Digital Academics

88 Constellations by David Clark

88 Constellations

I want to say that this work, though cinematic, does not have that feel to me. I do not want to call it a novel either. It feels like avant-garde creative non-fiction, if there is even such a thing (also, I know that this classification may represent an overly academic need to categorize accurately the things that I read or consume). What is literary about this to me is the linking of words, or symbols, to broader expositions, showing that a symbol encapsulates a great deal, meaning that no one word is really just one word but is really a connection of a great number of ideas symbolized together in the image of the word on the page. I think that mixing of mediums in this work did a fantastic job of trying to point a person toward the idea that a word is not just a word and as you explore the ideas inside one word, you are lead to explore more and more words and thus to keep exploring an infinite number of ideas. Though the words, symbols, and ideas in this work are not technically infinite, they give the sense that they may be. Because this work explores ideas like this, I feel that it is literary, at least within the confines of what I have grown to think of the idea of literature.

OK. Now I need to go let me head cool down, and marvel at the fact that I just witnessed a work that links Carmen Miranda and Hitler with only a couple clicks of the mouse between them.

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Digital Academics

Hello Twine!

 I am EXTREMELY (yes, I just used caps, bold, italic, underline, comic sans, and purple on an adverb to express my excitement…English majors and designers, please avert your eyes) excited about giving Twine a try. First off, Anna Anthropy should write all how-to’s ever. I loved her introduction to Twine and I felt like it opened my eyes to some potential features and ideas to experiment with using this great tool, and also let me feel like I could hit the ground running without worrying about the technical stuff too much.

Last week I mentioned writing choose your own adventure stories in QBASIC when I was a teenager. This program essentially gives you the same ability and does so in a far more user friendly way. The ability to create the story and then manipulate the markup, css, and javascript makes Twine a very robust platform and I fear that there is not going to be enough time in this class for me to really get as much out of it as I hope to.

I have had time to read a couple examples that Anna Anthropy points us toward at the end of her article. I adore You Will Select a Decision, published by Brendan Patrick Hennessy. I only had time to play with №1 – Small Child In Woods, and I managed to kill the poor child within 4 steps of the story, but the narrative is fantastic, and the history of it being banned by the CIA due to fears involving a communist plot to control the minds of American children is great as well.

I can not stress how excited I am to use this software for this class, and I will try and post a quick test before our Google Hangout tomorrow evening. Do any of you have ideas that you want to try in the Twine format yet?

 

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