Modifying Entity Relationship Models for Collaborative Fiction Planning and its Impact on Potential Authors

We propose a modified Entity Relationship (E-R) model, traditionally used for software engineering, to structure, store and share plot data. The flexibility of E-R modelling has been demonstrated by its decades of usage in a wide variety of situations. The success of the E-R model suggests that it could be useful for collaborating fiction authors, adding a certain degree of computational power to their process. We changed the E-R model syntax to better suit the story plans, switching the emphasis from generic types to instanced story entities, but preserving relationships and attributes. We conducted a small-scale basic experiment to study the impact of using our modified E-R model on authors when understanding and contributing into a pre-existing fiction story plan. The results analysis revealed that the E-R model supports authors as effectively as written text in reading comprehension, memory, and contributing. In addition, the results show that, when combined together, the written text and the E-R model help participants achieve better comprehension--always within the frame of our experiment. We discuss potential applications of these findings

Abstracts: HASTAC 2017: The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities

The document contains abstracts for HASTAC 2017

GAYME: The development, design and testing of an auto-ethnographic, documentary game about quarely wandering urban/suburban spaces in Central Florida.

GAYME is a transmedia story-telling world that I have created to conceptually explore the dynamics of queering game design through the development of varying game prototypes. The final iteration of GAYME is @deadquarewalking\u27. It is a documentary game and a performance art installation that documents a carless, gay/queer/quare man\u27s journey on Halloween to get to and from one of Orlando\u27s most well-known gay clubs - the Parliament House Resort. The art of cruising city streets to seek out queer/quare companionship particularly amongst gay, male culture(s) is well-documented in densely, populated cities like New York, San Francisco and London, but not so much in car-centric, urban environments like Orlando that are less oriented towards pedestrians. Cruising has been and continues to be risky even in pedestrian-friendly cities but in Orlando cruising takes on a whole other dimension of danger. In 2011-2012, The Advocate magazine named Orlando one of the gayest cities in America (Breen, 2012). Transportation for America (2011) also named the Orlando metropolitan region the most dangerous city in the country for pedestrians. Living in Orlando without a car can be deadly as well as a significant barrier to connecting with other people, especially queer/quare people, because of Orlando\u27s car-centric design. In Orlando, cars are sexy. At the same time, the increasing prevalence in gay, male culture(s) of geo-social, mobile phone applications using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services, such as Grindr (Grindr, LLC., 2009) and even FourSquare (Crowley and Selvadurai, 2009) and Instagram (Systrom and Krieger, 2010), is shifting the way gay/queer/quare Orlandoans co-create social and sexual networks both online and offline. Urban and sub-urban landscapes have transformed into hybrid techno-scapes overlaying the electronic, the emotional and the social with the geographic and the physical (Hjorth, 2011). With or without a car, gay men can still geo-socially cruise Orlando\u27s car-centric, street life with mobile devices. As such emerging media has become more pervasive, it has created new opportunities to quarely visualize Orlando\u27s technoscape through phone photography and hashtag metadata while also blurring lines between the artist and the curator, the player and the game designer. This project particularly has evolved to employ game design as an exhibition tool for the visualization of geo-social photography through hashtag play. Using hashtags as a game mechanic generates metadata that potentially identifies patterns of play and ways of seeing across player experiences as they attempt to make meaning of the images they encounter in the game. @deadquarewalking also demonstrates the potential of game design and geo-social, photo-sharing applications to illuminate new ways of documenting and witnessing the urban landscapes that we both collectively and uniquely inhabit. \u27In Irish culture, quare can mean very or extremely or it can be a spelling of the rural or Southern pronunciation of the word queer. Living in the American Southeast, I personally relate more to the term quare versus queer. Cultural theorist E. Patrick Johnson (2001) also argues for quareness as a way to question the subjective bias of whiteness in queer studies that risks discounting the lived experiences and material realities of people of color. Though I do not identify as a person of color and would be categorized as white or European American, quareness has an important critical application for considering how Orlando\u27s urban design is intersectionally racialized, gendered and classed

Soft cinematic hypertext (other literacies)

This research demonstrates the role of academic hypertext theory and practice to humanities research, and uses this as a model to explore the specificity of digital humanities practice in the contexts of scholarly writing. This establishes terms to reconsider cinema from the point of view of a hypertextual logic of wholes and parts, which is then used to develop a new form of online interactive video known as softvideo

Bits Creating Bonds: Lore as a Form of History in Creating Writing and Composition Pedagogy

This dissertation develops around a series of related arguments about lore: the role lore played in the disciplinary histories of both composition and creative writing, the longstanding yet diminishing dependence on lore in creative writing pedagogy, the distributed network created from tidbits of author testimony that helps students form social bonds, and finally, the mode by which contemporary students are situated through new media to be bricoleurs—or bricolores—of the array of conventional wisdom regarding how writing is “done, learned, and taught.” The canon of creative writing craft books and author interviews constitutes a major source of creative writing’s rich mythography. The House of Lore is largely comprised of and informed by these tidbits, and, through pedagogical dissemination, these fragments of writing advice, reflections on writing processes, and ruminations on “the writing life” are passed down through the generations. These fragments have a profoundly historical charge, and actually contain within thems a record of how creative works come into existence. When these fragments subsequently become part of individual student narratives of learning, apprentice writers in turn have the ability to form strong and meaningful bonds with mentors, fellow students, as well as with creative writing’s past. Lore’s potential for productive value might be elucidated if we can refocus our attention on the relational and history-specific contexts that shape these new encounters. All—teachers and students alike—who come in contact with these pedagogical fragments recombine/remake/remix them to meet new needs in what we can begin to think of as “Lore 2.0.” These tidbits can fuel further rhetorical invention, as well as create social bonds. Through the theoretical lens of Actor-network theory, we may better visualize and understand contemporary student learning narratives with respect to writing, both in first-year composition and creative writing.Doctor of Philosoph

Because I am Not Here, Selected Second Life-Based Art Case Studies. Subjectivity, Autoempathy and Virtual World Aesthetics

Second Life is a virtual world accessible through the Internet in which users create objects and spaces, and interact socially through 3D avatars. Certain artists use the platform as a medium for art creation, using the aesthetic, spatial, temporal and technological features of SL as raw material. Code and scripts applied to animate and manipulate objects, avatars and spaces are important in this sense. These artists, their avatars and artwork in SL are at the centre of my research questions: what does virtual existence mean and what is its purpose when stemming from aesthetic exchange in SL? Through a qualitative research method mixing distribute aesthetics, digital art and media theories, the goal is to examine aesthetic exchange in the virtual: subjectivity and identity and their possible shifting patterns as reflected in avatar-artists. A theoretical and methodological emphasis from a media studies perspective is applied to digital media and networks, contributing to the reshaping of our epistemologies of these media, in contrast to the traditional emphasis on communicational aspects. Four case studies, discourse and text analysis, as well as interviews in-world and via email, plus observation while immersed in SL, are used in the collection of data, experiences, objects and narratives from avatars Eva and Franco Mattes, Gazira Babeli, Bryn Oh and China Tracy. The findings confirm the role that aesthetic exchange in virtual worlds has in the rearrangement of ideas and epistemologies on the virtual and networked self. This is reflected by the fact that the artists examined—whether in SL or AL—create and embody avatars from a liminal (ambiguous) modality of identity, subjectivity and interaction. Mythopoeia (narrative creation) and experiencing oneself as ‘another’ through multiplied identity and subjectivity are the outcomes of code performance and machinima (films created in-world). They constitute a modus operandi (syntax) in which episteme, techne and embodiment work in symbiosis with those of the machine, affected by the synthetic nature of code and liminality in SL. The combined perspective from media studies and distribute aesthetics proves to be an effective method for studying these subjects, contributing to the discussion of contemporary virtual worlds and art theories

Persuasive Intelligence: On the Construction of Rhetor-Ethical Cognitive Machines

This work concerns the rhetorical and moral agency of machines, offering paths forward in machine ethics as well as problematizing the issue through the development and use of an interdisciplinary framework informed by rhetoric, philosophy of mind, media studies and historical narrative. I argue that cognitive machines of the past as well as those today, such as rapidly improving autonomous vehicles, are unable to make moral decisions themselves foremost because a moral agent must first be a rhetorical agent, capable of persuading and of being persuaded. I show that current machines, artificially intelligent or otherwise, and especially digital computers, are primarily concerned with control, whereas persuasive behavior requires an understanding of possibility. Further, this dissertation connects rhetorical agency and moral agency (what I call a rhetor-ethical constitution) by way of the Heraclitean notion of syllapsis ( grasping ), a mode of cognition that requires an agent to practice analysis and synthesis at once, cognizing the whole and its parts simultaneously. This argument does not, however, indicate that machines are devoid of ethical or rhetorical activity or future agency. To the contrary, the larger purpose of developing this theoretical framework is to provide avenues of research, exploration and experimentation in machine ethics and persuasion that have been overlooked or ignored thus far by adhering to restricted disciplinary programs; and, given the ontological nature of the ephemeral binary that drives digital computation, I show that at least in principle, computers share the syllaptic operating principle required for rhetor-ethical decisions and action

Internet art and interaction: a study into the creation of a taxonomy of interaction in online art works

Using the hypothesis that interaction with net art can be categorised, the primary purpose of the research was to generate a taxonomy of this interaction. Emphasis is given to interactive web based works that require the user to participate by contributing material to the piece. An initial period of contextualisation was required to position net art within contemporary arts culture this included an examination of previous attempts at categorising interactivity and the exploration of connected historical art practices. Most previous attempts at categorisation either characterise types of interactive work, or detail specific interactive characteristics the work itself may have. This aim of this thesis was to take an alternative approach by focusing on the interaction itself in order to create a taxonomy. To establish this characterisation of interactivity, several practical pieces of internet art were created that doubled as data collection tools. The main outcome of this project resulted in the development of my own Connected, Partially Connected and Unconnected ( C.P.U.) model of interactivity. This in turn necessitated the examination of the interactive process which resulted in defining a loop of interaction . This loop of interaction specifies several separate phases to the interactive process, the C.P.U. model of interactivity occupying one of these phases. This thesis primarily provides a platform with which to further interrogate interaction with net art. An unexplored area of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that is specific to net art has been identified and is therefore of use to theorists and researchers working in this area. It is also of use to artists enabling them to better understand how interaction is understood within the context of their own practice