Preliminary Business

• Attendance
• Teams (Team formation page) 
• Upcoming team and solo assignments:

Upcoming team tasks	Upcoming solo tasks
Meet at least once outside class by Monday Feb. 12th
Wed. Feb 14th: in-class project planning workshop	Wed. Feb. 14th:  Digital Analysis (Distant Reading) Assignment due -- Write a 3-4 page essay that uses any tool or method of digital analysis to assist in in making an interpretive argument about a work or collection of works.
[No class Monday Feb. 19th, campus holiday]
Wed. Feb. 21: team presentations of project ideass See Assignment:s >Team Project > Team Preparatory Tasks > Presentation of Project Ideas Prepare a Team Project Home Page for your presentation; see folder for Team Projects.
	Mon. Feb. 26th: E-Lit Creative Assignment Solo Assignment due -- Conceptualize and demonstrate (at least in partial form) how you would create an E-lit work.

 

 

Today's Readings:

• Readings
• Manuel Portela, Chapter 4 from Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines (2013) [requires course password]
• N. Katherine Hayles, Chapter 2 from Writing Machines (2002)  
• E-Lit
• Raymond Queneau, Cent Mille Millards de Poemes (online version) 
• William Poundstone, Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (2005) 
• Matt Schneider, @rm_everyfile (see also his short paper "Bot Rot") (2016) 

Practicums:

• Kyle Spears
• Malire Lozada
• Jack Kilgore
• Emily Schwab
• Rosalie Moreno
• Juliet-Way Henthorne 

Key Terms for Today:

• Interface
• Portela, pg. 208: "[The interface] functions as an organizing and narrative principle that imposes order on a database made of modular signs. This mediating interface creates a privileged reading sequence or calls forth several reading sequences that result in specific instantiations of the work's formal materiality."
• Hayles, pg. 22
• From Alexander Galloway,  The Interface Effect pg. 82: "Data have no necessary visual form."
• Platform
• Technotext
• From Hayles, pg. 25: "When a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it, it mobilizes reflexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence."
• Media-Specific Analysis
• From Hayles, pg. 29: "Complementing the foundational concepts of material metaphors, inscription technologies and technotexts is a kind of criticism that pays attention to the material apparatus producing the literary work as physical artifact."

Poetic Machines (Textual)

• William Carlos Williams, "A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words...There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. "

• Raymond Queneau, Cent Mille Millards de Poemes

• Nanni Balestrini, Tristano

Poetic Machines (Flash and JavaScript)

• William Poundstone, Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}
• Code and Source Text (from Jessica Pressman, Mark C. Marino, and Jeremy Douglass, Reading Project) 
•  Rui Torres, Humus - poema continuo 
• David Jhave Johnston, Spam Heart 
• Tan Lin, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Systems Theory 

Poetic Machines (Twitter Bots)

• Matt Schneider, @rm_everyfile
• Zach Whalen, @ClearCongress 
• Mark Sample, @NSA_PRISMbot 
• Mark Sample, "A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit"