Diary of a Digital Humanist
@0. This journal is the record of a “live-posting” event organized by Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Digital Humanities and TMU Libraries’ Collaboratory as part of the Day of DH 2024 (Mon, Dec 2).
December 2, 2024
@10:00am. Around when I’ll start posting (EST)…
@10:15am. Finally getting set up. Just had a great talk with Kelly Dermody (Head of Library Information Technology Services) about my expectations for the day.
@10:45am. Didn’t realise so many people would be popping by! Was just talking about (among other things) the use of AI in creative writing with Sally Wilson (Web Services Librarian) and Fangmin Wang (Collaboratory).
@10:50am. Ostensibly, I’m suppose to be thinking about possible events for next term. To that end, I carry around with me several notebooks and jot down ideas in them as they occur to me. What I thought I’d do today was sort through, identify any likely candidates, and add them to this journal.
@11:00am. I’ve been fascinated with syllabi and how they lead you through a topic or study. In particular, the Syllabus Project but also ones like HTTPoetics.
@11:10am. HTTPoetics introduced to me the work of Canadian-British artist J. R. Carpenter and in particular her essay “A Handmade Web (2015). This is something that I’ve been focused on in recent presentations (see links to Notebook and Walk above).
@11:15am. “A Handmade Web” led me to Nick Montfort’s generative poem “Taroko Gorge” (2009). There’s probably too much to say about this poem and it’s subsequent “re-mixes” but depending on how it was presented it could cover a number of our themes from Critical Code Studies to Retro Tools.
@11:20am. I think it would be interesting to take a closer look at what it means to re-mix the poem. I would also like to think more about the poem’s ambient qualities…
@11:30am. Montfort has added the remixes to the poem’s site by authors’ names (instead of titles) and these lead me off in lots of other directions. From enjoying Mark Sample’s “Takei, George” poem variant I found that he had written a very provocative piece called “Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities” (2012) where he talks about (and challenges) “deformative scholarship”.
@11:45am. It was Naive Weekly that got me thinking about “the poetic web” (whatever that might mean) and since then I have seen more and more references to it. I should probably put together a list… For example Laurel Schwulst, who “is interested in the poetic potential of the web”, wrote in The Creative Independent an article called “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?” (2018)
@11:50am. And since we’re starting to sound a bit poetic I have to add HTTPoetics’ lovely thought, “A website is a poem that is already in everyone’s pocket, a house built from photos of other houses, a book where every chapter is another book where every chapter is another book.”
@12:00pm. I just read the transcript of a talk Nathalie Lawhead recently gave at the ALUO (Academy of Fine Arts and Design) in Ljubljana about her experiences making interactive art. Lawhead’s “Electric Zine Maker” was featured in my first Tiny Tools Tour back in November 2022.
@12:10pm. Lawhead wrote somewhere that with the “Electric Zine Maker” “you’re making art inside of someone else’s art.”
@12:15pm. To return to “Taroko Gorge”. Another re-mixer is Leonardo Flores who playfully calls his a Hackeur poem. On his blog he provides instructions to become a Hackeur as well as a “Hackeur Minifesto”.
@12:30pm. One of the distinguishing things about “Taroko Gorge” is that within Monfort’s code is the declaration that “permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.”
@12:40pm. A book to look into: Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, by C. T. Funkhouser (2007).
@12:45pm. Quick break…
@1:30pm. A book to look into: Game Poems by Jordan Magnuson (2023).
@1:45pm. A book to look into: Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023 edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort (2024).
@1:50pm. Another book to look into: The Stuff Games Are Made Of by Pippin Barr (2023).
@2:00pm. “Traces of the trAce Online Writing Centre 1995-2005” by J. R. Carpenter and a pdf of Commemoration of Ten Years of Artistic Innovation at trAce (2005).
@2:30pm. This is a group I’d like to spend more time looking into: The Robida Collective.
@2:35pm. “From the Digital to the Bookbound” an essay by J. R. Carpenter on the work of Lori Emerson. There’s lots of good material around Emerson! Just to name one of them – “Other Networks“.
@3:00pm. Jason Boyd (Director of the CDH) has actually been here for awhile. We’ve been talking about the possibilities of teaching minimal web design – maybe part presentation, part workshop. Returning the making of websites to the basics of html and css (but with a kind of Gymnopédie sensibility).
@3:15pm. Cristina Pietropaolo (Collaboratory) would like to contribute Cameron’s World “a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet.”
@3:30pm. Essay by N. Katherine Hayles “Literary Texts as Cognitive Assemblages: The Case of Electronic Literature” (2018).
@3:35pm. Been talking so much with Cristina and Jason about “locative sound” haven’t been able to do much more than post a bunch of links.
@4:00pm. Well, I was able to extract only a small portion of my rambling notes but it seems as if there is plenty of material to go through anyway! Signing off…