31 Mai 2022 - Cômo

Understanding Digital Writing through Distance Learning

Retrospective of a distance learning class in literature on digital creation
Margot Mellet - Université de Montréal
@mellet_m

FRA3715 - Écriture et nouveaux médias (Fall 2020)

Time-Organisation

  • Asynchronous time for Theory (lesson, documentation, tutorial)
  • Synchronous time for Practice (workshop, discussion, feedback)

Availabilities

From left to right : Studium, Github, Web page of FRA3715 (2020)
Profiles

« Le "profil" en effet, renvoie tout d’abord à cet objet propre au domaine de la représentation visuelle, qui qualifie un portrait de côté, une esquisse des contours, figure ou visage à moitié montré – c’est-à-dire à moitié caché »
(Dibutade 2.0 : la "femme-auteur" à l'ère du numérique, Monjour 2015)

Portrait en creux de Jacques Roubaud (Lécroart 2012)
Technical Profiles
  • Devices & OS
  • Default browser
  • Writing practices

Naked Lunch (Fincher 1991 [Burrouhs 1959])
Media, Matter & Message

"The Medium is the message"
(Understanding Media: The extensions of man, McLuhan 1964)

"Media determine our situation"
(Gramaphone, film, typewriter, Kittler 1999)

"Matter matters"
(Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Barad 2007)


Marshall McLuhan missing reference
Mediating Conjunctures

"are the moving contexts [...] of action, the dynamic configurations that an ensemble of interplaying forces and agents in a determined space adopt at the moment of action."
(Media Do Not Exist, Larrue & Vitali-Rosati 2019)

Models & Inclusion

"When [...] efforts focused on adding race or gender to digital archives and data sets, there was an implication that simply adding new data as content is all that is needed to get at some truth about race or gender. While it is hard to argue against, [...] including women authors in a database of nineteenth-century writers, such an approach is more additive than integrative or relationnal."

(Feminist in a software lab: difference + design, McPherson 2018)

Index Thomisticus, Livia Canestraro, female punchcard operator (1950-60)
Open-source & Cost-free condition

  • Documentation & Community
  • Interoperability
  • + Balance between technicality & accessibility

Ted Nelson, “As We Will Think” (1972 version)
(Re)Appropriation

9 creative workshops & writing constraints

Ted Nelson, “As We Will Think” (1972 version)
Workshop 1 - Hypertextual narration
with Hypothesis

  • Overcome linearity with continuity
  • Invest a marginal area
  • Explore & explode directions of writing

Hypothesis Private Group for the Workshop
Hypothesis as narrative tool

From one annotation to another via hyperlinks
Workshop 3 - Performative writing
with Online Bash Shell

  • Writing with and according to the machine
  • Coding a narration
  • Interactive story

Bash as a writing structuration
Creation of automatic poetry from Antoine Swenney
Workshop 5 - Online Profile
with Wikipedia

  • Mix with identity & machine
  • Manage an identity within a community
  • Publish a piece of you

Wikipedia's Pastiche Page as place of experimentation

Chloé Dassylva Creation L'avenir de Wikipédia
Workshop 4 - Collaborative Writing
with Framapad

  • Visibility of writing processes
  • No other communication than writing
  • Building a group

Framapad, a collaborative notepad
Framapad as a sense of collective

Demonstration
Consideration, renegociation & diversion of digital environments
Ted Nelson, “As We Will Think” (1972 version)
Own place, own structure
FRA3826 - Théories de l'édition numérique Website, 2022
All the Humans ...

Haitam Alam, Chloé Dassylva, Félix-Arthur Grenier, Olivier Jobin, Farid Laouari, Antoine Sweeney, Sébastien Vaillancourt
& Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities

... and Tools

DeepL & Stylo
and reveal.js

Merci

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) and rengociate with Margot Mellet

Blank.blue - Université de Montréal
@mellet_m