Nick Montfort
“Fire in the Library” is an article in the new Technology Review about digital archivist, documentary filmmaker, and cat impersonator Jason Scott.
“The Curse of Cow Clicker” is an article in the new Wired about game developer, ontologist, and cowpocalyptic force Ian Bogost.
Enjoy your holiday season with these fine profiles.
I recently had the chance to revisit the Gendered Conference Campaign, which is not new (it’s more than two years old) but is (unfortunately) still relevant. Without fixing blame on conference organizers, this page lists several “all-male” academic conferences (those where all the invited speakers are men) and offers useful, concrete suggestions for including women in your own conference.
I’ve gone to quite a variety of conferences and symposia, in writing, literary studies, game studies, digital media, and several flavors of computing. The gender balance has varied widely, from “looks like America” in some humanities conferences to “sausage fest” in some computing conferences. I’m pretty sure I’ve been to at least one small conference that was truly all-male – not just with all male invited speakers, but where everyone was male – and I’ve certainly been to a five-person symposium where all the participants were all men. Well, I bemoan it, and I point to those useful suggestions for allowing more women to participate. These are most useful to read before conference planning even begins, so if you are thinking of planning an event at some point in the future, give them a read.
The journal New River has a new issue, very nicely designed and with a diverse selection of work. Editors Brianna P. Stout and Christopher Linforth have five different sorts of collaborative works, by Andy Campbell and Lynda Williams; Chris Funkhouser and Amy Hufnagel; Nick Montfort and Natalia Fedorova (who translated my “Concrete Perl,” “The Two,” and “Through the Park” into Russian); Jason Nelson and several Virginia Tech collaborators; and Alan Bigelow with those readers who respond. Here’s the link to my three poems, which are short computational works that operate on the level of the letter, word or phrase, and sentence.
Here’s an announcement about a new, free hypertext authoring system from my collaborator Alex Mitchell:
> We are pleased to announce the first public release of the HypeDyn
> hypertext fiction authoring tool: http://www.partechgroup.org/hypedyn
>
> HypeDyn is a procedural hypertext fiction authoring tool for non-programmers
> who want to create text-based interactive stories that adapt to reader
> choice. HypeDyn is free to download and open source, and runs on Linux,
> MacOS and Windows. You can download HypeDyn from
> http://www.partechgroup.org/hypedyn/download.html
>
> HypeDyn was written in Kawa Scheme, http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/
>
> As part of our ongoing research, we are interested in how people use
> HypeDyn. Please let us know at hypedyn@partechgroup.org if you are using
> HypeDyn and would like to tell us about your experiences, in particular if
> you have made any changes to the code.
>
> We are also interested in having authors take part in a more detailed study.
> If you are interested in helping with this study, please read the details at
> http://www.partechgroup.org/hypedyn/study.html
>
> Note that downloading/using HypeDyn does not require participation in the study.
In the Boston area? Please join us today for the last Purple Blurb event of the semester:
Penumbra: Rich Media & Gestural Text
Samantha Gorman
Creator of Penumbra, Books of Kells, Canticle
Instructor in Performance Studies & Digital Literature, RISD
M.F.A. Brown University
Monday, December 5, 5:30 pm
MIT’s 6-120
Samantha Gorman is a writer and media artist who composes for the intersection of text, dance, performance, and digital culture. She holds an MFA and BA in Literary Arts from Brown University, where she studied poetry and writing for digital media. Penumbra, a hybrid art/literature app for the iPad created with Danny Cannizzaro, challenges the notion of a static “ebook” by carefully integrating short film, rich animation, illustration and fiction.
Sponsored by the Angus N. MacDonald Fund
As always, this Purple Blurb event is free and open to the public.