Hi everyone,

Thank you again for a provocative and engaging class. I enjoyed the presentations and the various ways in which we ended up touching upon issues that we’ve been mulling over across much of the course as well as some of the new issues that arose specifically out of the topic of e-literature, both from the reading and the presentation.

I would have liked, however, to have had a bit more of a chance to delve into what is our first collaborative work as a class (well, besides the sequential narrative comments we’ve been posting to this weblog)! We were able to talk a little bit about our experiences of engaging with the seed paragraphs that Teresa set for us from the Stoss story. I made a couple of points about the particular affordances of the wiki space for collaborative writing (something that perhaps Heidi and I will revisit when we talk about social media), but I’d be interested in picking up on a point that Teresa made concerning the experience of students schooled in traditional print literacy (sound like anyone you know), and the ways in which their critique/resistance with e-literature changed somewhat when they shifted from being readers of hypertexts to authors of a hypertextual story.

For those of you who engaged with the wiki story, what did you make of the experience? How did you find your way across the gap from consumer to producer in the context of this particular text? I was talking to Eva at the end of class and I mentioned that I fell into my own approach by the serendipity of searching for one of the words in the text, the word “pronoiac.” Well, in doing a quick Google search of the word, I stumbled upon an allusion to a story that led me into wikipedia, which then led me to the title of the story from which Teresa extracted the passage, and from that point, I decided to adopt a strategy of fleshing out some contextual clues about the original text without (I hoped at the start) giving away the text itself. I did, finally add in the link to Stross’s text, but not until Sunday evening, so as to prevent that link from having significant influence on how we might develop our collaborative story. To link to some of the points raised tonight, I played around with character embellishments rather than bothering much with plot. Others, worked to advance the plot.

How did you engage with the text (if you did)? Once you did engage, what was it like to have to then accommodate the work added by others? For those of you who did not add to the text (and it is certainly not too late to do so…), what stopped you? I know a couple of people had some technical difficulties, and that is really something to think about with such spaces. And what might we make of such spaces and approaches to collaborative authorship in a wiki with the students that we teach? Was any of this experience different than how you typically write when you are using other spaces/context/technologies?

Curiously yours,

Jeff

This week’s readings reminded me of the work of Brian Dettmer. I’m adding a new post here so that it will allow me to insert the images. These pieces are neither hypertext or multimedia (as the terms are defined in our readings), yet one might consider them to be a hypertextual response to traditional forms of literacy, ironically using traditional (vs. new media) techniques; a reconceptualization of text that is reflective of the interactive and non-linear nature of hypertext, presented in non-interactive form.

Click on the pics to link to the original source and larger views. For more info on the artist visit http://www.briandettmer.com/

Brian Dettmer – Brave New World, 2008, altered books, 5-3/4 x 11 x 8 inches [Image courtesy of the Artist and Toomey-Turrell Gallery]

Brian Dettmer – Webster two point oh, 2008, altered book, 11-1/2 x 19 x 11 inches [Image courtesy of the Artist and Toomey-Tourell Gallery]

Brian Dettmer – World Books, 2009; Altered set of Encyclopedias, 19″ x 32″ x 10″ [Image courtesy of the Artist and Packer Schopf]

Brian Dettmer – Brave New World, 2008, altered books, 5-3/4 x 11 x 8 inches [Image courtesy of the Artist and Toomey-Tourell Gallery]

Brian Dettmer – New Books of Knowledge, 2009; Altered Set of Encyclopedias, 16″ x 26-1/2″ x 10″ [Image courtesy of the Artist and Packer Schopf]