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The recent snow was plentiful but too cold to do much building. On Saturday, though, some light snow turned into sleet and rain which melted the top layer enough to make it finally start sticking together. My 4-year-old, ever the snow trooper, wanted to make sure we took advantage of this small wind...
I'm a fan of the Moviebarcode Tumblr blog, which creates elegant "barcode" versions of movies and other visual media. Conceptually, it's similar to what Lev Manovich does with image sets and that I and my DGST 101 students tried to replicate last semester. Instead of shrinking each frame into pi...
When I first read Nick Montfort's #!, I shared my initial response via Twitter in the form of a Perl one-liner. Since I'm teaching #! this semester, I've been taking a second look and growing in my appreciation and understanding of the Perl poems in particular, so I thought I'd revisit that revi...
Haiku is a Japanese poetic form emphasizing brevity, clarity, and the juxtaposition of images or ideas. Its translation or appropration into English has foregrounded the 5-7-5 syllable rule, and its influence on Modernist poets like Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams is quite clear. Even if that...
In my classes, I've been talking about and showing off the kinds of visual analysis one can accomplish by extracting frames from video and comparing them in a montage format. This approach has been pioneered by Lev Manovich, Jeremy Douglass and others under the heading of Software Studies, and Man...
Earlier this year, a twitter account known as @555uhz gained some attention and eventually notoriety for posting, at a rate of one image per 2 seconds of film twice an hour, the movie Top Gun. This was a cool idea, and a clever use of Twitter to celebrate a well-known film. Even though posting ima...
Your phrases and their respondent images still keep within me. The cold water lapping at your ankles, threatening to pull you down into “Freezing meadows stretched to the horizon like a million blue pages”
This epigraph is a quote from House of Leaves, a book in which a complex and maze-li...
In January 2014, I traveled to Chicago to participate in the annual Convention of the Modern Language Association. There, I participated in a roundtable, Session 583: Electronic Literature After Flash, where I delivered a brief presentation on Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia. I wanted to talk a...
I have been interested in Twitter bots for some time now, but when I've talked about bots publicly, I've always had to hem and haw when students or other motivated parties ask how they can make bots of their own. It is unfortunately the case that even simple bots pose a signific...
If you've read Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, then you are no doubt familiar with the madwoman in its attic, Pelafina Lièvre. Her letters to her son Johnny add one more voice to this already polyvocal text, and though her words reside in Appendix IIE, her melancholy and madness encompass a spac...
This past week, I traveled to and presented a paper at the Society for Textual Scholarship. Although I've been interested in and working with Textual Studies for some time, this was my first time at the STS conference, and more than anything else, I found it an extraordinary learning exper...
Over the past fall and the summer semesters, I've been participating in an exciting pilot program at my university called UMW Domains (or sometimes, "A Domain of One's Own"). The basic idea is to give students their own domain names and some webhosting, which they can then use to construct their d...
Today, I presented a paper at the 2013 MLA Convention as part of a special session on Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media along with Lori Emerson, Paul Benzon and Mark Sample.
My talk was about the font OCR-A, and it's part of some research I'm doing as a bridge between...
In many of my classes, I've have an opportunity to discuss the poetic, sublime, cliche and now inevitable Passage, a game well-known for being well-known as an art game (or artgame). As a game or game-like thing about life and death, its approachable style and memento mori theme are sufficiently...
This semester (Fall 2012), I'm teaching ENGL 202H: Writing through Media, a so-called "special topics in writing" seminar that has become one of my standby's. The history of the course is actually kind of interesting, since it goes back to my graduate school experience teaching "ENG 1131: Writing th...
This past weekend, I was honored to present a short lightning talk at the Modern Language Association. I did this as part of a roundtable session, "Close Playing: Literary Methods and Video Game Studies," organized by Mark Sample and including 5 other participants besides myself: Anastasia Salter...
This coming spring (2012), I'll be teaching a new course, ENGL 251Y: Adaptation! Here's the description:
This general education literature course considers the question of "adaptation" as an aspect of cultural texts that are in some state of media transition; from book to film, from film to vide...
I recently traveled to the 2011 MLA Convention where I gave a presentation on some of my recent thinking on ARGs and the textual study thereof. Really, this presentation was the sequel to a blog entry that was to be the first in a series. I ran into some trouble with the software I wanted to discu...
Today is Monday, and I've just returned from a weekend in Florida where I participated in Futures of Digital Studies, the 5th Annual Digital Assembly Conference. This was a great weekend, not only because I got to be back in Gainesville, but because the conference itself was of exceptional quality...
With this blog entry, I announce a new project, a new (for me) undertaking in digital scholarship and professional development. In short, I have created a website, www.thevideogametext.com, where I will be publishing my dissertation in serial form. I'm doing this to put my work in front of a wider...
I have recently learned that I will be teaching a senior seminar in the Spring 2010 semester, and I'm using this blog entry to think through an idea I have. If I get a little feedback, that would be excellent as well.
The senior seminar is an important capstone for the English Major experience. Th...
Recently, Mark Sample posted a blog entry about making his Zotero library public, in which he outlined a nifty way to use Yahoo Pipes to streamline Zotero's RSS output and place it in a block on his website. This is a great idea, and from the number of "Recently Zoteroed" blocks I've seen croppi...
