Week Five:
New Information Systems = New Literary Genres

 

Writing Employs Information Technologies


Printed Documents Are Products of Information Technologies

 

A Literary Genre Based On The Post Office:
The Letter Novel

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded is a novel by Samuel Richardson, first published in 1740. The name, "Pamela", now a popular forename in English-speaking countries, was invented by Richardson. The novel is in epistolary form, consisting of letters and a diary.
An epistolary novel is a literary technique in which a novel is composed as a series of letters. The epistolary novel slowly fell out of use in the 19th century, especially as Jane Austen popularized techniques of the omniscient narrator.


 

A Literary Genre Based On The Electronic Post Office:
The E-Mail Novel

Corporate e-mail message goes astray. Two young strangers flirt in cyberspace. They agree to meet. An assault ensues. And a mystery built on digital clues is born.

"Intimacies" is a digital epistolary novel, or DEN. The plot of "Intimacies" is based on "Pamela," the 18th-century work by Samuel Richardson that is one of Western literature's first epistolary novels. The story unfolds through e-mail messages, instant-message conversations and Web sites, all within a window generated by the DEN software; the program can be downloaded free from www.greatamericannovel.com. Call Me E-Mail: The Novel Unfolds Digitally By Adam Baer New York Times, April 15, 2004

 

The Development of Information Technology Picks Up Speed

  • 1800 - Stanhope tests iron printing press
  • 1803 - Cylindrical paper-making machine produces cheap paper
  • 1804 - First book printed by stereotype process
  • 1811 - Steam-powered cylindrical printing press
  • 1822 - Composing machine for setting type
  • 1832 - Penny Weeklies build large circulations
  • 1836 - Dickens' Pickwick Papers invents serial publication

For the first time in the world's history, there are a lot of books.

In his authoritative study, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (1978), Robert L. Patten points to the interrelated effects that Pickwick Papers had upon author, publisher, and audience. According to Patten, although Sketches by Boz
inaugurated Dickens's career, Pickwick made it. Dickens's first continuous fiction -- many would deny that it is a novel -- ushered in the age of the novel, which critics looking backward from the perspective of the eighties and nineties thought either the glory or the curse of the Victorian era. The success of the flimsy shilling parts, issued in green wrappers once each month from April 1836 to November 1837, was unprecedented in the history of literature. The lion's share of credit for that success has always, and properly, gone to the pseudonymous "Boz," a twenty-four-year-old shorthand writer with a quick eye, a fluent pen, and an inexhaustible, buoyant, and loving imagination. Critics from 1836 onwards have tended to slight the part played in the runaway reception of the book by its unusual format; yet subsequent to Dickens's success with Pickwick, parts publication became for thirty years a chief means of democratizing and enormously expanding the Victorian book-reading and book-buying public.
Dickens and his publishers discovered the potential of serial publication virtually by accident. Even though in the half century after Pickwick most of the novels appeared "compact in three separate and individual volumes" as Mr. Omer describes David Copperfield's maiden effort, and were not bought but borrowed from the great circulating libraries like Mudie's and W. H. Smith's, serial publication opened up a new reading and buying public that subsequent publishers and formats did then exploit in a variety of ways. Furthermore, serial publication yielded profits hitherto thought impossible for any publisher or author, and transformed Dickens, Chapman, and Hall from minor figures in Victorian letters to titans. What forces made that format suddenly possible, and how the changes in publishing converged in 1836 and were connected by two shrewd, courageous, and lucky booksellers with the one man who could write letterpress for all the people, needs to be understood more fully than it has been so far. The prodigious success of Pickwick in parts signals a revolution in publishing.

 

21st Century Serial Publication:
Cell Phone Novel

As a critically acclaimed writer of dense, doorstop-size novels, Qian Fuzhang said he had finally developed a guilty conscience.

Moreover, as a writer in a country that tends not to pay its authors very well, he faced a challenge immediately familiar to writers everywhere: how to make a living cranking out prose.

Now, at 42, the author, whose real name is He Xingnian, and whose highly inventive, imagery-laden work has earned him comparisons here to Gabriel García Márquez, thinks he has found a solution to both problems.

The author's answer, titled "Out of the Fortress," showed up on tens of thousands of mobile telephone screens on Friday. It is the text-message novel, a new literary genre for the harried masses in a society that seems to be redefining what it means to be harried.

Weighing in at a mere 4,200 characters, "Out of the Fortress" is like a marriage of haiku and Hemingway, and will be published for its audience of cellphone readers at a bite-size, 70 characters at a time - including spaces and punctuation marks - in two daily installments.

"The Novel's Latest Version Pops Onto China's Cellphones" New York Times, September 11, 2004

 

21st Century Scholarly Journal:
e-print archive

Paul Ginsparg    arXiv.org e-Print archive"The first database, hep-th (for High Energy Physics -- Theory), was started in August of '91 and was intended for usage by a small subcommunity of less than 200 physicists, then working on a so-called "matrix model" approach to studying string theory and two dimensional gravity. Within a few months, the original hep-th had quickly expanded in its scope to over 1000 users, and after little more than three years now has over 3600 users. More significantly, there are numerous other physics databases now in operation that currently serve over 25,000 physicists and typically process more than 40,000 electronic transactions per day (i.e. as of 10/94)." 


To summarize, to date we've learned:

- The exponential increase in electronic networking usage has 
	opened new possibilities for formal and informal communication 
	of research information. 
- For some fields of physics, the on-line electronic archives 
	immediately became the primary means of communicating ongoing 
	research information, with conventional journals entirely 
	supplanted in this role. Researchers will voluntarily subscribe 
	and make aggressive use of these systems which will continue to 
	grow rapidly. The current levels of technology and network 
	connectivity are adequate to support these systems, and continue 
	to improve. 
- For some fields of physics, open (i.e. unrefereed) distribution 
	of research can work well and has advantages for researchers 
	both in developed and undeveloped-countries
Required reading: Winners and Losers in the Global Research Village by Paul Ginsparg

 

21st Century Publisher:
The writer lui-meme

"Riding the Bullet," a 66-page King ghost story, was made available at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday only on the Internet. Web sites including Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com were swamped with requests, making downloading it nearly impossible
"Riding the Bullet," written shortly after King's near-fatal accident in June, is about a hitchhiker finding a ride. It sells for $2.50 on many Web sites, though Barnes & Noble made it available for free Tuesday, and Amazon has no plans to charge for the download, according to company spokeswoman Kristin Schaefer.
"Stephen King's decision to publish his new short story in electronic format is a concrete declaration that the eBook format has arrived," said Steve Riggio, vice chairman of Barnes & Noble.com. "We see a time in the not too distant future when virtually every book in print will be available in both physical and electronic formats." "Demand for King eBook makes download downright impossible"


"The famed horror author is back now with his second unpublished, downloadable offering -- again in PDF -- but with a new, simplified distribution scheme. Left out of the process this time, some publishers and security technology companies may feel like they're in the direct path of King's second electronic bullet."
"King is short-circuiting a repeat of history by abandoning the notion of security, instead making "The Plant" available in unlocked format -- but with a twist. He'll upload at least two installments of the novel, asking readers to pay one dollar for each -- based purely on the honor system
If at least 75 percent of those who download installments one (July 24) and two (August 21) pay up, King promises to continue the experiment. Anything less, he writes on his official Web site, he'll pull the plug. Stephen King and PDF II: Honesty v. Security


Stephen King: "The Plant will end up grossing at least $600,000, and may end up over a million...Advertising aside (and finding the correct advertising venues for internet users is a whole other issue), costs are nonexistent and the profit potential is unlimited." The Plant: Getting a Little Goofy [King wrote in response to an article in the New York Times. The Times declined to publish King's response.]

21st Century Printer:
Desktop Publishing

When The Threepenny Review celebrated its 100th issue and 25th year recently, the literary quarterly received headlines for that milestone and gave itself a big party. After all, 25 years is old for a literary magazine with 9,000 subscribers, a $200,000 annual budget and no big-money patrons or university support.

But here's the surprise: while Threepenny represents the triumph of the bookish little guy in the age of publishing giants and gossip magazines, it is a behemoth in a landscape crowded with 1,000 literary magazines. That is more than at any time in history. Most of the magazines are geared toward specific audiences, with average readerships of 2,000 and annual budgets under$10,000.

Magazines like Quick Fiction are multiplying because desktop-publishing technology has made printing cheaper and easier than ever, the Internet helps get the word out (some magazines are online only), and the spread of university writing programs in the last 20 years has created a flock of university-sponsored literary magazines. The little guys serve as farm teams for big publishers. "A Little Journal for Nearly Every Literary Voice" By Felicia Lee, NY Times December 27, 2004

21st Century Comic:
"Infinite cave painting"

The digital revolution, [Scott McCloud] argued, would bring comics closer to their roots: cave paintings. Yes, cave paintings. "The ancestors of printed comics drew, painted and carved their time-paths from beginning to end, without interruption," Mr. McCloud wrote. And with the help of digital technology, he suggested, comics could break out of their boxes and get back to what he called "the infinite canvas."
Well, Mr. McCloud got his way. Comics did go digital. But he did not get everything.
Where is that great infinite canvas that Mr. McCloud was speaking of? ... "The Perry Bible Fellowship" by Nicholas Gurewitch, the winner of the "comedic comic" prize, does begin to verge on the infinite. It opens with a colorful picture of a rainbow, sun, bear, monkey, bird and dinosaur. If you click on any one of these creatures and it opens its eyes you can read a separate comic about it. Pretty neat.
"The greater the use of technology, the closer we get to film," Mr. Groth writes of Mr. McCloud's grand vision. And he was right. If comics want to exploit the Web without losing themselves, it looks as if they will be walking a very fine line.
"Comics Escape a Paper Box, and Electronic Questions Pop Out" By Sarah Boxer, NY Times August 17, 2005

21st Century Library:
Your computer

The premise on which Michael Hart based Project Gutenberg was: anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely. . .what Michael termed "Replicator Technology" The concept of Replicator Technology is simple; once a book or any other item (including pictures, sounds, and even 3-D items can be stored in a computer), then any number of copies can and will be available. Everyone in the world, or even not in this world (given satellite transmission) can have a copy of a book that has been entered into a computer.

Project Gutenberg Etexts are made available in what has become known as "Plain Vanilla ASCII," meaning the low set of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange: ie the same kind of character you read on a normal printed page-- italics, underlines, and bolds have been capitalized. The reason for this is that 99% of the hardware and software a person is likely to run into can read and search these files. History and Philosophy of PROJECT GUTENBERG


Required reading: "Thoughts on Project Gutenberg" by Michael S. Hart

21st Century Author:
Software

For some people, writing a novel is a satisfying exercise in self-expression. For me, it's a hideous blend of psychoanalysis and cannibalism that is barely potent enough to overcome a series of towering avoidance mechanisms - including my own computer...If I rail and curse at mine, it is partly out of resentment at our miserable co-dependence. Imagine, then, the blow to my scribbler's vanity when I discovered a while back that computers might get along just fine without writers.

This is not science fiction. With little fanfare and (so far) no appearances at Barnes & Noble, computers have started writing without us scribes. They are perfectly capable of nonfiction prose, and while the reputation of Henry James is not yet threatened, computers can even generate brief outbursts of fiction that are probably superior to what many humans could turn out - even those not in master of fine arts programs.

Still, what has been accomplished so far is scary enough, and surely there is more to come, thanks to rapid advances in computing power and the rise of "narratology" (how stories are told) as an academic field of study, among other unwholesome trends that are making the novelist's life ever more perilous. "Computers as Authors? Literary Luddites Unite!" By Daniel Akst NY Times, November 22, 2004

Not "required" but something you must read anyway

"Dave Striver loved the university - its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one's dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving."

Written by a computer program known as Brutus.1 that was developed by Selmer Bringsjord, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M.

21st Century Book:
A Movie

Independent filmmakers, specialty magazine publishers, artists, educators - all those with a video to sell, no matter how narrow the niche - are turning out DVD's and distributing them through the mail. It's a trend that began in the era of videotape but has accelerated with DVD's because they are inexpensive to duplicate and ship.

DVD distribution has helped create a market for specialized visual programming.

John Geyer, the vice president for marketing at CustomFlix, tells the story of a customer who made "RoadRace," a movie about people who race motorcycles on weekends. "He's an accountant," Mr. Geyer said. "I think he works for a Fortune 500 company and he races motorcycles on the weekend. He went around and put five video cameras on his bike. In two months he sold $10,000 worth of his product."

In the Era of Cheap DVD's, Anyone Can Be a Producer. Peter Wayner. New York Times, May 20, 2004

21st Century Information Literacy:
Read and Write Media

Rick Herbst, now attending Yale Law School, may yet turn out to be the current decade's archetypal film major. Twenty-three years old, he graduated last year from the University of Notre Dame, where he studied filmmaking with no intention of becoming a filmmaker. Rather, he saw his major as a way to learn about power structures and how individuals influence each other.

Some 600 colleges and universities in the United States offer programs in film studies or related subjects, a number that has grown steadily over the years, even while professional employment opportunities in the film business remain minuscule.

At the University of Southern California, whose School of Cinema-Television is the nation's oldest film school (established in 1929), fully half of the university's 16,500 undergraduate students take at least one cinema/television class. That is possible because Elizabeth Daley, the school's dean, opened its classes to the university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy that says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie world professionals. "The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write with media, and those who can't," Ms. Daley said. "Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody." "Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?" By Elizabeth van Ness The NY Times,March 6, 2005

 

To do: Digital documents have tools for readers?