Literatronica

Last updated June 16, 2019

The term literatronica, also literatronic (Marino, 2006), was coined by Colombian mathematician and author Juan B Gutierrez (2002) to refer to electronic literature. According to Gutierrez (2006):

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from computation", "work that could only exist in the space for which it was developed/written/coded—the digital space". This means that these writings cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the text are unable to be carried over onto a printed version. The digital literature world continues to innovate print's conventions all the while challenging the boundaries between digitized literature and electronic literature. Some novels are exclusive to tablets and smartphones for the simple fact that they require a touchscreen. Digital literature tends to require a user to traverse through the literature through the digital setting, making the use of the medium part of the literary exchange. Espen J. Aarseth wrote in his book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature that "it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery".

A word that describes digital narrative, that is, narrative designed for the computer, is literatronic. It comes from the Latin word litera -letter- and the Greek word which gave birth to the word electricity, electron -Amber. Literatronic means letter that requires electricity, or by extension, letter that requires a computer. Literatronic works could not be reproduced on paper except, perhaps, as a reading path at a given moment.

”

The literary hypertext authoring system known as Literatronica was developed by Juan B Gutierrez. Instead of relying solely on static hypertext links (for the system allows these as well), it uses an AI engine to recommend the best next pages based on what readers have already read. Literatronica radically revises the 1990s notions of literary hypertext as Modernist collage to the "original" notions of Arpanet as document sharing, where speed of access was put before what Espen Aarseth calls the aporia of links. In short, he asks, is nonlinearity and disruption inherent to the medium?

Espen J. Aarseth is a figure in the fields of video game studies and electronic literature. Aarseth completed his doctorate at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Bergen. He co-founded the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, and worked there until 2003, at which time he was a full professor. He is currently Principal Researcher at the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen.

In philosophy, Aporia is a puzzle or state of puzzlement. In rhetoric, it is a useful expression of doubt.

The system addresses several of the major classic problems found with hypertext, namely, the problems of:

Readers knowing how much of a text has been read.
Readers encountering repeated pages without artistic effect.
Readers getting lost and not finding their way through the text.
Writers struggling to maintain large systems of static links.

How it works

1. Authors input their pages into the web interface.

2. Authors decide which pages should be linked with each other

3. Authors assign a numeric "distance" between connected pages. A passage which follows easily, or without much interpretive work might be a 5 while a passage that is distantly related might be a 25.

What the system does

Out of these distances, the system creates a map. To help the reader traverse the map, the system runs a shortest path algorithm to suggest paths. Because the system is dynamic, it can change paths according to the pages the reader has already encountered.

How the reader encounters it

The reader is presented with an opening page. At the bottom of the screen are titles and short teasers for n possible subsequent pages, being n a number decided by the author for each page. Percentages beside the titles of these pages indicate "narrative continuity", as the higher percentages indicate greater linkage. When there is only one subsequent page, the system merely offers a "next" button. Readers can choose any of the links; however, once a page has been read it is removed from the bullpen of choices. If readers want to go back, they can access the "map", and reset pages to "unread". This feature allows the system to show its true dynamic powers, as a system can rearrange sequence in a way that static links cannot.

The author’s experience

The system can be used by each author in any number of ways. For example, an author can assign two pages the same distance, leaving it up to the reader to choose. Or the author can rate as highly continuous two pages that have nothing to do with each other, if they want their work to present a more difficult path. Writers might also offer their links in the hopes that readers will take the path less chosen.

This system introduces a new semiotic element: the relative distance between pages. Rather than thinking in hypertext terms, which elements should be linked, the author considers levels of kinship, affinity, connection. The system reports reader activity so that authors can get a sense of what paths people are taking. In response, authors can change the distances.

Gradually the readers will cut through the grass, wear it down to just dirt, and authors can lay the concrete on top in response — assuming the author has an interest in what the readers like to do.

Related Research Articles

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set or by touching the screen. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators, which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet. The resources of the WWW may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser.

A website or Web site is a collection of related network web resources, such as web pages, multimedia content, which are typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server. Notable examples are wikipedia.org, google.com, and amazon.com.

In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference to data that the reader can follow by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. The text that is linked from is called anchor text. A software system that is used for viewing and creating hypertext is a hypertext system, and to create a hyperlink is to hyperlink. A user following hyperlinks is said to navigate or browse the hypertext.

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.

Digital poetry form of electronic literature

Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD-ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in certain cases also recorded as digital video or films, as digital holograms, on the World Wide Web or Internet, and as mobile phone apps.

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text. It is the interconnection between similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence an audience's interpretation of the text. Intertextual figures include: allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche and parody. Intertextuality is a literary device that creates an 'interrelationship between texts' and generates related understanding in separate works. These references are made to influence the reader and add layers of depth to a text, based on the readers' prior knowledge and understanding. Intertextuality is a literary discourse strategy utilised by writers in novels, poetry, theatre and even in non-written texts. Examples of intertextuality are an author's borrowing and transformation of a prior text, and a reader's referencing of one text in reading another.

Michael Joyce is a professor of English at Vassar College, New York, US. He is also an important author and critic of electronic literature.

<i>afternoon, a story</i> work of digital literature 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.

Web fiction is written work of literature available primarily or solely on the Internet. A common type of web fiction is the webserial. The term comes from old serial stories that were once published regularly in newspapers and magazines. They are also sometimes referred to as 'webcomics without pictures', although many do use images as illustrations to supplement the text.

Stuart Moulthrop is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works Victory Garden (1992), which was on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Reagan Library (1999), and Hegirascope (1995), amongst many others. Moulthrop is currently a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He also became a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999.

Experimental literature refers to written work—usually fiction or poetry—that emphasizes innovation, most especially in technique.

Cybertext is the organization of text in order to analyze the influence of the medium as an integral part of the literary dynamic, as defined by Espen Aarseth in 1997. Aarseth defined it as a type of ergodic literature.

Juan Bernardo Gutiérrez is an American mathematician and author of Colombian origin, known primarily for his theoretical and practical contributions in the field of electronic literature.

Adaptive hypermedia (AH) uses hypermedia which is adaptive according to a user model. In contrast to linear media, where all users are offered a standard series of hyperlinks, adaptive hypermedia (AH) tailors what the user is offered based on a model of the user's goals, preferences and knowledge, thus providing links or content most appropriate to the current user.

The interactive novel is a form of interactive web fiction. In an interactive novel, the reader chooses where to go next in the novel by clicking on a piece of hyperlinked text, such as a page number, a character, or a direction. While authors of traditional paper-and-ink novels have sometimes tried to give readers the random directionality offered by hypertexting, this approach was not completely feasible until the development of HTML. For a discussion of paper novels that use a branching structure, such as Choose Your Own Adventure novels, see the Wikipedia entry on gamebooks.

Deena Larsen is a new media, hypertext author. She is best known for creating structural patterns in hypermedia literature. Larsen has been working with electronic literature since the 1980s and is considered one of the pioneer artists in the field. Her work has been published in online journals such as the Iowa Review Web, Cauldron and Net, frAme, inFLECT, and Blue Moon Review. Since May 2007, the Deena Larsen Collection of early electronic literature has been housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence.

"I Have Said Nothing" is an early work of hypertext fiction written by J. Yellowlees Douglas. In 1993 it was published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext , along with “Lust” by Mary-Kim Arnold. In 1997, Norton Anthology published an online version of the work, along with Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story as part of its print publication Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction.

References

Marino, Mark. Literatronica: The next generation of hypertext authoring . WRT: Writer Response Theory. (accessed October 10, 2006).
Gutierrez, Juan B. The influence of artificial intelligence in hyperfiction: Towards the digital author. Proceedings of Literatures: From Text to Hypertext, 1st International Conference on Hypertext of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Madrid, Spain.
Gutierrez, Juan B. Literatrónica: Sobre Cómo y Porqué Crear Ficción para medos digitales (Literatronic: About how and why create fiction for digital media.) in Proceedings of the 1er Congreso del Observatorio para la Cibersociedad (1st Congress of the Observatory for the Cibersociety.) Barcelona, Spain. In Spanish.

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain and today has hundreds of millions of native speakers in the Americas and Spain. It is a global language and the world's second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese.

External links

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.