jill/txt

Clay Shirky’s great at explaining the importance of participatory and social media, and his recent talk at the Web 2.0 conference last month, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, is an excellent example - not to mention a good and inspiring read. Clay takes the fairly wellknown fact that as people are using the internet more they’re watching TV a little less, and talks about the immense waste of time of TV-watching as a cognitive surplus. He cites the argumment of a British historian that with urbanisation in the 19th century people didn’t know what to do with the “civic surplus” of so many people together, and basically just got drunk on gin for a generation - before figuring it out and building libraries, museums and schools for all children. Clay reckons that in the same way, we had no idea what to do with the twentieth century’s sudden increase of leisure time - and so we spent a generation (or two) wasting it by watching television. Now we’ve finally figured out better things to do with all that time.

Apart from the appeal of the general argument, the piece provides a good answer to all those questions about how people find the time to contribute to the Wikipedia, to blog, to make YouTube videos or lolcats or to play World of Warcraft. Clay describes having told a journalist about the time and effort put into the editing of a Wikipedia entry, and continues:

She [the journalist] heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

I guess I’ve used this answer before actually, but not quite so snappily…

There’s a great interview with my World of Warcraft Reader co-editor Hilde Corneliussen and contributors Espen Aarseth, Torill Mortensen and Charlotte Hägström in Forskning.no - and the interview was held in World of Warcraft. This game-savvy journalist also covered the World of Warcraft conference held recently - also in World of Warcraft, Convergence of the Real and Virtual.

My blog reading list has changed of late. I’m currently fascinated by craft blogs and by parenting blogs - isn’t it nice how there’s a blog (or a dozen) for every phase in your life, every interest you acquire?

My daily blog reading time has been heavily curtailed by the amount of time taken up by our new baby, but here are a couple of my current favourite reads:

• SouleMama - this mother of three blogs about sewing, embroidery and other craft projects she does alone and with her kids, and post photos and descriptions of family moments that allow me to dream of my ideal visions of family: you know, the ones where we’re all constantly happy, beautiful and creative and I’m the perfect mother always. And have a great career too of course, but that’s sort of a bit vague in the background in these dreams. SouleMama also recently published a book, Creative Families, which I enjoyed - although it sometimes makes me frustrated that Jessica’s too young to do this stuff with (only one month old after all) and my big girl’s big enough that she’s mostly got her own projects… Ah well, it’s sort of like reading cookbooks, I suspect, more about the dreaming than about necessarily actually doing it all.
• Karen Cheng is a Perth-based designer who also writes about life as a mother, and has a beautiful looking blog to boot. Karen is more likely to post a tutorial on how busy people take great photos rather than explaining how to embroider French knots, or she’ll post a quick recipe or explain how she organised a social event for the other mums at her son’s preschool rather than how to make binding for edging fabrics, but the fragments of joyful life with children are there, and just what I want these days.
• Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff is a colleague whose baby was born just a week after ours, so of course I’m following her blog these days - and she actually blogs about her baby, unlike me (Jessica is however heavily documented on Scott’s (and to some extent on my) Flickr stream, though mostly for friends and family only I’m afraid). Clearly Clancy’s life is also baby-focused rather than work-focused right now, though I think she has to go back to work much sooner than I do.

Jessica’s waking up, so I’m going to leave it at that. And generally that’s where I have to leave it while blog surfing, too…

Thanks to Scott at GrandTextAuto and to Maggie Green at the gamer blog Kotaku for the writeups of the World of Warcraft Reader. It’s exciting to see what people think of the book - actually, we still haven’t heard what any real readers think about it after having read it, so we’re rather looking forward to that. Eek.

I’m also proud to announce that our anthology is currently the #2 bestseller in Amazon.com’s Puzzles and Games/Reference section, second only to the Scrabble Dictionary. How’s that for success!!?

In between feeding Jessica, cuddling Jessica, changing Jessica’s many nappies, trying to give my eleven-year-old a bit of much-needed big sister attention and (not least) trying to catch up on sleep, I’ve been eagerly following the fate of the World of Warcraft Reader. It’s risen like a rocket on the Amazon bestseller list, from 132,000th most sold book last week to around the 6000th today. Yesterday it even had a brief spell in the 3000s! Awesome.

Even our cat, Maestro, approves of the book. He’s not really that into reading it, but it’s a real comfy cat bed!

Call for Papers and Works: Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe

September 11-13th, 2008 at the University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway.

The Fall 2008 Bergen Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe will build upon the work of the e-poetry seminar held in Paris in February 2008 at the University Paris 8, the 2007 e-poetry conference in Paris, the 2007 Remediating Literature Conference in Utrecht, and other recent activity in the field of electronic literature in Europe. The goals of this gathering are:

1) To provide an opportunity for European researchers to share and discuss their current research on electronic literature, e-poetry, and digital narrative forms.

2) To provide a forum for European authors of electronic literature to share, demonstrate, read, or perform their work.

3) To discuss and explore the foundation of a European research network focused on electronic literature, funding opportunities for such a network, and network activities.

The seminar will last three days and will include about 20-30 participants. The day-long meetings during the first two days will consist of short presentations of papers in panel format. Additionally, there will be performances, readings, and demonstrations of electronic literature in the evenings. The third day of the conference will be dedicated to proposing and discussing the formal establishment of a research network on electronic literature in Europe. Paper presentations should be in English. Presentation and performances of works can be made in English or in the native language of the presenter.

Registration for the seminar is free. There may be a fee for a conference dinner only. There will be no simultaneous sessions, so the number of presentation slots available will be limited, but researchers not selected to present are also free to attend. Both electronic literature authors and researchers are encouraged to submit proposals.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Any paper topic related to the seminar theme is welcome. Some subjects might include:

- Close readings of specific works of electronic literature.
- Ontologies and definitions of e-lit forms.
- National or language-group histories (or pre-histories) of e-lit.
- Procedural literacy and electronic literature.
- Relations between e-lit and other literary and artistic forms and movements.
- Issues involved in translating electronic literature.
- Issues involved in recording, archiving, and preserving e-lit.
- Electronic literature in cultural contexts.
- Pedagogy and approaches to teaching e-lit.
- Proposals for research network activities (e.g. archiving projects, publications, establishing a journal, pedagogical resources, etc.).

Presentations of papers should last no longer than 20 minutes.

Researchers should send an abstract of approximately 500 words before June 20th to elit.in.europe@gmail.com

CALL FOR WORKS

Authors wishing to present works of electronic literature should submit the following before June 20th:

1) A 500 word abstract describing the work, how the author intends to present it, and any technical requirements and how long it will take to present your work (max 30 minutes). The title of the work and all authors should be clearly identified. The abstract should be sent to elit.in.europe@gmail.com

2) If the work is published online, the URL at which it is located should be included in the abstract.

3) If the work is a non-web application, is published in other media than the web, or is performance-dependent, three copies of a CD-ROM or DVD including the work or video documentation of the work should be sent before June 20th to:

Scott Rettberg, Associate Professor
Literary, Linguistic, and Aesthetic Studies (LLE)
The University of Bergen
Postbox 7805
5020 Bergen
Norway

What is Electronic Literature?

The term refers to works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. Within the broad category of electronic literature are several forms and threads of practice, some of which are:

* Hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web
* Kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms
* Computer art installations that have literary aspects
* Interactive fiction
* Novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs
* Poems and stories that are generated by computers
* Computer-enabled combinatory literary forms
* Collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work
* Literary performances that use the computer or network to develop new ways of writing

CALENDAR

The deadline for abstracts and works is June 20th. A response will be given by July 25th. Final papers must be submitted by September 1st for online proceedings that will be published after the seminar. A website with further information will be published later this summer.

REVIEW COMMITTEE

Scott Rettberg, University of Bergen
Jill Walker Rettberg, University of Bergen
Phillippe Bootz, Paris 8 University
Maria Engberg, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Talan Memmott, Blekinge Institute of Techonology
Raine Koskimaa, University of Jyväskylä
Susana Tosca, IT University of Copenhagen

CONTACT INFO

Submission of abstracts and proposals should go to: elit.in.europe@gmail.com. Questions about the seminar should be directed to Scott Rettberg: scott(at)retts.net.

Right after Jessica was born, our anthology of scholarly essays on World of Warcraft was finally published! Here’s a pile of them, don’t they look great?

Buy your own copy today! Or borrow one from a library :)

If you want a closer look online, you can view the table of contents and the introduction at MIT Press’s website.

Even infants need passports these days - and you have to get a passport photo by the same rules as for adults: front of the face, eyes open, looking at the camera, no parental hands holding her up, white background, mouth closed… Apparently the best way to do this is to wait until baby is pooing…