Ambient literature and the beginning of a ubiquitous everything

As an emerging form of pervasive media, “ambient literature” presents an opportunity for re-thinking the book’s engagement with contemporary technology and the broader social setting in which each operate. Building on themes developed in psychogeography and enacted in so-called locative literature, ambient literature utilizes techniques founded in ubiquitous and “calm” computing in order to leverage the context of the reader toward literary effect. With utopian visions of calm computing imagining a world in which computers fade into the background of experience and in which human life is inextricably linked to the technologies we use, how are literature and the book changed through this engagement? What does it mean for literature when the book is no longer a discrete moment of experience, but is entangled with both everyday experience and global communication networks? Building from already-existent understandings of the hermeneutic conditions linking reading, everyday life, and the wider world, this paper engages the question of the disappearance of the book into a generalized information system, one which is increasingly both present and invisible. With the contextual limits of the book effaced and replaced by a generalized field of computational effect, classic questions in critical informatics are reinvigorated to examine the entanglement of reading and movements of computerization. How is a literature which in its form and reception is inextricably linked to wider technological networks to be understood? Is it possible to continue to think in terms of individuated literary products? Taking cues from research in new media, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, and human-computer interaction, this paper will examine the newfound contextual conditions of literature, mapping out the ontological and ethical implications of the book’s computational turn

Poetics of attention and the experience of ambient literature

Utilizing techniques derived from contextual and ubiquitous computing, works of “ambient literature” highlight connections between literary texts and the wider contexts of their engagement. As such, a necessary aspect of these works is the modulation of readers’ attention between the text itself and the context within which it is read. Building on Charles Bernstein’s account of the role readers’ attention plays within poetic texts, this paper examines the connections that exist between new forms of digital writing (such as ambient literature) and the poetic traditions stemming from language-centered writing. For each, attempts to locate (both literarily and theoretically) the poetic text within broader networks of social, material, and historical context serve as anchor to the relationship between the linguistic artifice and reception of the work. In focusing on the role a reader’s attention plays in both existing pre-digital and digital writing, a general model of readers’ attention is able to be developed. By bringing discussions of ambient literature together with existing traditions of avant garde practice, it becomes possible to critically engage the question of attention as it comes to be expressed in post-digital forms. In recognizing the permeability between classical analog and contemporary digital forms of writing as they both exist within a wider world, attention comes to be inscribed as a fundamental aspect of not only the reception of a work, but within the work itself. By drawing these connections between new forms of digital media and aspects of the historical landscape of avant garde textual practices, it becomes possible to both critically engage the territory of post-digital writing and develop strategies for the analysis and creation of ambient literature

Some digital literature questions for the digital humanities

In examining the rise of new forms of digital literature which take advantage of contemporary ubiquitous technologies, the ambient literature project raises questions regarding how digital and interactive literature can be studied and understood as a form of practice based research contained within the idea of the digital humanities. Building on existing approaches in locative and interactive narrative, ambient literature provides an umbrella term for works which incorporate the situation and context of the reader within the work itself. Through the commissioning of three literary works which target the specific formal and generic claims put forward by the concept of ambient literature, the research project makes use of design-based research techniques developed in the area of human-computer interaction in order to understand these new forms of variable and interactive works of literature. In this, the ambient literature project provides a model for how the field of the digital humanities might take advantage of an expanded set of computational methods in order to study novel forms of contemporary literature

Constant-Factor FPT Approximation for Capacitated k-Median

Capacitated k-median is one of the few outstanding optimization problems for which the existence of a polynomial time constant factor approximation algorithm remains an open problem. In a series of recent papers algorithms producing solutions violating either the number of facilities or the capacity by a multiplicative factor were obtained. However, to produce solutions without violations appears to be hard and potentially requires different algorithmic techniques. Notably, if parameterized by the number of facilities k, the problem is also W[2] hard, making the existence of an exact FPT algorithm unlikely. In this work we provide an FPT-time constant factor approximation algorithm preserving both cardinality and capacity of the facilities. The algorithm runs in time 2^O(k log k) n^O(1) and achieves an approximation ratio of 7+epsilon