Final Essay - Hunter Rose Myers

In my final essay, I chose the topic of data mining. My essay is titled Covertly Clandestine because data mining is a form of unraveling hidden secrets. I begin my essay by providing background information on the subject of data mining, as well as discussing researchers who have made both negative and positive comments about data mining. For the empirical research section, I chose to data mine song lyrics written by Beatles members John Lennon and Paul McCartney. I did this in order to compare the two artists and find out what word frequencies can reveal about popular music. Enjoy.

Final Essay - Rachel Heming

My final essay is titled Exploring Multiple Endings in Video Games. It discusses the different ways developers implement multiple endings and the reasons for doing so.

RPG's

Role Playing Video Games: Traversing through an Alternate Universe

For my final project, I wanted to focus on a topic near and dear to my heart: Role Playing Video Games. RPG's always appealed to me, and for my paper, I wanted to answer a few questions about them: What they are, how we interact inside and out the video game, what relationships and bonds do we develop from the games, and what positive mental, physical, and social benefits we can receive from playing RPGs.

The title of my final essay is Video Games and Books; A More Immersive Narrative. This essay talks about video games being a more immersive narrative since they capitalize on the benefits of the digital world.

Essay Exhibits

This semester, our class has learned a great amount about digital humanities. The essay exhibits that we created demonstrated not only the diversity of the field, but also how much we've learned. No two exhibits that I viewed were about the same thing, and I'm sure there were many other topics we could have covered. It is truly amazing to think about how expansive digital humanities is and how much we're still learning about it.

One exhibit that I found especially interesting was The Intersection of "Video Games and Religion" by Hunter Graham. His exhibit detailed that lack of attention video games get regarding religious reference and why this should not be the case. He cited examples such as the Zelda series's focus on three goddesses and how it was initially going to have elements of Christianity in it. The Game Journey was also included, and how the journey through the game is similar to someone traversing through life to reach a destination. His exhibit made me realize just how little attention is paid to religious references in games compared to other media.

Another exhibit that I  viewed was Caitee Baird's "Electronic Literature: New and Improved English?" It discussed the benefits of integrating electronic literature into classroom settings. One of the key benefits was that it appeals to students that have different learning styles, such as kinetic poems to hands-on learners and art-based pieces for visual learners. She even gave some exam
ples of types of e-lit that would be appropriate for each age level: literacy apps for elementary school, Google maps essays for middle school, and various kinds for high school. In a world that is advancing technologically very quickly, her essay addressed topics that many schools will likely have to discuss in the coming years.

All of the exhibits explored topics and asked questions that exemplify what our class has learned this semester. It was interesting to see each person's specific areas of interest in this diverse and expaniding field.

Essay Exhibits

     Over the course of this semester, I have gained an abundance of information, tools, and techniques involving digital culture which can help me in all areas of life. Whether I am creating a presentation for a job, researching materials, or fiddling around with technology in my leisure time, this Digital Humanities course has provided me with amateur experience, as well as highlighting new interests.
     Our final class project is creating an essay comprised of researched materials exploring multimedia in digital humanities. As an insider to what other students are writing about, our class exhibited a brief presentation of our individual essay ideas, and our classmates provided feedback about our projects.
     One of the projects I viewed in detail was about Virtual Reality and how it could affect job training. It begins by defining Virtual Reality (VR) a 3D world, created digitally, that allows the user to interact and manipulate objects within the world while stimulating each one of their senses. Next, there is a short video explaining VR more in depth. Then, career fields that are adopting VR practices are listed, including: Healthcare, Education, Advertising, Military, etc. Finally, it tells how a few of these careers use VR in their job training programs. I thought this exhibit was interesting because it demonstrates how growing digital technologies are being used in every day life, and could possibly affect us in our future jobs.

     Another project that I viewed in detail was about Video Games in the Education System. First, it defines gamification as the process of taking something that already exists and integrating game mechanics into it to motivate participation and engagement. Next, the presentation explains how video games are already implemented into the education system and what ways they can benefit students. For example, changes in cognitive development and socialization skills are detailed as improving children's' visual processes, attention span, relationship readiness. Finally, it closes with a brief video outlining the basics of gamification in school programs. I appreciated this exhibit because I would have liked being exposed to this type of teaching technique while in high school. However, maybe my children can benefit from this type of learning in the future.

Essay Exhibits

Walking around and viewing many of my classmates final presentations, it truly illustrates how massive the field of Digital Humanities is. Throughout the exhibits, it was very interesting to come across all of the different topics that so many people found interest in, such as video games, technological convergence, data-mining, and even Google Maps essays. One of my favorite essay exhibits I viewed was by Dominique Marini. Dom covered the idea of the benefits from playing video games, from a Social, Emotional, and Physical perspective. I could personally relate to Dom's project, which I believe is why I enjoyed learning about what he had to say. Growing up playing video games my whole life, I found it interesting to make connections between Dom's research and my own personal experience with video games, especially when the topic of Skyrim came up: a game I have spent many many hours playing myself. Dom's presentation was well informed and brought up many thought provoking ideas.

A second presentation I viewed and enjoyed was Jon Dicey's presentation of the prevalence of video games in modern-day society. Dicey used a wide variety of data to determine who are today's "video gamers," and what video games are most commonly played and how they have changed. He also added into his project of how the majority of these people playing video games are affected by playing them.


Each presentation I viewed intriguingly and uniquely captured the area of the Digital Humanities field that they were covering. However, some of the most interesting projects I viewed were all centered around video games because I could both learn and provide input for these presentations. My final project is centered around video games, so all these exhibits also provided some inspiration for my own project as well.

Essay Exhibits

The field of Digital Humanities covers a wide range of topics that were all displayed by students in their essay exhibits. From literature and video games to music and data mining Digital Humanities is relevant almost everywhere. It was surprising to see that nearly everyone had a different topic that they were talking about. The exhibits that were put on display in class highlighted many different things and all showed the keypoints of the final essay very well. After going through each exhibit I felt like I actually learned something about that specific topic. One exhibit that I looked at was Jon Dicey’s exhibit on How Video Games Affect Society. This presentation provided a lot of good information on who today’s gamers are and what they play. Statistically information was provided to see the age range of today's gamers. A lot of information on how video games affect people in today’s society was also provided. This exhibit relates to my own essay and it was helpful to see another person’s perspective on a similar topic to mine. Another exhibit that I was able to look at was Emily Sasso’s exhibit on Datamining Boy Bands. This presentation highlighted a lot of key points about data mining and what she found as she datamined information and statistics about the bands. Finding trends throughout different boy bands was interesting to see since you don’t pick up on those things when listening to their music. Every presentation that I was able to look at had some interesting aspect to it that displayed what Digital Humanities is about. I realized when looking at both of these presentations that they exhibit two completely different things that are still encompassed in Digital Humanities. These exhibits are a good representation of the digital humanities not just for the reason that they are about the digital humanities but they represent the areas of study that it covers.

Convergence

Henry Jenkins is the author of "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide." It is a book that conceptualizes how humans' consumption of media is a collective process also known as collective intelligence (coined by French cyber theorist Pierre Levy). It highlights the idea that none of us can know everything; each of us knows something, and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.

Jenkins writes that convergence starts and ends with what he calls the "Black Box Fallacy." This means that sooner or later, all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms. These black boxes include VCR, digital cable boxes, DVD players, digital recorders, sound systems, gaming consoles, videotapes, DVDs, CDs, game cartridges, controllers, and TV.  He goes on to explain that a pull toward more specialized media appliances coexists with a push toward more generic devices. The proliferation of black boxes is a symptomatic moment of convergence where we are being forced to buy a range of specialized and incompatible appliances. An example of this is the iPhone 7. This iPhone requires one to either purchase wireless headphones or buy an adapter because there is no headphone jack on the phone.


The idea of convergence means that all the technology we have today, will continue to exponentially expand until we have an ultimate, even possibly artificially intelligent, device through the process of a technological convergence. Through applications, or through other forms of media, this merging of technology would significantly change our day-to-day lives.

Media convergence impacts the way people consume media. For example, as young adults who grew up with technology, we have experienced this first hand. Sometimes we find ourselves doing homework while surfing the web or online shopping, while listening to music and searching for new music, all at the same time we are texting friends, responding to emails, and much more. This picture of the iPhone as a tool with many different function (i.e. an umbrella, knife, cork screw, hammer, etc). More and more, convergence is requiring media companies to rethink old programming and marketing assumptions about what it means to consume media.

Blog Post 8

The Art of the Video Game: The Evolution of Video Game Illustration

Video Game Art Archive

Since the birth of the Digital Humanities field, archiving has been used as a way of creating and preserving works of electronic literature. Archiving in the digital world means that many different works of literature, ranging from centuries ago, are digitized into a thematic collection.

To create an archive like this, the primary source of materials would be the games themselves. Screenshots would be taken from classically iconic scenes from games and used on the timeline. By clicking these images, the user would be taken to a page containing more images from the game, such as character art and world maps.

As some gaming consoles have become obsolete, the video games once played on them have as well. For example, video games in the 1970s were simple, child-like arcade games. One would have to hop on their bike, ride to the arcade and use quarters to play these games. Some of the more popular arcade games of the time include: Space Invaders (one of the earliest space shooting games), Pong (one of the first sports arcade games to reach mainstream popularity), or Galaxian (another popular space shooting game). An archive of their artwork is a great example of a way to preserve the memory and existence of these games. Having open access to these records can allow people to come together and connect with one another and reflect on the changes of video games over the past 40-50 years.

Video games are no different than any other technology in terms of their exponential levels of growth, and this is seen in a single decade of video game graphics. From the 1970s to the late 1980s, video games visually developed from pixelated characters and GIF-like animations to the user controlled. They further expanded into more immersive graphics like of those in the mid 1980s: for example, the famous Super Mario Bros. Archiving these transformations allows people to view the changes within the artistic values of video games, and as with any other form of history, these video games are important preserve. The art in video games are always going to evolve, and without archiving these classic, original, and fundamental games they would fall into extinction.

Organizing the content chronologically can give viewers a sense of how far technology has come since its creation and a greater appreciation for the realistic graphics present in many games today. While it is impossible to play every video game that has ever been released, people will still be able to get a feeling of what these games were like by viewing the artwork from them. The following images are both from the Final Fantasy franchise. The first image is from the original game Final Fantasy, released in 1987, and the most recent Final Fantasy XV, released in 2016 (about 30 years later).

Throughout these archives, one can see the graphics of the game as well as the artwork that the game designers implemented into the scenery for players to experience. For example, there are paintings that are archived that come directly from the walls of the castle in “Castlevania”. Many times these pieces of art are put throughout the scenery to highlight important characters, places, or events. Archiving this artwork saves important parts of games throughout history.

Blog Post - Response to Bots and Self-Generating Texts

I found that this blog post was comprised of the topics of bots, text, creation, and generating because those are the top 4 most used words within the blog. This was interesting because the words bots and generating are in the title as well as most commonly used within the body of the text. When looking at the world snippet (below), I was not surprised to see the words bots, create, human, generating, and text in the biggest font and having the greatest connection with one another. If I had not written/read the blog post “Response to Bots and Self-Generating Texts,” I could still hypothesize what the genre of the text would be from the key words and phrases provided by the Voyant technology data-mining website.

    When I plugged in the top 4 most commonly used words from our blog into Google’s Ngram viewer, the results were not in strong correlation with one another. The words “text” and “create” follow the same linear pattern, with a slight upwards spike in the 1940s and a downward shift closer to the 2000s. The words text and create have a steep upwards slope in the 1980s-90s which is important to note because that was when the Internet was becoming a prevalent part in everyone’s lives. The word “bots” seems to have little to no data, while the word “generating” has very little to no data until the the 1900s with a small jump near the 1970s. With such little data, I cannot hypothesize much.

Blog Post - Response to E-Lit - 75 most common words

This post was a response to electronic literature, and we focused on a piece titled “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge” by Dinty Moore. His name was the word used most commonly. This makes sense, as we frequently referenced his work. The most common words all make sense within the context of the post: moore, story, literature, electronic, plimpton, etc. 

When plugging the three most common terms into an Ngram viewer, I disregarded ‘Moore’ and ‘Plimpton’ as they are names and are unlikely to wield results. When using the words ‘story,’ ‘literature,’ and ‘electronic,’ the result was the following:

The word ‘story’ has always had fluctuating popularity. There is a correlation between a rise in the frequency of both ‘literature’ and electronic’ from around 1940 to 2000. During that time, there was a rise in the number of digital products being researched and made available, and before this time they were almost unheard of. ‘Literature’ has always had some popularity, and it is steadily increasing over time (with a few dips here and there). If the Ngram viewer could show up to this year, I would be curious to see if there was an even greater correlation between them because of the rise in popularity of electronic literature.

Serendip-o-matic Run of a CNN News Article

Rachel Heming - Original Work of E-Lit

The title of my original work of electronic literature is Impractical Magic, It is a "choose your own adventure" story made with Twine where you play as a wizard's apprentice making potions.

Devon Cuda Original Work of E-Lit

My Final Season is the title of my DH original work of E-Literature. This is a google maps essay that tells the story of my senior year of high school wrestling. It highlights the areas in Pennsylvania where I trained and had my biggest tournaments.

Hunter Rose Myers DH Media Project

The title of my DH Media project is DH Original Media Project with my name and 12:00 as the description. It is about my spring break excursions and includes my personal ideas and pictures.

Brenden Bowser -- Original Work of Electronic Literature

Synopsis: For my final piece, I decided to create a twitter bot based on fitness. My inspiration for the piece is Aziz Shavershian, an Australian YouTuber and bodybuilder who inspired thousands to begin their fitness career. As one of my most influential role models, Aziz a.k.a "Zyzz" created his "aesthetics revolution" through his love for bodily perfection, trance music, and a pursuit of happiness. Tragically, On 5 August 2011, while on holiday in Thailand, he suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 22. I saw this twitter bot as a way to combine bot technology with an ever expanding twitter page created in memory of Zyzz.

https://twitter.com/Aesthetics_Bot1

Blog Post #6

This blog is a focused response to Kurweil, thoughts on the so-called singularity, virtual identities, artificial intelligence, and sentience.

Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction writer, who posited that accelerating technological change would inevitably lead to machine intelligence that would match and then surpass human intelligence. Coined the term “singularity” in 1993.

Technological Singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial super-intelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.

“The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” is a non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil (2006). The book builds on the ideas introduced in Kurzweil’s previous books. He describes his law of accelerating returns which predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Once the singularity has been reached, Kurzweil writes that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterwards he predicts intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe. Ray Kurzweil claims that AI will outstrip human capabilities by 2045.

Ray’s predictions are a byproduct of his understanding of the power of Moore’s Law, more specifically Ray’s “Law of Accelerating Returns” and of exponential technologies. These technologies follow an exponential growth curve based on the principle that the computing power that enables them doubles every two years. [Moore’s Law was coined by Gordon Moore, who was considered to be a pioneer of silicon valley (1965) that observed information technologies as following an exponential growth curve based on the principle that the computing power that enables them doubles every two years.] As humans, we are biased to think linearly. However, entrepreneurs think exponentially. Peter Diamandis talks about the 6D’s of exponential thinking in writing that most of us cannot see the things Ray sees because the initial growth stages of exponential; digitized technologies are deceptive. Before people know it, they are disruptive—for example, the massive companies that have been disrupted by technological advances in AI, virtual reality, robotics, internet technology, mobile phones, OCR, translation software, and voice control technology. Each of these technologies de-materialized, demonetized, and democratized access to services and products that used to be linear and non-scalable. Now, these technologies power multi-billion dollar companies and affect billions of lives.
John Markoff wrote “When is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime.” He writes that the idea of singularity is a misconception. He thinks that computers will not outstrip human capabilities within many of our lifetimes, and that humans won’t be obsolete for a long time, if ever.

Blog Post #5

Wikipedia defines literature as works which are considered of superior or lasting artistic merit; it defines art as the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination. Video games embody all of these characteristics, thus making them both forms of literature and art. Many scholars argue over the differences that distinguish video games as separate media forms, but various real-life applications have presented their evidence otherwise. However, the term "video games" is very broad, so one could look at how different video games cover different questions we have about our interactions with these games. Video games over the years have changed exponentially, from the classic arcade games such as Pong and Pacman, to the current ultra-realistic, and even virtual reality games we play today. What started as a joystick and button has been revolutionized into an all immersive, in-game experience where we are now able to change into a virtual body.

Different game studies have been completed and experimented with in order to further understand the culture and logic behind video games. This research employs study through the social sciences, industry and engineering, and the humanities. Areas such as the players in the games, the design of the games, and the role games play in society are each examined in order to better comprehend how video games affect people.






One of the most controversial questions raised about video games is the effect they have on behavior, and more specifically, anger and aggression. For years, video game cynics often blamed certain video games for certain acts of violence. The real question that should be asked is why people relate video game violence with real-world violence in the first place. Games such as Call of Duty and other first person shooters that people often associate with violence, only produce spontaneous violence, lasting usually around 15 seconds (normally directed towards the noob who shot you). So if video games don't attack our daily emotions, then what effects do they have on us?

Furthermore, an article written by Drew Guarini titled, "9 Ways Video Games Can Actually Be Good For You" outlines specific examples of video games which have had a positive impact on people. For example, expert action gamers who play "Call of Duty" have a higher contrast sensitivity function, which allows them to notice subtle changes in the brightness of an image. This is applicable to those who drive at night because they can pick out bright patches of light much easier. The ability to apply video games into the real world is one of the biggest developments that is changing the way we understand and appreciate video games.

Electronic Literature in the Form of a Solar System

Electronic Literature is a very broad field that takes on many forms, such as electronic poems, E-books, self-generating texts, and many others. One of my personal favorite forms are interactive based narratives, that tell their story based on how you react to the piece. 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein is placed under as an interactive based narrative of the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, with each one of the 88 constellations in the night sky being given a role in the philosopher's life. 

The piece suggests that the narrative is to be played with your left hand (Wittgenstein's brother lost his right hand, but continued to be an avid piano player with left-handed music). The 88 separate constellations all give history into the life of Wittgenstein, highlighting the events occurring throughout his life, and how they are apart of his philosophy. The story of Wittgenstein ends at a place called "Storey's End", where Wittgenstein claimed that he had a wondrous life, whereas his friends saw him as having a torturous life, coming to an end on a long night in April where perhaps, "An angel got his wings."

88 Constellations plays out the events through Wittgenstein's life, and with every story, makes the reader think. apart from receiving a dose of 20th century history, the piece references to his philosophy, where it creates a constant puzzle of piecing together Wittgenstein's life and tying those events to the philosophical ideas he believed; "Wittgenstein's life was a series of moments, and our story is a series of constellations."

In our world today, 88 Constellations gives insight, and provides new thoughts and ideas, that no book would ever be capable of doing. The piece takes would could have been a story lain in a book, and animates using intriguing sounds, visuals, and voice narration to provide a much more in depth experience with Wittgenstein than that would ever be able otherwise, This piece I found to be one of the most informative, creative, and understandable pieces we have viewed so far, it brilliantly collects together the pieces of his life, but while informing, every single piece starts to question the mind, far beyond what many other works of Electronic Literature are able to do.

Blog Post #4

Creatively Un-creative Writing

In 2011, American poet Kenneth Goldsmith coined the term "Uncreative Writing" in his book of essays, called Uncreative Writing:Managing Language in the Digital Age. Uncreative writing can take many forms, including writing screenplays for existing television shows and videos, creating essays comprised of pieces of other people's writings, and transcribing audio clips. In many of Goldsmith’s works, he often infers on the idea that “re-purposing a work is not plagiarism”, a theory that has brought much criticism along with it. These criticisms stem from where credit should be given. Re-purposed works have many different authors, and it becomes hard to tell who is the actual creator of the work. There are many different collaborators in a re-purposed work that all deserve credit for their part in the new piece. 

In the link below is a poem compiled of text that has been generated by our four tribe members in a group chat. The poem we created was composed of the audio we heard from three separate videos, a KurtCobain interview, Jimmy Fallon #MomTexts, and a history of rap with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake. Each member of our tribe typed into the chat bits and pieces of what we heard in these videos, and we composed them into what can really be describes as a poem of many things. The most interesting part of this work is that while simultaneously hearing the same audio feed, each member tended to chose the same words/phrases to type into the chat. This makes the poem a flow of words our brains interpret, intertwined together, creating a poem of our similarities of mind. 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nFqDHeQ5QIwByBSfgwME9HB11fiVcYhCn7cNecsWrDo/edit?usp=sharing

Response to Bots & Self-Generating Texts

Whether you know it or not, there is a good chance that you have interacted with web robots at least once before, or even interact with them everyday. So what exactly is a “web robot”? These robots, commonly known as bots, are programs that run automated tasks. These bots create simple and complex works, typically with the purpose of generating what for humans would be time consuming and never ending works. However, many of these bots are often used for malicious reasons. For example, certain chat-bots are used for scamming purposes since many of these self-generating text bots can easily be confused for being actual humans writing the text. Programmers set up parameters for the bots to follow so the text they create follows grammar rules and speech patterns to make them sound more human-like.

“Taroko Gorge” is a self-generating poem created by poet/digital media artist Nick Montfort. The text is produced line by line scrolling down the screen, endlessly describing a nature scene. This work is written in a code which Montfort gives the public free permission to use, copy, modify, or distribute. His code has allowed many other authors create and publish their own works of self-generating text. These automated programs are different than other software because they produce content that humans can interact with or view from an artistic standpoint. They are also different because they do not create the same work more than once, text generating bots formulate text randomly every time. Even though the text these bots create is random, they still follow sentence structure and speech patterns.

Pentametron is a Twitter bot created by Ranjit Bhatnagar. Bhatnagar is also interested in working with language, technology, and sound materials, which helped the development of this bot. Essentially, this bot uses an online dictionary service to locate various tweets in iambic pentameter. The bot then holds that tweet until it detects another tweet with the same rhyming pattern, and retweets them both to create a rhyming couplet. For example, tweets in succession include, “up for whatever reason .. nothing new,” “been craving some Korean BBQ,” “here goes another unproductive day,” “I have an interview tomorrow, yay!” According to a statement by the Electronic Literature Collection, Bhatnagar commented on his Twitter bot saying, “as a sound artist who studied some linguistics, I’m interested in language as a material for fabricating new kinds of art".

Corrupted Image

Corrupted Image

Corrupted Image

Rachel Heming -- E-Poetry

E-Lit, Digital Poetry, etc...

With technology advancing every day, developments are constantly being made in all kinds of areas. Many of the arts are being hybridized with these technological advancements, and it has paved the way for a myriad of possibility. Electronic literature is just one intersection of these two realms. The written arts are presented in a more visually captivating, user-interactive format. Looking more deeply at e-lit, one can find e-poetry.

E-poetry utilizes cutting-edge, digital formats to bring new life and meaning to poems. The technological aspect of it allow for a great diversity in the types of poems, from short, simple visual pieces to touch-interactive haptic poems. We looked at several different e-poems in class, but one that really stood out to me is titled "The Sweet Old Etcetera."



It is similar in name to E.E. Cummings's poem "My Sweet Old Etcetera." The reason for this is that this online work is composed of pieces of his writing. The viewer is presented with a bare scene, and by interacting with different parts of it, the scenery grows and changes. By the end, the viewer is presented with a beautiful landscape.


The style of the different sections mirrors the style of Cummings's poems. The use of parentheses in both leads to cleverly written works, and the whimsical, carefree tone of each evokes a sense of youth. The advantage of the e-poem is that it can utilize motion and sound in a way that classical poetry cannot.


Various sounds are produced when the reader interacts with the poem. They are similar to guitar chords and evoke a sense of remembrance and calm. Poetry in its classical form is meant to elicit some kind of response from the reader. E-poetry does this as well, but arguably has different ways for doing so. Everything about the image is also just text and color. The landscape is comprised by pieces of text. While a traditional poem could have this element, it could not unfold and progress the way this one does with user interaction. 

Everything from the unfolding of the landscape, to the animation of the words, to the soft yet striking music makes this piece a touching, powerful work of art. 

Created by: Rachel Heming

                                 Poetry and the Digital World

Poems have shifted from simple paper and ink into an interactive experience for readers. In class we were given the opportunity to look at many different works of e-Poetry. To first understand the works the class had to understand what e-Poetry is. After learning that e-Poetry engages in aspects that digital media offers we looked at a piece titled “ask me for the moon”.

This piece involves poems describing the labor behind the scenes in a Hawaii resort. At first glance I felt that this topic would not catch my interest, however by the author immersing his work into the digital world he made it a piece that appeals to many more readers such as myself. I caught myself paying much more attention to what I read as I interacted with the piece. Clicking through I was much more immersed due to the author using Adobe Flash to make the work dynamic instead of stagnant text. The flash animations and the dark colors draw your interest in as you watch Waikiki slowly appear before you. The dark colors symbolizing the work done at night and behind close doors to keep guests happy only enforce this notion that is already being made throughout the poem. Messages and themes of the poems can be conveyed much stronger with the sound and visual effects that the digital world offers.

The verses of the poem appearing and disappearing forces readers to actually pay attention as they read through the story. This is what makes e-Poetry much more interesting than normal poetry. e-Poetry forces you to think and interpret what is going on throughout the poem. I feel that e-Poetry is a better way to present new poems due to their interactive aspects. These poems appeal to an audience outside of those who will recreationally read poetry. e-Poetry is a step in the right direction for digital literature.