Category: Group A

We live in a digital day and age, where everything has become electronic, even our books. We discussed the five affordances that books grant us, but there are also affordances that electronic literature and media can offer. Janet Murray describes the four essential properties of digital environments in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Murray spoke about digital media being participatory, procedural, spatial, and encyclopedic. Digital media can be also be interactive, as well as immersive.

Moreover, I believe that the affordances of electronic literature can go beyond the affordances granted through physical books. Books are finite and grant us a fixed story, where we can only imagine what has already been presented to us. The participation is limited, because we are given the setting, tone, characteristics, etc. With electronic literature and different digital  programs, the participation is endless. Murray gives us the example of the program ELIZA. Although, it initially wasn’t running at top efficiency, it was able to be an interactive story teller that followed the readers imagination and even gave different twists. Programs like this can allow audiences to not only follow a pathway, but also create their own. Growing up, I always wished that I could change the conclusions of different novels. Would slight changes in characters’ decisions result in a completely different outcome? Digital media has now allowed us this opportunity and many more.

Books are both writeable as well as readable, to some extent. We discussed the advantages of marginal spaces and sizes in books. This allows readers to leave notes, comments, and interpretations, but as stated earlier these comments are limited to the finite text already given. With electronic literature this affordance can live up to its full potential. You are able to actually write and read a story that can incorporate your ideas, as well as previously programmed ideas.

Coincidentally, many people feel as if this digital era has caused people to become “lazier” and create “shortcuts”. I disagree, if anything this era has caused many authors to become more innovative. These different media outlets have allowed others to explore an array of creative outcomes to a story that was once very limited. Books have set the foundation for the creation of electronic literature and digital media and the affordances of both platforms are equally advantageous.

Following my reading of Chapter 3 in Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, I am left with lingering thoughts and certain questions about particular aspects regarding the critical intersection between academic humanities and technology.

I wish to further explore Murray’s idea of “multimedia” as a medium through which storytellers potentially discover how to tell their stories more effectively. Under this idea, Murray examines what it means for a medium to be “digitally sophisticated” which she explains through the capabilities of digital narratives such as an internet soap opera which she contends can be “sophisticated” if it provides features like “audio as an integral part of the plotline” such that readers are more interested in the story itself rather than the technology used to convey said story (67, 68). Here, I wish to expand upon Murray’s exploration of the influence of multimedia in movies, Web soaps, and books and add to her list podcasts and audiobooks that likewise employ aspects of “dramatic richness” through inclusion of technological resources such as “the wiretap of a murder threat or a political negotiation” (68). To this end, I believe that podcasts and audiobooks as sources of digital humanities and alternatives to traditional oral – person to person – storytelling provide an interesting conceptualization of what Murray terms “electronic narrative art” (68). One of my favorite podcasts which I believe assumes Murray’s standards of dramatic richness and electronic narrative art is Dr. Death – give it a listen.

Using our continuous discourse about affordances as they relate to books versus electronic literature as a launching point, I turn to Murray’s final affordance of four relating to digital environments: “Digital Environments Are Encyclopedic” (83). I found this particular affordance the most intriguing in that it further revealed to me the disconnect between academic structures of access to resources versus technological, or digital, approaches to encyclopedic accessibility. During the summer of 2019, I collaborated with a Davidson College English Professor in the process of publishing a book at Duke University Press. He wished to create for his book a digital archive as an electronic receptacle in which to provide sources cited within his book thus producing an accessible electronic platform to view and retrieve relevant materials. This experience strongly correlates to Murray’s belief in the “encyclopedic capacity of the computer” to grant readers access “from any point on the globe” (84). However, ideas about the accessibility of materials in relation to the competitive nature of humanities academia and the way that competitive – and almost capitalistic – attitude interacts with digital environments lingers with me because while many more resources are available to users through the internet a strong disconnect remains between the prestige seeking egos of academic scholars who wish to make exclusive their work and the highly collaborative and open-access spaces of digital humanities and computer science communities at large. Nevertheless, as I learned through my research last summer, Davidson College professors are working to make smoother the intersection between technology and academic humanities.

Lastly, I leave readers with a moment in Murray’s work I continue to muse over. She writes, “the encyclopedic capacity of the computer can distract us from asking why things work the way they do and why we are being asked to play one role rather than another” (89). It is important to remember that games such as SimCity that simulate life, are in fact not modeled based on real life but rather certain perspectives on it. Thus, the conflation of the game simulation and real experience I believe Murray claims can be dangerous.

In Janet Murray’s article, Hamlet on the Holodeck, she talks about the different characteristics of electronic literature and what makes it unique compared to traditional literature. She explains how these four characteristics come together to make the literature both interactive and immersive. She uses Zork as an example as the game allows for the player to enter commands to change where the story is heading through their decisions and how Zork paints a narrative landscape through the descriptions of the area in the game without using any graphics. The point Murray brings up on how immersive electronic literature through it being participatory is very important with what makes electronic literature so appealing. It allows the reader to be a part of the story in a way most books can not, as the reader can make decisions and see how those decisions in turn affect the story. It also allows for the reader to feel like they are the main character of the story, which in turn makes the reader become more immersed in the story and care a lot more about in which direction they take the story. Another interesting point brought up is how the encyclopedic nature of interactive literature distracts us from the sets of rules that guide our decisions in these works. I’ve never really seen it as a problem that interactive literature guides you in a certain direction with your decisions within the work as it makes most sense with how the story is going, but it is interesting to think about how the lack of freedom to go in whatever direction you want with certain simulation games, in particular, is masked by the seemingly endless amount of options presented to you in line with the set story. However, I still do not think the encyclopedic nature of electronic literature is a handicap as Murray suggests, as I think it allows for people to have more content and more possibilities to explore thanks to the encyclopedic nature of electronic literature.

Janet Murray characterizes digital environments using several properties in her article Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. These electronic spaces act as infinite expanses for free expression due to their interactive and immersive qualities. As a computer scientist, many of Murray’s examples sounded familiar to innovations in deep learning and language processing about which I have heard. Examples of unconventional, electronic works that Murray and Dr. Sample have showcased are often feats of cutting-edge computer science.

The ELIZA program, in particular, interested me because it bridged the gap between computers and humans and integrates computers as functional “members” of society. Similarly, the IBM Watson computer can interpret human questions and search for answers online in record time. I saw IBM Watson play Jeopardy, and I was astonished by how quickly the computer could listen to Alex Trebek and translate his voice into something understandable to a computer. In an internship I had last summer, a mentor of mine discussed a natural language processing algorithm that “read” a doctor’s note and inserted that information into a database. This is impressive considering how notoriously sloppy doctors’ handwriting is. These examples of language processing are critical advancements in the digital world and unlock a whole new way in which we interact with games, literary works, and business projects.

Today’s electronic literature reminds me a lot of modern abstract art. There are no rules or conventions with abstract art; there are experiments and unlimited styles. The user/viewer’s interpretations or decisions are incredibly valuable in the meaning of the work, like with the Zork game or choose your own adventure novels. With the rise of technology and the wide variety of current digital environments, it begs the question if there any boundaries or limitations to digitized spaces. Murray argues that digital narrative holds “new beauty and new truths about ourselves and the world,” so as long as we continue to push the boundaries of English, computer science, and digital studies, our digital world will have unlimited potential.

In the first chapter of his book, Electronic Literature, Scott Rettberg discusses the genres of electronic literature. Using arguments from both Tzvetan Todorov and Jaques Derrida, he comes to the conclusion that genre, in the case of traditional literature, is a set of guidelines and norms that identify and classify works. He goes on to argue that electronic literature is difficult to place into these categories because it has “cycles of creation that move at the speed of technological change” (Rettberg, 9). One of the reasons that this genre is so hard to define is because technology has a completely separate set of affordances that the traditional book does.

In her article, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet H. Murray elaborates on these affordances. She largely focuses on discussing hypertext games, specifically Zork, which exemplifies many of these affordances. Zork is an interactive game where players move through a dungeon environment slaying trolls and solving puzzles. Zork demonstrates three of the four affordances that she identifies: digital environments are participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. The final affordance being digital environments are procedural. All of these affordances succeed in making Zork, and other forms of digital literature, both interactive and immersive in a different ways from printed literature.

I agree with Rettberg that it is too difficult to try and confine the hybrid, unwieldy body of electronic literature into formalized genres like traditional literature. Because of their complicated, multi-media features, categorizing these works by only one criterion or set of norms is not sufficient. While traditional literature certainly has affordances that make it ideal for certain things, the technology used to create electronic literature is able to create vastly more varied and multi-faceted forms of literature. Further, at the end of her article, Murray discusses how much of today’s electronic literature is a form of experimentation. Much like the refinement of film that she discusses previously, electronic literature is still in the early stages and only through time and experimentation will “narrative art… come into its own expressive form” (Murray, 93). I believe that only once electronic literature is fully established can we begin to label and define its “genres.”