Authors read & discuss their D1G1T4L WR1T1NG at MIT

All events are free and open to the public

Purple Blurb started in Fall 2007, when four events were held monthly in the cozy Trope Tank, in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Building 14. In Spring 2009 the series was on hiatus.

Fall 2009 Lineup: Wardrip-Fruin, Flanagan, Harrell, Bers

Once again, Purple Blurb offers readings and presentations on digital writing by practitioners of digital writing. All events are at MIT in room 14E-310, Mondays at 6pm. All events are free and open to the public. The Purple Blurb series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund and Writing and Humanistic Studies.

September 14 — Noah Wardrip-Fruin is author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (MIT Press, 2009), co-creator of Screen (among other works of digital writing), and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

November 2 — Mary Flanagan is author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press, 2009), creator of [giantJoystick], and author of [theHouse] (among other digital writing works). She is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth.

November 16 — D. Fox Harrell is the creator of the GRIOT system for computational narrative and author of several works in this system, including Loss, Undersea and The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs. He is assistant professor of digital media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

November 30 — Marina Bers is author of Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2007) and creator of the system Zora. She is associate professor in the Department of Child Development and adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at Tufts University.

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As far as Purple Blurb is concerned, digital writing includes any work where computation and digital media intersect with writing practices, including creative and nonfiction ones. For some other ideas, see trAce's article on "digital writing," the definitions of "electronic literature" from the Electronic Literature Organization and from Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, and Brian Kim Stefans's discussion of the term "electronic writing."

We have a mailing list that is used for announcements of each semester's schedule and each event. You are welcome to add yourself to it.

Thanks to the MIT Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies for support of this event and thanks for the publicity and encouragement from the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, the Electronic Literature Organization, and Turbulence.

Past Purple Blurb Events

Special July 15, 2009 Event: Rafael Pérez y Pérez

The Purple Blurb series offers a second special summer talk by a leading researcher in creative text generation. Rafael Pérez y Pérez will speak on ...

MEXICA: A Computer Model for Plot Generation of Prehispanic Stories

MEXICA is a computer model that generates plots for short stories about the Mexicas, the old inhabitants of what today is México City, based on the engagement-reflection cognitive account of writing. During engagement MEXICA generates material guided by content and rhetorical constraints, avoiding the use of explicit characters' goals or story-structures. During reflection the system breaks impasses, evaluates the novelty and interestingness of the story in progress and verifies that coherence requirements are satisfied. In this talk I will explain the main characteristics of the system, I will show how emotions are employed to progress a story in a coherent way and generate novel situations, and how the dramatic tension of the story in progress might be employed to evaluate its interestingness. I will present results showing how story generation is affected by various model parameters and I will compare MEXICA with other story-generators programs. Finally, I will mention how we are employing MEXICA as starting point for new research projects.

Pérez y Pérez will speak on Wednesday July 15, 6pm-7pm, at MIT in room 14E-310. This is in the same location as Pablo Gervás's talk in May, and just one more floor up the stairs from the Trope Tank, where other Purple Blurb events were located. The talk is (as with all Purple Blurb presentations) open to the public.

Rafael Pérez y Pérez earned a BSc. in Electronics and Computers at Universidad Iberoamericana in México City, a MSc. in Knowledge Based Systems and a DPhil. in Artificial Intelligence at Sussex University in England. His research has focused on computer models of creativity. He and his students have developed programs that write short stories, compose music, and solve geometry problems, among other things. In 2006 he organised the Mexican Creativity, Cognition and Computers research group (MCCC) which aims to gather together a multidisciplinary group of researchers and students interested in computational creativity. He has published different papers in the area and has participated as a PC member and co-chair in international events related to computational creativity. Currently he is a researcher and lecturer at The Autonomous Metropolitan University (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana or UAM) in México City and an invited Lecturer in the MSc and PhD programs in Computer Science at The National Autonomous University of México (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México or UNAM).

Special May 20, 2009 Event

The Purple Blurb series offers a special talk by a leading European researcher in creative text generation.

Pablo Gervás works as associate professor (profesor titular de universidad) at the Departamento de Ingeniería del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is the director of the NIL research group and also of the Instituto de Tecnología del Conocimiento.

His research is on processing natural language input, generating natural language output, building resources for related tasks, and generating stories. In the area of creative text generation, he has done work on automatically generating metaphors, formal poetry, and short films.

He will speak on Wednesday May 20, 6pm-7pm, at MIT in room 14E-310. For those who have come to previous Purple Blurb events in the Trope Tank, this is just one more floor up the stairs. The talk is (as with all Purple Blurb presentations) open to the public, and (as with all Purple Blurb presentations so far) will be in English.

Fall 2008

Steve Meretzky on writing and computer games (32-141)

October 6, 2008 (Monday) 6pm.
Meretzky, an alumnus of MIT, was the most prolific author at the most successful interactive fiction company, Infocom. The work he did there included writing Planetfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos as well as collaborating with Douglas Adams to develop The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Meretzky has worked at Legend Entertainment, Boffo Games, and WorldWinner. He is currently at Blue Fang Games. Note that this event is in the Stata Center, not the Trope Tank.

Jesper Juul on developing video games to develop video game theory (14N-233)

October 27, 2008 (Monday) 6pm.
Juul is a video game theorist and author of Half Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (MIT Press, 2006). He is also a video game developer, and will discuss using lessons from developing online and casual games to inform work with video game theory (and vice versa). Juul is currently a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies; he works at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

Jason Scott on the blog ASCII and textfiles.com (14N-233)

November 17, 2008 (Monday) 6pm.
Scott is a documentary filmmaker whose work includes BBS: The Documentary and a film about interactive fiction, Get Lamp, which is now in post-production. In addition to making films, Scott maintains the main archive of textfiles (plain-text documents) as they appeared on computer bulletin board systems in the 1980s and early 1990s. He also blogs about digital media topics on ASCII.

Spring 2008

Day of Interactive Fiction!

January 29, 2008 (Tuesday) Group play sessions started on the hour from 1pm–6pm - come for whatever of the time you would like to. There will be a Q&A with authors Liza Daly, Andrew Plotkin and Dan Schmidt from 6pm–7pm.

1pm-2pm For a Change, by Dan Schmidt
2pm-3pm Dinner with Andre, by Liza Daly
3pm-4pm A Mind Forever Voyaging, by Steve Meretzky
4pm-5pm Mindwheel, by Robert Pinsky
5pm-6pm Delightful Wallpaper, by Andrew Plotkin
6pm-7pm Q&A with Liza Daly, Andrew Plotkin, and Dan Schmidt

Aya Karpinska presented Lala and other work

February 20, 2008 (Wednesday) 6pm-7pm. Karpinska is an electronic writing fellow in Brown University's Literary Arts program.

Ben Miller presented Soldier's Story Archive

March 11, 2008 (Tuesday) 6pm-7pm. Miller is a lecturer in the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies.

Beth Coleman presented Boba Fett's Day Off

April 8, 2008 (Tuesday) 6pm-7pm. Coleman is an assistant professor in the MIT programs in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies.

Daniel Howe presented text.curtain and other work

April 29, 2008 (Tuesday) 6pm-7pm. Howe is a computer science doctoral student at the NYU Media Research Lab.

Fall 2007

Robert Kendall read from and discussed Pieces.

September 18, 2007. Kendall has been creating interactive multimedia poetry since 1990. He has led the Connection Muse and the Electronic Literature Directory projects, and his work includes Clues, Faith, and Logozoa.

Vika Zafrin read from and discussed RolandHT.

October 16, 2007. Zafrin (PhD in Humanities Computing, Brown University, 2007) studies people by way of the stories we tell to ourselves and each other on and off the net.

Barbara Barry told stories from her ongoing project One Degree.

November 13, 2007. Barry, who earned her PhD from the MIT Media Lab working on Mindful Documentary, studies the history and practice of documentary, story understanding in artificial intelligence, and intelligent tutoring systems for reflective practice.

Andrew Plotkin described and discussed a writing game for Myst Online.

December 4, 2007. Plotkin, also known as Zarf, is an interactive fiction author and game maker who created A Change in the Weather, So Far, Spider and Web, Shade, The Dreamhold, and Delightful Wallpaper as well as System's Twilight and Capture the Flag with Stuff.

  The writing-game page has the original concept post, a rule summary, and a partial example game (with me playing both sides). The incomplete play-test with players, Zarf and Pryftan, and with only three moves completed, nothing resolved. The Myst Online official site, managed by Cyan Worlds. The screen saver running before the presentation. And finally, a nearly-completed (as of December 10) journal game — in Russian.

Digital Writing Series Elsewhere

MACHINE at the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House, Philadelphia, PA, 2004-present

HyperText: Explorations in Electronic Literature at UCLA's Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2003-2004

The Electronic Literature Speaker Series at Richard Stockton College, Pomona, NJ, 2004

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