Jay David Bolter

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Jay David Bolter (born August 17, 1951) is the Wesley Chair of New Media and a professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His areas of study include the evolution of media, the use of technology in education, and the role of computers in the writing process. More recently, he has conducted research in the area of augmented reality and mixed media. Bolter collaborates with researchers in the Augmented Environments Lab, co-directed with Blair MacIntyre, to create apps for entertainment, cultural heritage and education for smart phones and tablets. This supports his theory regarding remediation where he discusses "all media functions as remediators and that remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well" (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 55).

Contents

Biography

Bolter received his B.A. degree in Greek from Trinity College, in the University of Toronto, in 1973. In 1977 and 1978 he received his Ph.D. in Classics and an M.S. in Computer Science, both from the University of North Carolina.

Bolter received prominent fellowships at Yale University, Cornell University, University of Göttingen, and with the American Council of Learned Societies.

From 1979 until 1991, Bolter held various faculty positions at the University of North Carolina. In 1991 he moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he remains today. [1]

Storyspace

Along with John B. Smith and Michael Joyce, Bolter co-created Storyspace, a software program for creating, editing, and displaying hypertext fiction. It was developed to support hypertext fiction in particular, although it can also be used for organizing and writing fiction and non-fiction intended for print. [1] Although always credited as a coauthor of Storyspace with Joyce and Bolter, Smith wanted to clarify in an interview that he wasn’t involved in the development of either TALETELLER (which was a precursor to Storyspace) or Storyspace — but that he made more of an intellectual contribution insofar as "there was a sort of cloud of ideas that we were all drawing on in the discussions we’d have in this research entity at UNC, Textlab" [2]

Some of the notable hypertext fictions created in Storyspace include: Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story , Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl .

Bolter has used Storyspace to revise several of his own books. More importantly, Storyspace provides facilities for writing and editing, which includes a map of the structure of the links, making it accessible for new users. Storyspace is currently being developed by Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems. [3]

Trivia

Brian Eno has referred to Bolter as "the new Gutenberg." [4]

Bolter states in Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print that "Hypertext in all its electronic forms — the World Wide Web as well as the many stand-alone systems — is the remediation of print". [5]

Jay David Bolter and his writing partner, Richard Grusin, make the claim in their text Remediation: Understanding New Media, " At this point, all mediation is remediation." [6]

Select works

See also

Related Research Articles

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Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.

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Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.

<i>afternoon, a story</i> Hypertext fiction by Michael Joyce

afternoon, a story, spelled with a lowercase 'a', is a work of electronic literature written in 1987 by American author Michael Joyce. It was published by Eastgate Systems in 1990 and is known as one of the first works of hypertext fiction.

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<i>Patchwork Girl</i> (hypertext) Work of electronic literature by Shelley Jackson

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Yellowlees Douglas</span>

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Eastgate Systems is a hypertext publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts.

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Storyspace is a software program for creating, editing, and reading hypertext fiction. It can also be used for writing and organizing fiction and non-fiction intended for print. Maintained and distributed by Eastgate Systems, the software is available both for Windows and Mac.

Forward Anywhere is a hypertext narrative created by writer Judy Malloy and scientist Cathy Marshall. They started working together in 1993 through the PAIR program at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Malloy and Marshall were one of the first and only pairings of two women in the program "created to bring together scientists and artists, with the hope of initiating a dialog between the two communities, and creating what PAIR program director Rich Gold described as 'new art' and 'new research.'" The pair wrote of their experience working together in the article, "Closure Was Never a Goal in this Piece", explicating their collaboration process and the connections found between each other.

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Richard Arthur Grusin is an American new media scholar and author. Grusin is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and former Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies.

The ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (Hypertext) is one of the oldest international conference series on the crossroads of Human-Computer Interaction and Information Science. The full list of conferences in the series can be found on the Association for Computing Machinery Hypertext Web page, and papers are available through the ACM Digital Library.

References

  1. 1 2 "Jay David Bolter: Short CV". Georgia Tech. Retrieved January 4, 2013.[ permanent dead link ]
  2. ↑ Barnet, Belinda (26 October 2012). "Machine Enhanced (Re)minding: the Development of Storyspace". DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly. 006 (2). Retrieved September 4, 2013.
  3. ↑ Hayles, N. Katherine (2007-01-02). "Electronic Literature: What is it?". The Electronic Literature Organization. Retrieved 2013-01-03.
  4. ↑ "Brian Eno on Writing Space". Artforum: 12. November 1992.
  5. ↑ Bolter, Jay (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Taylor & Francis. pp. 41–42. ISBN   0-8058-2918-0.
  6. ↑ Bolter, Jay David; Grusin, Richard (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press. p. 55. ISBN   978-0262522793.
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