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COMPUTER AND LITERARY ARTS

By: O.B. Hardison, Jr.

Louis Milic observed in 1970 that the

objective of those who want computers to uselanguage must be more modest than that of the

computer musicians, who have some respectablecompositions to their credit, and the producers of

computer graphics, whose beautiful

arrangements of lines and colors adorn a number

of walls in good artistic company.

* Computers are more generally used in writingthan in any other form of arts.

* Format. Computer texts exist as a long scroll

in the computers memory. It appears by

screenfuls to the author, and until it is printed

out, the readiest measure of length is the number

of kilobytes it occupies in memory, which can be

metaphorically translated into the length of theimaginary scroll.

* Form. Computer offers for endless revision.

Theres always a time for one more run-through.

* Process. A writer who uses a local area

network can communicate actively with others

while engaged in the process of writing.

- Writing is a communal process.

A Networked Classroom stresses the fact that

with computers, writing no longer needs to be an

isolated activity.- discourse community

* When the community begins to collaborate,

writing becomes anonymous, which is to say that

the author begins to fade away.

* Networks classrooms are a classic use of

computers technology. Computer novels, for

one, are seldom the work of a single author.

Same is true with folk ballads. After years of

circulating, the work will be a product of several

thinkers.

Walter J. Ong suggests in Orality and

Literacy (1982) that computers encourage areturn to many of the mind habits of oral

literature. As they return to modes of communal

art that predates literacy, they move beyond the

concern with author and ownership that

characterized the culture of the book.

* Content. Computers encourage writers to be

visual. It carries forward the movement to

reclaim the visual element in language that is so

important a motive for concrete poetry.

* Writing that includes images is less dense and

less continuous than language. Remarks andcaptions replace long, descriptive paragraphs.

* Pure writing is different from the often

communal and image-oriented manner of

composing. The masterpiece of computer writing

will be different from the masterpieces createdby pure writers.

Hypertext as outlined by Gregory Crane of

Harvard in an article in Academic Computing

entitled Redefining the Book, it is a database

program, and other programs which are capable

of emulating many of its abilities.

3 important differences between present

standard literary works and hypertext:

1) A great deal more information can be

incorporated into hypertext that in a printed

book.

2) The information can include complex images

--- maps, schematic drawings, engravings, and

photographs.

3) Hypertext is normally visible until invoked.

The Hypertext

1) As applied to literary studies is that it allows

many different resources to be brought to bear ona given work.

The Tempest would include the text itself and

a list of variants in the text. The lists would beshort.

* Staging is important in The Tempest.

Hamlet or King Lear list of variants would be

long and complicated.

2) The hypertext would include explanations of

difficult words like the explanations in thefootnotes of conventional texts.

- Magic is important in The Tempest.

Hypertext should include an explanation of the

Renaissance idea of magic, including the

distinction between white and black magic, and

an explanation of what a masque is.

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* The Tempest is not a literary work but a heap

of facts to be memorized or a puzzle to be solved

or a mystery to be explained.

* The process of reading hypertext is interactiveand discontinuous

Metatext made of bits and pieces of

Shakespeare interspersed with bits and pieces

from other sources.

* An article by Estelle Irizarry, a literary scholar,

describes the use of Lotus 1-2-3 to make agraphic configuration for analysis of novels.

Adventure one of the earliest important

interactive novels, began in the 1960s as an

exercise in artificial intelligence programming by

Willie Crowther and Don Woods of Stanford.

- Operated by means of dialogue between the

computers, which asked questions and madecomments, and the player, who typed answers

that drew further comments from the computer.- The reader must decide how to proceed and

what to use to cope with the situations

encountered.

- Adventure is self-referential. You do no read

about an adventure, you have an adventure.

- The setting recalls spelunking expedition that

Willie Crowther took in Collosal Cave in

Kentucky. The plot is influenced by Tolkiens

Lord of the Rings.

Neuromancer the foremost classic ofcyberpunk by William Gibson.

Mindwheel probably the most brilliant of

interactive novels by Robert Pinksy. The story is

based on the premise that powerful minds leavepsychic impresses behind them.

Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT developed a

technique for a still-famous dialogue program

written in 1966.

ELIZA was based on nondirective

psychotherapy. It moves us from novel-likeworks towards pure computer generation of

language. It is designed to dominateconversation.

RACTER (raconteur) a brilliant variation of

ELIZA, which is designed to elicit comment

from the user.

* In general, the more urgently meaning is

sought in computer-generated text, the more

disappointing the product.

TRAVESTY invented by Hugh Kenner andJoseph DRouke of John Hopkins University in

1984. The program works by analyzing thefrequency of letter groups in a simple passage

and producing nonsense in the style of the

passage.

* The theory of narratolgy that descends from

the Russian critic Vladimir Propp treats fictionas a sequence of standard plot units.

Sheldon Klein and a group of associates of the

University of Wisconsin created a computer

program using Propps formulas.

Socrates, in the Ion complains that poets

behave like drunkards and madmen/

Permutation a typical device of computerpoets. It is illustrated by Edwin Morgans justly

famous Computers First Christmas Card.

Marc Adrein of the Vienna Institute of

advanced Study, in Cool Pop combines

graphics with words in a manner that recalls

concrete poetry,

RETURNER a program by Louis T. Millic,

which uses a poem by Alberta T. Turner for

input.

MUSESTORM comes closer to transparency

than RETURNER because, aside from having a

limited pool of words to draw on, its only

constraint is that each line must be scannableiambic pentameter.

* A computer poem does not have to be

considered sacrosanct. The resulting production

is a composite of human and machine input a

literary cyberborg.

Wanni Balestrini created a computer poem,which is a meditation of the first atomic bomb.

- It is a product of deep collaboration betweenhuman and machine.

William Dickey one of the most serious

computer poets in the early 1980s.