactions in the online world. ... Sweeping generalizations that misguide the public on the reality of what happens online is a big problem.

Although perhaps my favourite bit is where she asks (after quoting some "experts"), "Are you on twitter? Is this how you feel?" Exactly!

 

The final two links have content about health, linked to matters of spirit and mortality:

Justine Larbalestier's posting on RSI and so much more, "Farewell For Now"

Bassey Ikpi's re-posting of "One Good Reason To Stay (A Poem for Phyllis Hyman)"

Excerpt from the introduction: Fuck Stigma. If you need help, get help. Those who wish to shame you aren’t going to ever come to your rescue. Fuck them. Seek treatment. Pity the ones not brave enough to seek help. Who only want to sit in judgment of those who do. Fuck them. Seek treatment. Talk about it. Fuck a stigma.

 

If you are listed here, and I have not linked to the preferred version of your online presence, please let me know (juliannechat at gmail dot com). All comments are welcome!