From the April 1985 issue of Electronic Games Magazine (via the Internet Archive): “Start an Electronic Novel by reading the opening chapters in the hard-cover book, and then go directly into the story. As the asynchronous real-time universe unfolds, your actions determine the direction and the outcome of this imaginative journey. You can’t get tired…

-fascinating memoir here by J.M. Graetz from the August 1981 issue of Creative Computing about the development of the ‘first’ computer game, Spacewar. Talks about the importance of Edward E. Smith’s Skylark and Lensman science fiction novels.

-worked through Stephen Ramsay‘s wonderful “Algorithmic Criticism” article in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. A great article which pushes textual analysts to do more with the data produced by their clever computational systems–to go beyond the data outputs and ask new questions, produce new critical interpretations of literary texts, not simply data-sets. Ramsay’s article…

-On the suggestion of committee member Paul Hjartarson, I’ve been working through (the always excellent) Alan Liu’s (excellent) 2012 article for Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, “The State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique.” Liu points to many resources that sound both interesting and useful (that is, generally interesting and useful…

-Working through old notes from N.K. Hayles’s texts. Her account of the cybernetic theory of the transmission of information (in How We Became Posthuman) emphasizes the importance of both the sender and the receiver (neither of which are necessarily human, but both of which are necessarily embodied). The inclusion of the receiver parallels the importance…