Paper Electronic Literature

An Archaeology of Born-Digital Materials

Richard Hughes Gibson

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781625346018, 9781625346001
• eBook ISBN: 9781613768778
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The field of electronic literature has a familiar catchphrase, "You can't do it on paper." But the field has in fact never gone paperless. Reaching back to early experiments with digital writing in the mainframe era and then moving through the personal computer and Internet revolutions, this book traces the changing forms of paper on which e-lit artists have drawn, including continuous paper, documentation, disk sleeves, packaging, and even artists' books.

Paper Electronic Literature attests that digital literature's old media elements have much to teach us about the cultural and physical conditions in which we compute; the creativity that new media artists have shown in their dealings with old media; and the distinctively electronic issues that confront digital artists. Moving between avant-garde works and popular ones, fiction writing and poetry generation, Richard Hughes Gibson reveals the diverse ways in which paper has served as a component within electronic literature, particularly in facilitating interactive experiences for users. This important study develops a new critical paradigm for appreciating the multifaceted material innovation that has long marked digital literature.

Chapter 1

Material Reading

Three Codes, Four Dimensions, and Three Strata

The first question asked by beginning readers of electronic literature—and even experienced readers encountering a new text—is “how do I read this?” For electronic literature, this question is not only hermeneutic—it refers to not simply to how readers might encounter the meaning, style, themes, and language of the work but also to how readers can operate the text-machine itself.

—Scott Rettberg, Electronic Literature (2019)

[W]e need to make room for the spatially relational study of the book, of how the printed book and the computer (but also handwriting, speech, video, sculpture, theater, and a host of other media) have existed and continue to exist side by side, with, as Goethe put it, “their joints touching quite naturally in secret.” We need to account for what Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen has called “mixed reality,” not the way some single medium might absorb and consume us, but the way we incorporate various media into our interactions with and understanding of the world.

—Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books (2009)

To illustrate the point being made about e-lit in the first epigraph, I invite you to consider a scene related in the opening chapter of Jessica Pressman, Mark Marino, and Jeremy Douglass’s Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope (2015). Here Pressman recounts a familiar vignette from the office lives of the students and practitioners of e-lit—a conversation with colleagues who are unacquainted with the genre:

“What is it?”

I turned the screen toward them and watched their eyes scan the rows of horizontal squares, each containing miniature bursts of text, color, and design.

“It visualizes nine minutes of animation from Project for Tachistoscope—a work of electronic literature that I’m writing about. I’ve been analyzing that work for months, reading it over and over, but I’ve never seen it like this!”

A moment of silence passed.

One finally asked, his voice registering sincere interest, “What does it mean? How do you read it?”

The other scoffed, “It’s just a pretty picture. You can’t read it.”

I let out a small sigh, turned my attention back to the screen, and replied, “Depends on what you mean by ‘read.’”1

The account thus ends in deflation, the scoffer triumphing over the curious colleague in this psychomachia-like scene. Pressman’s colleagues are experiencing exactly the disorientation that Rettberg describes in his epigraph: they are wondering not just how to interpret the work but also, in a far more basic sense, how to read it. The conversation cuts off before Pressman has a chance to explain what she means by read and what she and her fellow authors find intriguing about the piece.

On its own, the anecdote might seem to be merely one more failed conversation about (or failed conversion to) e-lit. Within the wider scope of Reading Project, however, the colleagues’ questions—“What is it?” “What does it mean?” “How do you read it?”—do not seem at all naïve. Again, as Rettberg notes, such questions are live ones for professional critics, and that is just what we are shown in Reading Project. The book relates the authors’ process of wrestling with not just Project for Tachistoscope but also the problem of developing a method for coming to grips with its multiplicity of elements—verbal, visual, auditory—and the conscious and subconscious effects of those diverse elements. (Remember that a tachistoscope flashes images so quickly that many of them may not be consciously registered by the reader.) The initial impetus to discussion in the episode isn’t the work itself. The catalyst is a visualization of the work, a graphic representation of its elements—a montage—created by Douglass, which has been necessitated by the rapid-fire nature of Poundstone’s creation. The work is a digital simulation of the brisk flipping of a tachistoscope, presenting “a high-speed, one-word-at-a-time text animation accompanied by frenetic visual and aural effects.”2 The montage is a means to slow the display down, thereby allowing the critics to see all of the stimuli acting upon the reader at any given moment.

For these professional critics, reading is anything but a given. It is, as their book’s title plainly states, a project that they undertake with the help of distant analytic techniques unrecognizable to Pressman’s colleagues as reading. The tragedy of the scene is that these colleagues can’t see that this electronic experience opens up fresh ways of reflecting on the very nature of reading, an issue that has been made all the more pressing by “our changing media landscape.”3

While Pressman’s anecdote emphasizes new media’s potential to trouble simplistic notions of reading (obviously a concern in this book, too, given its subject matter), her concluding remark—“Depends on what you mean by ‘read’”—illustrates a broader disciplinary trend. Reading practices have been a growth industry in literary studies in the current century. Notable publications have touted the benefits of “surface reading,” “reparative reading,” “recuperative reading,” “not reading,” “unreading,” “uncritical reading,” “thin, flat reading,” “fast reading,” “new formalist reading,” “phenomenal reading,” “just reading,” and “post-critical reading,” among other varieties.4 (Not to be outdone, the literary critic and book historian Leah Price has even taken aim at “the primacy of reading” itself in understanding the meaning and functions of books.)5 These new entrants and renovations of old standbys have given scholars fresh occasion to reconsider the late twentieth century’s practices of “symptomatic reading” (as exemplified by Marxist readings), “deconstructive reading,” and “suspicious reading.” Notable for present purposes is the fact that these various readings are almost always broached in terms of print literature. “How do you read it?” is thus not a question limited to the e-lit camp: it is seemingly on everyone’s lips and typing fingertips.

Paper electronic literature is a posterchild for our times because it raises questions about reading from two directions: digital and print. How does one read born-digital literary works that hinge on print components? How does one handle print bits whose meanings emerge within digital environments? This chapter lays out my proposal for a reading practice that hones in on these hybrid works’ abilities to play in many registers simultaneously. For they draw on the signifying powers of not only words but also the materialities of their component media, whether composed of wood pulp and glue or aluminum, plastic, and rare earth elements. My object is to explore the diverse sources of meaning that paper e-lit works possess rather than to establish in some would-be definitive sense what my selected works mean. In other words, the meaning-making process is the target of my reading rather than the meaning of the works that I hold up for examination.

As I mentioned in the introduction, I call this practice material reading. I’m not the first to use this expression: it also appears, for example, in historical studies of the book that pay close attention to works’ physical properties.6 Given my own sizable investment in bibliography, I see the term as all the richer because of its prior use in these ways. Underlying many of them, as well as my own, is Jerome McGann’s notion of a materialist hermeneutics, an interpretive practice that reads a book’s physique along with its language (issues discussed in detail later in this chapter). But my sense of material reading is differentiated from previous uses because of my concern for new media. The nature of digital materiality, as I hinted in my remarks on Deadline in the introduction, has been a matter of much theoretical reflection about materiality in general during the past decade, and my material reading practice seeks to reap the benefits of this theorizing.

Consider, for example, Matthew Kirschenbaum’s notion of machine reading related in his book Mechanisms (2008). The term appears at the outset of his grammatological inspection of the hard drive: “Here I propose a close reading, a reading both close to and of a piece with the machine—a machine reading whose object is not text but a mechanism or device” (his italics).7 Kirschenbaum is thus not using the notion in the now familiar sense of a machine’s work of reading. He would describe a critic’s work of reading a machine with the closeness that we have long given to reading texts. My material reading follows Kirschenbaum’s example in treating as potential objects of close reading not just conspicuous physical data (for instance, hardware) but the swirling processes, operations, interactions, and mechanisms that occur within hybrid media systems. In this book, my attention will not, for the most part, fall on the micro- or nanoscopic events that interest Kirschenbaum in Mechanisms. Rather, my concerns are often in plain view to the human eye, at the level in which the user moves between paper and digital media. My point is that within paper e-lit works not only the paper and digital devices but the action of moving between media can be read closely.

My practice of material reading proceeds through what we might call a “ten-point inspection plan.” This represents the sum of three smaller figures—three codes, four dimensions, and three strata. As these concepts provide the framework for my analysis in the chapters that follow, I will spend the remainder of this one carefully working them out. In each case, I begin with the figure’s theoretical underpinnings—derived from media archeology, bibliography, and (e-)literary criticism—before offering exemplary applications of the concepts in brief readings of two works: Nick Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge” (2009), a computer-generated poem; and Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Paper and Screen (2010), a collection of visual poems realized through augmented reality software.

To begin, though, I want to offer a quick rundown of the figures, briefly casting a vision of the whole before I scrutinize the parts. The first figure is paper e-lit’s triply coded character, a phrase that builds on McGann’s notion of linguistic and bibliographical codes: the messages encoded in words and in the physical media in which they are inscribed. Paper e-lit also employs a third code source that McGann’s original formulation does not incorporate: the computer. Within e-lit works, computers, too, are media that possess “symbolic and signifying dimensions” exploitable by artists. However, paper e-lit is not simply an object or set of objects. It is also a field of relations, exchanges, intersections. As I discussed in the introduction, Blank’s crime dossier not only served aesthetic purposes but was also a load-bearing element within a machine for inputting and extracting text, and its position within the system reveals the characteristics—the affordances and limitations—of the other parts.

The second figure is the four dimensions, the ecological qualities of paper e-lit works. To map these dimensions, I draw from the discourse that theorists have developed to describe the materiality of digital objects, particularly the ideas of Kirschenbaum, Johanna Drucker, and Hayles. This figure ranges widely, taking into account the specific computing systems for which e-lit works have been designed, the formal environments that those systems project, the distribution of tasks among the components of works (digital and paper), and the user’s roles in activating and/or overseeing the contributions of the various parts. The second figure fills out the first, examining how the coded components inform each other’s roles as well as the mental and physical labor involved in setting the parts in motion and making sense of their messages.

The third figure attempts to bring a degree of order to paper’s varied career within electronic literature by tracking major changes to the physical and cultural conditions in which e-lit artists have worked with paper over time. I propose that we can loosely sort paper’s electronic literary history—from e-lit’s origins in the 1950s to our current decade—into three strata by focusing on momentous shifts in paper’s physical or notional position within the conditions of computing (such as the displacement of paper-based interfaces by monitors in the late 1970s and early 1980s). The third figure thereby rounds out the other two. For, of course, how creators went about writing these works and users went about reading them were actions shaped by the conditions in which they computed.

Three Codes

We are now more than thirty years removed from D. F. McKenzie’s pronouncement that the “computer has changed its nature from blackboard to book” and so entered the domain of bibliography, at least the version of bibliography—as the “sociology of texts”—that McKenzie theorized in his famous Panizzi lectures.8 My book builds on McKenzie’s insight, bringing the bibliographer’s attention—to texts’ compositions, transmissions, and receptions—to new media artifacts. Yet it also argues that works of paper e-lit are not simply occasions to translate the paper-based methods of bibliography into new media. Paper e-lit works are themselves in part (and, in some cases, in many parts) paper—whether loose leaves, bound books, or other forms. I thus advance a counterintuitive methodological argument: that bibliographical analysis of “old” media belongs among the tools of e-lit criticism.

I propose McGann’s concept of bibliographical coding as the starting point for this work. The term debuted in The Textual Condition (1991), one of the foundational texts of modern bibliography. The book brought to a head McGann’s critique of textual theories that portray linguistic signifiers as a literary work’s sole “locus of meaning.” McGann argued (as McKenzie had done a few years earlier) that “symbolic and signifying dimensions” reside in a literary work’s “physical medium through which (or rather as which) the linguistic text is embodied.” The Textual Condition thus argues for, and itself models, a materialist hermeneutics, whose aim is to comprehend the roles that texts’ physical qualities play in generating meaning. McGann did not disparage the study of the words on the page, what he now labeled the “linguistic code.” His point was that the properties of the page—the typeface, the quality of the impression, the color of the ink—also had meanings that readers not only could but have interpreted, and even now do interpret. Both codes are the purview of the materialist interpreter. Take up a medieval manuscript or an illuminated book by William Blake, McGann notes, and this point will be obvious. In such cases, “the physique of the ‘document’” has been given a clear “aesthetic function, has been made to play a part in the ‘literary work.’” Yet McGann also urges readers to look beyond such rarefied artifacts. Every book, he would have us see, is bibliographically coded, which is to say that every book is covered with signifiers. As the book historians Michele Levy and Tom Mole explain, “The ‘bibliographic [sic] code’ is composed of the messages sent by the paper the book is printed on, the way it’s bound, its size, the appearance of the dust jacket, and so on.”9

How is this concept relevant to born-digital literature? Consider the two examples that I have mentioned: Nick Montfort’s computer-generated poem, “Taroko Gorge”; and Between Paper and Screen, a collection of visual poems by the poet Amaranth Borsuk and her partner (in life and sometimes art), the app developer Brad Bouse. “Taroko Gorge” is now largely known as a webpage, but that is, in fact, its second mode of distribution. It appeared first in 2009 as a printout of Python code needed to execute the poem and, according to Montfort, was “intended as a completed work” in that form.10 Using the dot-matrix printer in his office at the Massachusetts Technology, Montfort printed ten copies, which he then signed, numbered, and mailed to readers ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Part IFirst Stratum: Early Computing
• Part IISecond Stratum: Personal Computing
• Part IIIThird Stratum: Internet Age
• Notes
• Index