Broadening our Scope: Incorporating New Media Forms into Formal Literary Studies

The study of literature is integrally connected to the study of culture as a whole. Traditionally, literary scholarship has embraced not only a study of texts but also art, music, and other forms. Truly understanding literature and its import within our modern culture, then, requires that we acknowledge the interconnectedness of textual and other artistic forms and integrate novel media forms into our study of literature. Curricula for literature and writing classes within the English department need to instruct students in the use of novel media formats as a part of the formal research process. This includes not only digitally mediated interpretations of traditional forms like music and art but also contemporary forms like user-created videos, video games, blogs, and a wealth of other creative media formats.

Matthew Arnold proposes that great literature is possible only thanks to the “current” of ideas that exists within a given culture, citing Shakespeare’s success as a clear demonstration of this point. This current depends on a diversity of media formats, as Paris’s Lost Generation of Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, etc. demonstrate in their close association with prominent painters and musicians like Pablo Picasso and Cole Porter. Incorporating a broader study of media, both modern and traditional, as part of an academic study of literature will improve students’ understanding not only of the works themselves but also in the cultural relevance within a modern context and will additionally provide for a richer stream of ideas and influences upon which students can build their personal writing. Novel media forms prove especially pertinent in their ability demonstrate the relevance of the literary studies to modern audiences and to adapt seemingly “old” ideas to new contexts. By modifying curricula to include new media studies as a part of a formal study of literature, the English department would thus be able to improve the breadth, relevance, and vitality of students’ research and of the department as a whole.

Reading Digital Culture: How Literature Aids in Understanding the Digital Age

Literary works like Moby Dick help us to make sense of digital culture by investigating key themes pertinent to digital interaction. One of these themes is the idea of isolation, a concept that I discuss in some detail in "The Sea and Solitude." Moby Dick essentially presents the reader with a number of disconnected individuals and asks what is necessary to bring them together. This theme shows up early in Queequeg's and Ishmael's relationship, but other relationships, like that of Queequeg to Tashteego or of Ahab and Pip further illustrate the idea that even though these individuals are from different backgrounds, the mere fact that they are together serves as a foundation on which they can build meaningful relationships. The Internet works in a similar manner, facilitating powerful relationships for people from different countries and backgrounds and providing means for people who feel isolated or left out to find a "home" of sorts. Kristen, for example, shows how digital tools can be used to help returned missionaries who return home early to feel connected and loved despite the negative feelings or comments that others might hold against them. It demonstrates that those who feel excluded or separate can, in fact, find a place where they belong in digital culture.

Moby Dick likewise investigates identity, a theme that is pertinent to to digital culture on a number of different levels. Moby Dick's famous opening line, "Call me Ishmael," is perhaps the book's most well-known and robust exploration of this idea. In three little words, Melville establishes an identity for his narrator, and throughout the rest of the book, as we hear more of his stories and see more of his interactions with others, we learn more of who he really is. This is similar to how identity is established on the Internet, where often, we have only a name and a picture or a catchphrase to go off of in terms of defining a person. Gradually, through their comments, posts, pictures, etc. we come to understand more of who they are, yet we understand that even these "facts" are in some sense constructed specifically for the Internet: just as Ishmael reveals only that which he wants to share about himself, so also are Internet identities constructed to convey certain ideas, qualities, or images. This is a concept that Aleesha investigates to some extent in her study of Pinterest, where users define themselves by the clothes, accessories, decorations, and quotes that they post to their respective pin-boards. Others, like Lizy and Victoria, look at identity as parts of a larger collective, as in fandoms.

Reflections on Digital Culture

Wikimedia Creative Commons License

One of things that has been impressed upon me most this semester is the idea that the digital age allows us (and in some cases, requires us) to specialize. Whereas in traditional settings creators, innovators, Paul, Heidi, myself), fandoms (Victoria, Lizy), rethinking print literacy (Shelly, Kayla, Danielle) and social media for social change (Kristen, Cheri) are just the beginning. For me, digital culture is a loose term, because it's composed of so many diverse and sometimes isolated culture so much so that to make broad generalizations in an attempt to classify the culture as a whole would likely exclude vast subsets of digital users. Nevertheless, I'm going to try.
and enthusiasts are limited by the accessibility and popularity of certain ideas or sub-cultures, the Digital Age is a time of fandoms and specialization and unbridled creativity. Chances are that if someone, somewhere is interested in an idea, then there are likely others talking and thinking about those same ideas, and the Internet provides the means to connect those people together. It has been interesting to see different themes and subsets of digital culture evolve even in our own class: gamer culture (

In my view, digital culture is about the following:

1. Personal and group expression
2. In light of the first item, the somewhat paradoxical recreation the self
3. Resistance to traditional forms and paradigms
4. Accessibility of information and means of creation
5. Sociality

Digital Spaces: Working Outline

I. Introduction

                A. What is a civilization?

1. "[A] grouping of at least several thousand people with a common culture, usually a common language, usually a geographic locale, some significant (usually monumental) buildings and architecture, and a political structure that is not necessarily unified” (Blaha 2002).

2. "Civilization is fundamentally a cultural infrastructure of information and knowledge that serves survival and continuity. What distinguishes a civilization from a culture is that this infrastructure, having reached a critical level of complexity, becomes autonomous from constituent cities, nations, and empires" (Bosworth 2003). At what point will digital/Internet culture reach its critical complexity?

B. With a majority of the world's physical frontiers having been swallowed up in expansionism, many are looking to digital spaces as a new frontier—a place where they can establish their own culture and stake their claim in a rich and vibrant future within the Digital Age. Whether independent civilizations will emerge from this new frontier is yet to be determined, but already we see the close integration of real and virtual 'civilizations' as we know them, and the future will surely witness further advances in this area. Though at this stage of its progression the Internet and its substituent communities are still very much so dependent on real-world authorities and spaces for their being and maintenance, the foundations are already in place for the eventual emergence of virtual civilizations.

C. Working Thesis: Virtual spaces are becoming increasingly independent, and while they necessarily remain linked to the real world, they nonetheless provide the social underpinnings for the genesis of digital civilizations through their facilitation of virtual government, economy, and culture.

Virtual Nation: Civilizing the Digital Wilds

Image by Greg Bayles. CC BY 2.0 Generic.

Adapted from Jastrow's public domain photograph.

1. Working Thesis Statement
The Internet represents the heir apparent to the cultural and social wealth of the American 'Empire' and will ultimately serve as a crucible for new, transcultural, digital civilizations.

2. Preliminary Exploration

I've explored the concept of virtual civilizations in a number of posts:

• Digital Nations: The New Frontier takes a look at the historical inheritance of cultural/social wealth that in part led to the rise of the Roman, British, and American 'Empires.' It looks forward to the rise of the digital nation from the cultural and social infrastructure of America. This is essentially my first focused exploration of the concept of digital nations and represents my earliest thinking on the matter.
• Monuments of our Age: Foundations of Civilization in the Digital World addresses the concept of civilization from a historiological perspective, examining the requirements for civilization and providing a number of scholarly definitions for civilization in a modern context.
• We the People: Digital Civilizations is the post that I've used for most of my social proof, because it provides a brief overview of the topic and presents some foundational evidence as to the foundations of civilization already exigent within virtual worlds. This post received a good amount of feedback, and it's been one that I've circled back to at various points. This was also my first real call for colonization of the digital wilds: "Rather than anathematizing video games and virtual realms as base and 'savage,' we need settlers who will actively shape the digital frontier for good. Rather than complaining that digital worlds are mindless and violent, maybe we need to be the ones to find out how we can make them thoughtful and exalting."

Potential Presentation Venues for Digital Civilizations Research

I've been looking for different outlets for my research on digital civilizations, so I wanted to post some of my preliminary findings.

• Re: Humanities 2014 is an undergraduate conference focusing on digital studies, so I feel like it will be a perfect setting for my research. The submission deadline is fast approaching, so I'm planning on putting together a proposal over the next few days and submitting it to Dr. Burton for feedback so that I can make the December 1st deadline. This would likely be a good venue for just about any of my classmates as well.
• Interrogating Colonization and New Politics is a graduate conference held at Bowling Green State University, but I'm going to be contacting the conference coordinators to see if they will consider an undergraduate paper. My topic ties in really well with one of their main topics, which involves "digital frontiers." The deadline isn't until March, so this might give me the chance to really figure out what they are looking for and adapt my work to the requirements in hopes of getting accepted despite my undergraduate status.
• EDUCAUSE is also accepting submissions for a conference on digital scholarship, and it has the added benefit of being online as well as in-person. That might prove necessary, as the conference is during the regular school year, and assuming I'm in grad school, I may not have the time nor resources to go gallivanting around Florida (despite the obvious temptation).

As I was looking through papers, I found a couple that might be useful for +Aleesha Bass or anyone else involved in women's studies in the digital age. The Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association just recently ended its call for papers for its April 16-April 19 conference, but it may be that they accept late submissions as well. I felt that this would be an especially pertinent area for Aleesha and others. Elsevier journal also has a call for papers going on right now, though it seems to be more about feminism that about media studies. Anyway, it might be worth looking into.

That's all, though, for now. I'll hopefully post some of my progress by Thursday or Friday, and I'll have a draft up soon for anyone who's interested. Thanks for enduring!

Breaking Down the Video Game: Resources for Reading Video Games

Are video games art? Can we look at them as 'literary' works?
What critical theories aid in understanding and distilling
meaning from video games? How can we 'read' video games?
Hopefully these resources will help to answer some of these
questions!

I've been really fascinated by +Paul Bills's research on video games, so I decided to take a few minutes to contribute some resources for his study of video game "literacy." Paul has been working on a book proposal for a work on how to "read" video games from a critical persthe medium of the 21st century, so I'm excited to see people like Paul engaging in formal analysis of games. They will, no doubt, play an integral role in the future of media studies, and realistically, they are on track to become one of the most powerful tools for audience engagement and social change.

I started off by doing a search for "reading video games," and that didn't turn up much of anything useful (mostly just a bunch of pseudo-games that teach reading). I then decided to try searching for "critical analysis of video games," and this turned up some really great material. I've divided into three categories: courses/syllabi, books, and miscellaneous (though still valuable) resources.

Herman Melville: Virtual World Builder

Image Credit: Michael Pate

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

I've been trying to figure out how I could relate a study of Moby Dick to my current research topic, virtual worlds, and I've had an interesting time thinking about some of the connections. A few days ago, a friend sent me a synopsis of an article that basically talked about how for him, baseball was a "virtual world" to which he escaped as a child, and that got me thinking more about the nature of virtual worlds in a broader sense. Basically, I want to work toward proving that Moby Dick (and for that matter, a vast majority of books) is really just a rudimentary virtual world and that the fundamental principles behind a book are emphasized likewise in online worlds.

The term "virtual world" in our modern context usually implies a number of things: online, multiplayer, interactive, and based in a generated 3D environment. Thinking about it from that perspective, books really don't have much in common with virtual worlds at all. But what if we examine books and virtual worlds from a broader perspective? What is a book? What is a virtual world?

Chasing Divinity: Search-Based Analysis of the Sacred in Melville's Moby Dick

Ichiyusai, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi
Public Domain

Alright, it's Moby Dick time again. A while ago, I wrote a couple posts about Ahab as a representation of Milton's Satan and of the white whale as a symbol of divinity. In that I've been learning about "big data" and digital modes of textual analysis, I figured it might be interesting to look at divinity and holiness from a new perspective. Based on my findings, it turns out that "holiness" as a concept becomes less as less frequent throughout the work and in some sense becomes inaccessible or 'unthinkable' (a la Marx) for Ishmael and the other characters. While certain associated words like "blessed" and "divinity" feature throughout the work, others like "sacred" either become increasingly sparse (or absent) toward the end of the book or they adopt negative forms (i.e. "unholy" vs. "holy") that lend to an overall descent into madness and despondency.

I used an html version of Moby Dick (thank goodness for public domain) to do some simple searches in-browser, and it turned up some pretty interesting results. My first few searches were the most revealing, so I'll save those for the end, but I input forms of "bless" and "divinity," and those showed fairly uniform frequency throughout the novel as a whole. "Bless" and its derivative forms showed up twenty one times without any apparent pattern of usage or non-usage, and "divine" appeared a total of fifteen times. Interestingly, of those fifteen instances, five are in reference to whales or to the White Whale himself, this being the most common referent, coming in well above "God" and "Providence" in terms of usage.

Video Book Review: Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken

This is just a quick look at Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken. It likely won't come as a surprise to anyone, but I got carried away trying to do something really cool to do for my video book review and ended up just splicing a few clips together for lack of time. One day, I'll figure out Windows Movie Maker and be able to import .MOV files successfully without spending an hour and a half. Anyway, without further ado, here's the review.

Waiting Out the Copyright Crisis

Creative Commons License, by AJ Cann

My argument is that the solution to the copyright crisis is in allowing copyright law to drown in its own obsolescence as we move on in creating meaningful, integrative, world-changing content that is connected, open, and free. It's taken me a little while to really come to that stance, but in any case, the Copyright Law Panel at BYU on the 25th of October gave me the chance to deliberately think about copyright and thus helped me to come to this conclusion. I think that with time, we will build up a large enough creative commons base that we won't any longer need to lean on copyrighted materials as a primary foundation for modern media arts and digital studies.

Well, to start off, do copyrights have a place in society? Yes. Absolutely, in my book. While I most certainly agree that there are other ways of making money than by copyrighting material, I think there are some really good justifications for short-term content ownership and capitalization. Whether that means five years or ten or even fifteen, I'm not really sure, but what I do know is that if copyright law does end up getting a makeover, it's still probably going to be a pretty ugly beast.

We the People: Digital Civilizations

Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic

By Greg Bayles, graphic remixed from Luc Legay

I've been getting more and more interested in the idea of digital civilizations, so I wanted to throw out some of the thoughts that I've had over the past couple of days. Earlier in the week, I completed a book preview on Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken, and while I found a lot of really useful information, I think the most influential for me has been just a couple lines from a NYT book review. William Saletan remarks, "The Internet isn’t heaven. It isn’t hell, either. It’s just another new world. Like other worlds, it can be civilized." Now obviously my interest in digital civilizations predisposed me to be way more excited about this than perhaps the average person, but for me, Saletan's words came as a powerful reminder about a concept that I've held dear for years: we are the creators of our realities.

Understanding the Digital Exodus with Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken

As somewhat of a social critic and one who at various times has been thoroughly involved in video games, I couldn't resist Jane McGonigal's title: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. It seems like McGonigal has a lot of great videos online about video games and virtual reality, so I see her work as key in understanding the 'exodus' to digital worlds.

Book Preview

After spending ten minutes previewing McGonigal's book, it looks like McGonigal's central question is this: "What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality?" In addressing this topic, it looks like McGonigal will cover how video games can help us to be happier, more successful, and more productive. I really found her reference to Heroditus's concept of games to be compelling and grounding in a sense, and I think I'd like to look more at the sociological and historical foundations of video games.

Google Alerts: the Now, the What, the Who

I've been looking into Google Alerts as a curation tool of late, as I wrote in a recent blog post, but I wanted to throw some thoughts out there as to its usefulness and some of the things that I've found .

My general impression is that I'm very impressed. I've used Google Alerts before to monitor people, but I've never really approached it topically, and I have to say, I've really been missing out on a valuable tool. I put up three alerts (queries) on Thursday and have been receiving daily updates on "digital worlds," "virtual worlds," and "virtual civilizations," and while I've gotten a few things that were less applicable to my particular area of interest, I've discovered a lot of really interesting recent, meaningful resources and found people with whom I can connect.

Creating Worlds: Immanuel Kant and Virtual Reality

Wiki Creative Commons

This idea is still in its infancy, but I wanted to get it up here before it gets carried away in the busy of life. Recently, I've been studying Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and that's got me thinking about the imagination as a creative entity. Kant's overarching idea is that reality is founded in the imaginative representation rather than in actual substance--that the world is really just a series of relationships that  exist between the mind and the body and that the world is thus, in some sense contained within each individual. This has lots of implications, but the quick and dirty summation is that as a result, human beings are, at least in Kant's view, entirely autonomous and actually construct their worlds (actively and passively) through the associations that their imagination makes with objects and ideas in the world around them.

Google Alerts (Teaser) and Mirror's Edge

I've been looking into Google Alerts as a way of monitoring the Internet for information on digital worlds and civilizations, and I'm thinking that this will be a really effective way of catching the latest information on new technologies and trends. I made three different alerts today, and I'm going to monitor them over the next few days to see what quality of information it really picks up, and then I'll post a review on Monday as to my findings.

Creative Commons License, Tom Francis

In other news, I recently stumbled on a game called Mirror's Edge, and I've been enjoying exploring that world and thinking about the implications of some of the ideas. The game is based in a dystopian world wherein a hegemonic political/police entity controls all information highways. As a result, the only safe means of transporting information is through runners who use parkour (you should watch this: it's amazing) to navigate rooftops and abandoned buildings in their efforts to evade capture. The game originally interested me because of the parkour aspect, in that I'm working on a novel that features parkour runners or "kites," but in any case, as with most well-made games, Mirror's Edge has got me thinking about some other important ideas.

Digital Nations: The New Frontier

(If you're in for a long read, read it all. Otherwise, just skip to the bolded stuff)

Okay, so here's my proposition, and I want to hear your thoughts on it: just as America was the cultural and social heir of the British Empire and the British Empire that of the Roman Empire, the Internet represents the heir apparent to the cultural and social wealth of the American 'Empire' and will ultimately serve as a crucible for new, digital civilizations.  

So some of you probably thinking right now, "Wait a second... America heir to the British Empire? The British Empire heir to Rome? I don't know what you're talking about..." Well, that's okay, because the idea is still rattling around in my head, too, and it still needs a lot of refining, but I think you'll see my point as I explain. It all started out with the lovely drawing that you see to the right. Well, actually, it started out when I found out that there are Roman aqueducts all across Great Britain, but the drawing was really when it started to take shape. So, to start off, let's look at what goes into making a super-power (like the British Empire and America, for example):

Midterm #1 Prewriting: Charting a Path to Connectedness

Here are some quotes and initial thoughts for my investigation of connectedness and isolation through the lens of Melville's Moby Dick:

• "It is a book which could only have been written in America" (vii-viii)
• "Melville wants the whole world in--particularly the human world; hence the slightly improbable spectrum of the crew of the Peqoid" (ix).  --> ship as a microcosm of America
• Sea as the new frontier
• "Ishmael, the whale-writer, knows that the great Sperm-Whale, 'scientific' or poetic, lives not complete in any literature . . . his is an unwritten life'. [sic] . . . We must not expect to find Moby Dick in Moby Dick" (xiii). --> In some sense, maybe digital culture is not intended to show us humanity but is rather meant to lead us back to an appreciation of that which is real and present within our lives.
• "Given the radically orphaned condition of modern man (Ishmael ends as an 'orphan', [sic] which is the last word of his book), a danger that Melville could see was the accelerating drift into disconnectedness of the non-affiliated contemporary individual" (xv).
• "How, therefore, men might move from isolation to connectedness was a matter of great moment to him and it pervades the book" (xv).

Midterm 1: Looking Back and Zooming Forward

This is an index of the blog posts that I've completed to date on Team Ahab:

Pleasta Meecha! (An introductory blog post)
The Sea and Solitude (Isolation and connectivity in the Digital Age)

Digital Text, Plato, and Dynamic Expression: A Vlog (XML and static/dynamic forms)

Avatars and Anonymity: Who are We? (Anonymity and online personae)

Bionic Us (Bionic implants and prosthetic technology)

God in the Whale (Melville's use of Moby Dick as a symbol for deity)

Devil in the Man: A "Hell-Bent" Captain (Capt. Ahab as Milton's Satan remade) 

Don Yer Blubber, Land Lubber (The virtue of blubber/thick skin in the Digital Age)

My Research, Your Voice (Exploration of research topics and requests for social proof)

"Another and still stranger world..." (Selection of research topic as "digital worlds unseen" and a brief look at EVE Online)

In class, we've talked about various social platforms that have allowed people to meet others with similar interests and connect in meaningful ways--in many cases, in ways that would be impossible except for the Internet. Whether it's collaborative music sites like Kompoz or expansive, fantastical worlds as in EVE Online and other video games, the Internet is creating digital spaces wherein people are able to share ideas and interact in meaningful ways.

"Another and still stranger world..."

Ch. 11, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Recently, I wrote a blog post, a Google+ message, and a Facebook plea asking for you to help me choose between research topics, and the tally is in. I'm proud to announce that I'll be researching 'digital worlds unseen'--that is, the digital universes that oft times go completely unnoticed in the 'real' world despite their apparent complexity and outright intrigue.

In light of our study of Moby Dick, this is an especially pertinent topic, for in some sense, the leviathans of Melville's work live in a world that is to us likewise unknown and unseen--a place that's neither understood nor appreciated by the vast majority of people. We perhaps catch a tiny glimpse of that world every now and then in our brief encounters with its strange inhabitants, but we otherwise remain blissfully (and sometimes sanctimoniously) ignorant to these worlds lurking just beneath the threshold of our perception. Well, I want to change that.