April 16th

Venue: University of Tartu Library, Struve 1, Tartu

Cultural heritage: Digital library

Main hall
12.00

Digital Memory and Common Sense

The paper focuses on the availability of national memory in digital era, discussing the practice of national libraries and the possibilities and dangers of different technologies in preserving national memory and creating access to it. The authors address ideological, economic and administrative aspects connected with developing long-term preservation, as a potential for making national memory available. The paper also touches upon the issues avoidable in this discourse, incl. questions about the possibility and credence of combining digital preservation and technological experience, preceding the period of industrial revolution. The authors are searching for historical roots of this field dilemmas that they came across while working out ”The strategic development plan of the National Library of Estonia 2009-2013”.

For those looking for information and experiences:  National Digital Library of Finland

The National Digital Library is one of the research, innovation and creativity environments, the development of which is among the strategic policies of the Ministry of Education of Finland. It implements national culture and science policies by means of increasing the availability and preservation of the electronic information resources of libraries, archives and museums, and by means of establishing a significant research infrastructure and strengthening electronic learning environments.

The term of the project is 2008-2011. A total of 35 organisations are participating in the project: ministries, national institutions in charge of recording and preserving cultural heritage, scientific and public libraries, archives, museums, universities, research institutes, academic associations and representatives from other key interest groups.

Besides creating common solutions, the implementation of the National Digital Library requires harmonized practices, continuous interaction, and agreement on the rules of the game.

The services, practices and procedures generated by the project will have a substantial impact on the entire library, museum and archive sector. With the creation of the National Digital Library, the common utilization of infrastructures, as well as access to national information resources, will become more efficient. To maximize the benefits of these new solutions, organizations will be updating their processes, working hard to build interfaces, and committing themselves “in the future as well“ to joint R&D work.

The National Digital Library project develops and implements a public interface for information retrieval of the most essential electronic information resources of libraries, archives and museums. The most essential, prioritised materials of libraries, archives and museums will be digitised, described and made available for information searches via the public interface. A plan for long-term storage solution for cultural heritage materials will be created in the project. Competence in the area of digitisation and online availability of cultural and cultural heritage materials and the long-term preservation of electronic cultural heritage materials will be boosted.

The public interface offers a simple and easy-to-use access to the materials and online services of Finnish libraries, archives and museums. The basis for the development of the service is meeting customer needs. The future end-user-groups include, for example: general public, researchers, other professionals, the educational sector, artists, the authorities and media. The public interface will be launched in 2011 and it will also act as the national aggregator for the European Digital Library, Europeana.
For more information: http://www.kdk2011.fi/en/

Large-scale aggregation of digital content from distributed digital libraries in Poland

In June 2007, PSNC started a new service based on distributed digital libraries in Poland: PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation (PIONIER DLF), which may be accessed at http://fbc.pionier.net.pl/. The mission of this service is to: facilitate the use of resources of Polish digital libraries and repositories (1), increase the visibility of Polish digital resources in the Internet (2), give Internet users access to new, advanced network services based on the resources of Polish digital libraries and repositories (3).

This mission is realized by constant development of the PIONIER DLF functionality, by its popularization and cooperation with international projects like EuropeanaLocal. As a part of the project, digital publications aggregated in PIONIER DLF will be made available in Europeana.
  

Changing clients of the digital library

University of Tartu Library, the oldest university library in Estonia, made its digital library accessible to the end users after buying its first scanner (at the end of the 1990s). That is the most accurate definition for the beginning of “the era of the library becoming digital”. The process of developing into a digital library (as it articulated in most common definitions) has developed gradually, starting with the library’s own homepage, converting bibliographic records into ProCite, some years later into INGRID database etc.
In the developmental process of a digital library the main emphasis has always been on the information contents and technical applications. The visitor of the library has obviously been the main target of these changes.

However, the image of the end user has remained somewhat blurry. It has been assumed that, as the university library’s main responsibility is to meet the information needs of its patrons (i.e. faculty, other staff and students of the University of Tartu), the digital library is supporting the same user groups in the digital environment. At the same time, it has also been very tempting to imagine that a digital library is ready to serve the whole wide world – just like all contents one can find in WWW. But even so the digital library has to be created, keeping in mind the information needs and behaviour of particular user communities. In reality, the users need to be positioned somewhere between those two approaches mentioned above. This paper explores the target groups of the digital library in order to explore the groups in more detail.

Expert interviews with faculty members (in 2009) and library staff (in 2009 and 2010) have revealed that the role and meaning of university library is being perceived differently. Although the library staff sees developing the library’s online environment as an important task, the physical environment has remained as an important place for studying, working and meeting peers and colleagues. At the same time, while the interviewed faculty members visit university library (mostly through the specialized branches at their own institute or faculty) their contact to the main university library is virtual: through using its databases, electronic services etc. Physical environment (including books and the library building) is either something nostalgic for them, a reminder of their own student years, or something precious and strongly associated with leisure – holding a (new) book, inhaling its smell, reading it before going to sleep. This paper discusses the changing notions of the visitor/user of the library in the context of physical places and digital spaces. Through mapping various target groups, the paper highlights how library visitors become users of the online resources and how this changes their relations to the library, books and information.

Changing user: access on multimedia

Main hall
14.30

 Accessible Digital Culture for Disabled People

Background
Many of Europe's fifty million disabled people are being left behind in the digital revolution. Online information, collections and learning resources are transforming the ways visitors engage with museums. Far deeper changes are to come as digital media re-shape the ways culture is produced and enjoyed. Digital media have the power to provide a shared experience for disabled people. Ironically, they have widened rather than lessened the cultural exclusion of disabled people.

Digital inclusion of disabled people goes well beyond providing a website for a museum or other cultural institution or activity. It is about meeting World Wide Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in developing the website. It is about collections being made accessible though Sign Language for deaf people, verbal descriptions of artefacts for visually impaired people, easy read text with image and symbol support for people with a learning disability. 

Content of the talk
This talk will present policy and research findings:

• International policies which establish the cultural rights of disabled people
• European e-accessibility policies
• Findings of the 'Audit of museum, library and archive website accessibility', commissioned by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, England (2005), the only medium-size survey of its kind in the cultural sector. The survey identified the most common access barriers and introduces a user measure of accessibility.
• An introduction to the new version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG2).
  

It will then present best practice case-studies to illustrate the transformative power of digital media, selected from the Winners of the annual Jodi Awards for accessible digital culture (www.jodiawards.org.uk). The Awards have been given since 2003, European Year of Disabled People, for projects in the UK. In 2009, an International Award for most accessible website was also launched.  The Jodi Awards are for museums, galleries, libraries, archives, arts organisations and heritage venues which use digital technology to widen access to information, collections, learning and creativity for disabled people. The Awards criteria include accessibility of digital technology, as well as of content; user involvement; creativity and potential impact on the cultural sector.  Case-studies will include:

www.tate.org.uk/imap: a website that sets out to make Matisse and Picasso accessible to visually impaired people, using outstanding visual analysis, high tone contrast, description and tactile images (Jodi Award 2006)
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/prisoner4099/: young visually impaired people produced learning resources for everyone about the Victorian prison system (Jodi Award 2007)  

www.britishmuseum.org/learning/schools_and_teachers/school_projects/bsl_project.aspx:   in this project young deaf people produced signed curriculum resources for young deaf people (Jodi Award 2008)
www.aangepast-lezen.nl/ (first International Jodi Award 2009) News embargoed until 3 December: a website by Dedicon, the Netherlands, a European pioneer of accessible digital libraries) 

The talk will conclude with recommendations for local and national cultural organisations, aimed at ensuring that digital culture will be accessible for disabled people.

Note: The University of York Human-Computer Interaction Research Group and the Jodi Mattes Trust, which gives the Jodi Awards, are in the final stages of agreeing terms of a contract with the European Commission for the development of a European e-accessibility network. A European survey and network for 'Accessible Digital Culture' is part of the project. If offered the chance to give a talk, we would of course like to briefly present this project. We would also wish to meet colleagues from Estonia and delegates and talk about the situation in their country and cultural sector need for information and guidance, as well as possibilities for initiative.

Creating more personalized multimedia guides for visitors

Audio-guides in museums, art galleries and other cultural heritage sites currently follow one of two conventions: either they provide visitors with a fixed path through exhibits, providing a directed tour, that introduces artefacts and points of interest in logical order; or, alternatively, visitors can move freely around an exhibition, and select particular artefacts and points of interest in any order they choose.

With the recent advances in mobile technologies, audio-guides are becoming enhanced with both multimedia and location-sensitive information.  For example, museums and art galleries are beginning to use smart phones, such as the iPhone, as a platform for their visitor guides.  These devices offer much more functionality and flexibility than previously available, and curators can use them to create more interesting and engaging experiences for visitors. 

Further, information and media can be personalized to the interests of individual visitors. 
At the University of York we are starting a research programme investigating the potential of these new devices for creating innovative and personalized multimedia guides for visitors. We are interested in both the design and development aspects of such guides as well as in how best to evaluate whether they are successful in creating interesting, engaging and educational experiences for visitors.

The first phase of the programme is investigating how to measure visitors' engagement with the exhibits through the technologies.  To this end we are developing a tool to measure visitor engagement via technology.  The second phase is exploring how visitors engage with museum exhibits through a direct tour or through free exploration of exhibits using a mobile museum guide.  In the third phase, we will create personalized guides for visitors to exhibits.  These guides will use information about visitors' preferences gathered when they arrive at an exhibition (by a short questionnaire delivered via their multimedia guide), and then by noting which artefacts visitors choose to access via the multimedia guide while touring an exhibition.  Using this information, visitors will then be directed to artefacts of interest to them (as indicated by their preferences questionnaire) and to artefacts similar to those that they have already accessed in the multimedia guide.

This paper will present results from these first three phases of work and plans for further investigations of this area.

Can you be friends with an art museum? Rethinking the art museum through Facebook   

In Web 2.0 the users are no longer satisfied being passive consumers, but they want to interact and participate. In online social network the users have become prosumers (producers/consumers) co-creating our culture (Tapscott&Williams, 2006). The rise of social media marks a paradigm shift in our contemporary culture, which the museums have to respond to. With the term new museology, the museums’ awareness of the audience can however be traced back over a century. According to Gail Anderson, new museology reinforces a shift from an exhibition-centred to a visitor-centred art museum and reinvents the institution (Anderson, 2004). Social media can be seen as a catalyst in this development and must be welcomed and explored as a possibility to transform the museum in order to stay relevant in our developing society.

On one of the most popular social networking sites, Facebook we see a growing participation of art museums. You can now be friends with your local art museum as well as the national gallery of art. Social media has been taken into use by today’s art museums to reach out to new potential users and establish a more direct interaction with their audience. But this paper reveals three specific dilemmas between the character of social media and the art museum as institution, which illustrates that an integration of social media in the art museums’ praxis is not as unproblematic as often alluded. We investigate why there is a gap between the social media prosumer culture and the art museum as institution, and how these new media challenge the foundation of the museum.

This paper builds on the results from a not yet published empirical research on the Danish state-subsidized art museums’ use of Facebook.* In online social networks such as Facebook the art museum enters a prosumer culture where the users are co-producers of the art museums online profile. However, a closer look at the Danish state-subsidized art museums’ use of Facebook shows that an actual prosumer culture barely comes into existence. The content produced by the users are limited and of poor quality mainly because Facebook is used as a marketing channel to the users. Social media are however to be seen as more than just new software for promotion, rather as an environment to interact with the users reinventing the museum.

A closer look at the three dilemmas in art museums’ use of Facebook uncovers how Facebook potentially breaks down the boarders between the traditional museum space and the public space and questions the very foundation of the art museum and its role in our society. We suggest that museums have to rethink their identity and role in order to take full advantage of the new prosumer culture, which seems to gain ground in our society.
“In the reinvented museum, philosophy translates into practice, and practice reflects philosophy, values and mission.” (Gail Anderson, 2004 p. 5)

Based on new museology and the case study of the Danish state-subsidized art museums we will introduce Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘becoming’ and ‘reterritorialization’ to explore how his thoughts can be helpful in understanding the ongoing and challenging transformations the museums are experiencing with social media.
*The case study is carried out by the author of this paper, Katrine Damkjaer, and is part of her Masters Thesis. The thesis is defended on 1 December 2009.

Designing the physical environment. Preliminary design of the Estonian National Museum’s permanent exhibition on Estonia

Ilmar Valdur & Markus Kaasik

The Estonian National Museum’s permanent exhibition describes the cultural changes in Estonia and the people who have inhabited this area through the lens of their activities and their everyday creativity. The exhibition does not merely present specific objects but rather shows them as part of practical life along with the role of the object as practical uses changed. The exhibition focuses on people’s everyday lives and the opportunities that lie within their lives. The exhibition views everyday life as the source of changes in everyday culture, the source of resourcefulness and innovation.

When visitors encounter an object at the exhibition and stand face to face with the techniques and technologies that were used in a different era, they can engage in a “dialogue with history”. But in the same way, it is also possible to feel like a “square peg” in the “round hole” of the era and its activities, and this lack of fit can often be more productive than a seamless identification with it. Exhibited items that refer to a specific activity contain the action and the actor as well as the way in which we learned of the activity – it can be said that the objects contain time in compressed form. Thus the museum is a place where by sensing the multiple possibilities of history and the different twists and developments, one can arrive at the realization that the future is radically open-ended and in the state of creation – things could go just about anywhere.

Part of preliminary design documentation. The principle behind the exhibition. General design concept: Andres Kurg – Academy of Arts, researcher

Our workgroup started design of exhibition year ago. Among multiple parts of this work (exhibition concepts from different viewpoints, digital environments, audio-video projects, lighting design) there is design of physical environment.

We will present range of principles and solutions of elements in exhibition, designed specifically for this exhibition.

Changing user: Identity and individual in social networks

Room 243
12.00

Internet, blogs and social networks for independent and personal learning of Information Theory and other subjects in Journalism, Advertising and Media

Professor Graciela Padilla proposes a conference to share the results of our research on teaching innovation, funded by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the section Projects of Innovation and Improvement of Teaching Quality of Development, and the Vice-Rector of Teaching Quality. Its researchers, Professor Felic?simo Valbuena, Professor Eva Aladro, PhD Ignacio Jiménez, and assistant professor Graciela Padilla, have studied the European literature on teaching through Internet, innovation projects in Spanish universities, and Web tools that require teachers and students of journalism and media. After analyzing the educational needs in Spain, they have proposed the creation of a Web page with blog, message board, chat room for teachers and students, downloads area, with videos, books and texts; an indispensable tool in the world of today, built by and for teachers and students. We propose a paper to share our teaching experience and show how times are changing the teaching methods. The teacher must adapt to these changes and acquire a Web culture to understand their students and make them get their lessons in a pleasant and complete way. The students are no longer passive listeners in their classes and have become participants, creators and responsible for their own university education.                                                           

The artist and digital self-presentation: a reshuffle of authority?

The aesthetic experience, like media experiences, can be considered a social encounter in which symbolic meanings are shared between the art producer (the artist) and the art consumer (the audience). Nowadays this aesthetic experience is limited no longer to an offline existence (in physical exhibitions, galleries and networks). On the contrary, art increasingly finds its way online for creation, distribution and consumption. However, whereas media-theoretical reflections within the context of popular culture and cultural industries about the relationship between the producer and the consumer in an Internet-mediated environment focus on obtaining power or losing control, the discussion about the relationship between artists and their audience seems to pursue a slightly different path. In this context the social dimension and, more concretely, the power aspect rather seem to be understood in terms of authority and mystification.

The link between artist and authoritative mystique has a long history, going back as far as the 16th century with paintings depicting the artist at work in his studio and, hence, suggesting a near magical occurrence. After 1900, photography, film, television and digital technologies replaced the painted depictions of the artist at work and pursued the mystification of the artist. It can, therefore, be argued that mass media have played, and still play, a decisive role in constructing the authoritative and mythical perception of the artist.

Given the rise, spread and ubiquity of the Internet and, more specifically its interactive characteristics, this paper, firstly, intends to theoretically explore how this media technological development might impact the artist's authority. We aim to elaborate several hypotheses concerning the way the Internet could transform both the artist's and the beholder's perception of their position vis-à-vis one another. Secondly, we empirically elaborate on these hypotheses and theoretical concepts by studying a specific case in depth.

Seeing that digital interactivity both allows the artist to become the presenter of his self-image and allocates a more active and creative role to the audience, we question its possible influence on the dominant conception of the artist as being an uncommon and exceptionally gifted creative member of society and, hence, of the hierarchical relationship between the artist and his audience. We reflect upon the interactive encounter between the artist and the audience in the case of a specific artist's blog and wonder how this encounter could initiate a change or otherwise in the prevailing socially constructed aesthetic relationship. For it could be doubted whether both the artist and the audience actually intend to pull the artist off his authoritative and mythical pedestal.

In sum, this paper, which is part of a larger PhD project, seeks to offer both a theoretical framework and a concrete empirical elaboration about the way the Internet as a self-presentational and interactive medium is possibly used to construct or, on the contrary, to dismantle the image of the artist as an authoritative figure.

Communicative Image Construction in Online Social Networks. New Identity Opportunities in the Digital Age

In the digital age, as a result of the appearance of web 2.0, totally new opportunities for individual image construction have resulted.  Thus, computer-mediated communication is a central concern of a large number of communicational, sociological and socio-psychological studies (cf. Köhler 2003: 12f). Besides weblogs, the numerous online social networking sites like „Facebook” or „Twitter” offer new platforms for the presentation of identity and the explosive growing rates of sites like these show impressively the great importance of these networks for a broad population group.
In comparison with traditional face-to-face-interaction, for a long time computer-mediated contacts have been supposed, on the one hand, to be characterised by higher anonymity, impersonality, restrictions in the expression of nonverbal cues and the risk of isolation of the user, which can also cause increased self-awareness. But on the other hand, computer-mediated contacts can also facilitate emotional openness and experiments with one's own personality. Thus, the boundary between real self-presentation and creative image construction are blurred. Equally multifaceted are the expression forms of online constructed identities. Besides the publication of the so called 'status messages', used for communicating the actual emotional or physical well-being or actual activities to the members of a particular network, it offers also the opportunity to display pictures or videos to a more or less broad public.

However, the membership in different groups with usually very meaningful and evocative names or the posting of links is also used to create an image in online community, that expresses the user's views, interests and values as in as much detail as possible. Sometimes users even construct some different personality concepts at the same time, i.e.  „multiple personalities”, that they adapt specifically to the different contact persons in the  respective networks so they act out different identity concepts in the secure space of the online community and (!!!) explore the social consequences of their identity experiences.
But what motivation is at the bottom of this diverse online self dramatization? Do the online opportunities of image construction increase the pursuit of a perfect self-image or do they perhaps even develop one in the first place? How far does the internet contribute with its 'virtualisation of social presence' to the development of a culture of multiple personality?

The clarification of these questions is necessary, on the one hand, in order to obtain evidence of changed identity concepts in the era of the digital age, and on the other hand to observe the significance of computer-mediated communication for individual image construction.

The method
To answer these questions a systematised combination of qualitative and quantitative methods has been used. The object of investigation is the Online Social Networking Site „Facebook”, which is hugely popular. In the first explorative step it is observed and recorded which communication tools are used in the online social networking site for self-presentation or self-dramatization.  Parallel to this, the observed users are also asked with qualitative interviews about their motivation for their online image construction as well as their self-perception and their respective imaginations about their own online vs. offline images. The qualitative interviews are supplemented with a quantitative questionnaire where, besides basic information about the habits and the intensity of the „Facebook” -use indicators of personality, characteristics like introversion or sociability are also recorded. This combination should facilitate detailed evaluation of the relation between individual personality characteristics and the self-presentation practices in Online Social Networks.

Digital Identity: The Private and Public Paradox

Doctoral student

Estonian Academy of Arts

Digital identities are who we say we are, when we are online. They can be a subtype of a public persona, an extension of our ‘true’ selves, or they can be completely fabricated and fantastical, to function as a mask to shield or protect the Internet user from rest of the world. A digital identity can spin intricate, interconnected webs utilizing creative platforms that enable them to share or perform to an open or closed audience. The power of deciding what information to share and what information to withhold is a meaningful characteristic that the creator of a digital identity has online, and not in the real world. In real life it may prove more challenging to convince others that you are a different gender, age or species than it is on the Internet. The mask that the digital identity wears, can often be as simple as a pseudonym or ‘handle’ instead of their real name, so they can distance themselves from their real identity. Both online identities and online communities are part of a virtual reality, simply put a reality or existence that in most cases will only exist on the Internet and not ‘offline’ in real life

Digital identities are best characterized by their urge to both flaunt and hide information simultaneously, leading to a private and public paradox. This contradictory nature that characterizes the digital identity and their carefully protected private and public spheres of existence that they are caught between, is potentially the key to understanding the true essence and future of human existence online. It is possible that this drive to experience informational self determination, by creating a digital identity, is an important aspect of modern life. The digital identity’s paradox of wanting privacy and publicity at the same time, is only a microcosm of larger informational trends in society and culture today.

With the rise of the surveillance or transparent society, citizens of democratic nations have experienced a dramatic shift in how easily rights regarding privacy can be neglected. Voyeurism has become not only a recurring theme in entertainment but also social policy in the information age. When the present phenomena of digital identity is better defined, and its effects on psychology, culture and society are more outlined – that is when the true power of the digital identity can be not only understood, but harnessed and utilised to a higher potential.

Personal memory: creating virtual self

Room 243
14.30

Mystory in Myspace. Rhetoric of Memory in New Media Culture

Gregory Ulmer in his Teletheory (2004) proposes 'mystory' as an inventional method that assumes that one’s thinking starts not from the general, but from the historically situated specific experiences. Mystory is a genre that represents the way of experiencing and learning by which knowledge can be approached from the side of not knowing what it is (and not from the side. Although Ulmer presents it as an academic genre it can function across all kinds of media. Mystory represents a new rhetoric integrating public discourse, private biographies and discourses bound to disciplines. Practically it is the generic, textual form of scrapbook: contextualized, associative personal memories and interpretations of one’s social life.

Myspace is a social networking and blogging site representing these mystories: texts and images open a space of the self constantly actualized by exhibition and interaction. Considering other community sites such as Twitter, heterotopias (Foucault, 1998) are being formed in a heterochrony. Traditional time is broken and people create a flow of time by blogging short, brief messages and inviting interactive comments. Life is not remembered here but reported, monuments are turned into moments.

Mystory on myspace provides a framework for a cultural-social memory in which remembering is based on speed, reach and opportune moments. This telematic memory is a mobile form that operates on the basis of associations. Telematic memory is the memory of information-producing and of forgetting. The rhetoric of producing to forget, and the rhetoric of forgetting in order to produce. Digitalization has opened the space to store more and thus to forget more. The way new media genres exploit one’s own history is a tele-rhetoric mode of inventing ourselves and construct culture. Mystory on myspace is myculture “constructed rather than given, historically contingent rather than timeless and certain” (Poster, 2002).

The paper uses a critical-rhetorical method to investigate the discursive practice that characterizes new media genres of personal and social history and memory. It focuses on the rhetoric/heuretic way of re-imaging self and sharing personal memory in the digital age. Giving an outline of the relevant and interdisciplinary assembled notions, it aims at introducing a framework of the rhetoric of memory and memorializing in our age.

The following questions will be addressed:
What is selected to be represented from one’s life story? How is one’s own history structured and interacted? How do these spaces of memory constitute a social pattern of remembering and forgetting? How do new media formats contribute to the durability and longevity of memory-texts, cultural traces in the “digital bubble”?

                                                   

Life-publishing on the Internet - a new field of Life-telling

In today’s culture, every web user is in theory able to publish anything s/he desires by any technique s/he can imagine: text, photos, videos, hyperlinks... For many, this means the possibility (or even a pressure) for telling about one’s everyday life on blogs, micro-blogs, galleries, discussion forums, communal sites… Even many of those who do not want to re-produce pieces of their lives on the Internet, may follow others’ lives with great interest.

I call this interesting newcomer among the life-telling traditions the field of life-publishing. It is reflective, yet playful; it is a performance for the publisher him- or herself as well as the audiences. Perhaps the most interesting, the most characteristic element in life-publishing is the contradictory relation between the intimate contents and the public forum. Contradictions also appear in the way the publishers on the one hand give significant meanings to their activity, on the other hand shrug and say “I don’t know why I do this – because everybody does it, I guess”. Life-publishers have chosen an open forum to represent pieces of their lives; yet they may be surprised by finding out that “someone is actually reading” them.

Life-publishers reflect both their lives and their Internet actions. The contents in personal blogs, photo galleries and even on Facebook status updates ask: Who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I wish to be seen? These publishers may reflect their everyday lives quite intimately (or so it seems), but not without questioning why and how they do it. They see their publishing as natural and light, yet it arouses strong feelings both for and against.

By their contents and actions such as Facebook applications, life-publishers call out to other web users: Hey, do you see me? I’d like to contact you, will you play with me? Life-publishing is playful. The interaction is light and may seem to carry along very little of ‘real’ personal meanings. Even the actors themselves often say that there is quite a bit of real interaction; however, they see the possibility of communication as an important motive for life-publishing. Playfulness does not equal to superficiality.

As an activity, life-publishing may be reflective and meant, as publishers sometimes claim, mainly for oneself; it may be a playful reach towards other people. However, an important element of life-publishing is building an image (or images) of the self both consciously and unconsciously. Expressions of life-publishing are performances that invite audiences to join in, play along, comment and evaluate.

In studying life-publishing, great attention must be paid to the contradictions that constantly rise from the material basis such as interviews, theme-writings and the web contents. This contradictory nature seems to be caused especially by the changing relation of intimate and public. Defining the field of life-publishing with emphasis on this relation is a significant object of research.

'Ours is a pornographic culture par excellence': Is private space really individualistic on Facebook

The quotation in the title of my presentation comes from Jean Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies. In my presentation, I would like to concentrate on how people construct their personalities on Facebook. As I understand it, pornographic in this context, has little to do with eroticism. Here, pornography is associated more with ridding ourselves of our privacy. It is exposing ourselves to the public. It is a question of private space becoming public. To again use Baudrillard, the domestic scene is exteriorized. The space becomes individualistic. What is it, however, that we reveal? What is our Facebook personality built of? Do we really manifest our individualism? In simple terms, does a Facebook identity really exist? As I will try to argue, a Facebook profile is far from being a representation of our individuality and/or even offline personality and serves, most generally, as a manifestation of post-modern popular culture.

A deconstruction of a Facebook profile reveals a characteristic of a Facebook personality. It is just repeating, or a mash-up, of things other people like. What is it, however, that people like? It is, usually, what popular culture generally defines as trendy or cool, which means, commonly recognized and accepted. Naming a Facebook identity, identity is, therefore, in fact very limiting. As I will try to argue, it is rather a materialization of the whole cultural setting in which a person is currently located. We need to look at the Facebook identity, therefore, not as individually created, but as a product of post-modern culture in general. It needs to be remembered that it is rather a construction of the identity, the construction of a hyper-identity.

First of all, it is not only, however, what Baudrillard would call 'simulacrum' or 'production of the real', where we indulge ourselves in creating an 'imitation' or 'perfecting the reproduction' of an identity, but to quote Umberto Eco, it is a place, where 'we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it.' We are deluded into playing a game of 'the real as imagined and the imagined as real,' where the real departs further and further from, to use Hannah Arendt's words, 'true reality' into a space of negotiated truth, the area of 'more real than real'. Secondly, the idea of creating and recreating oneself, resonates here with the Foucauldian concept of 'technologies of the self,' which, basically, refers to the ways people produce their selves in the society, or 'how the self recognizes itself as a subject involved in practices of self-constitution, recognition, and reflection.' Foucault states that people perform 'operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.' Creating a Facebook identity, however, we rid ourselves from the limitations of the body and 'perform' operations on the products of culture to create our identity.
                                                   

Digital Literature I

Room 186
12.00

The „Open” Ideology of Digital Culture

In the most literal sense, the digital is a binary logic in which all actions are reduced to one of two positions, "on" or "off," and which serves as the basic language of all computing. In contemporary cultural theory, however, new technologies of reading and writing are taken to mean more than what the digital makes possible in the ways in which information is written, stored, and transmitted. As the editors of “The Literary Text in the Digital Age” argue, in the "twilight of the Age of the Printed Book" (ix), "we are at the beginning of a time of profound change, one that will forever alter our notions of 'literature'" as "fixed, linear, non-interactive, and, most restrictive of all, essentially confined to a single medium" (ix).

The "digital," in this context, is no longer defined as the difference between "on" and "off," but between as "open" and "closed." In this binary that is (said to be) not a binary, "closed" is the sign of totality, of objectivity, of history, of understanding, and ultimately of social critique. In contrast, the "open" is defined as the space of the "bastard, hybrid, grafted, multilinear, and polyglot". In turn, it is argued that the digital text requires a new mode of analysis that, according to the editors of “Digital Media Revisited”, is detached from the "grand narrative of modernity" — which means abandoning concepts such as production, causality, totality, and referentiality when making sense of the text—and, instead, embraces a new way of reading in which, "the name of the game is tearing apart and weaving together, decoupling and recoupling, analyzing and synthesizing, diverging and converging" without appealing to any final or definable "outside" of the text, whether this outside is the "author" or "reality".

In this paper, I will argue that the move away from critique and towards what is represented as a more "open" mode of analysis is in actuality the form that ideology takes in the digital age. Drawing upon the work of writers such as Georg Luk?cs ("Art and Objective Truth") and Bertolt Brecht ("The Popular and the Realistic"), I will argue that whether culture appears "open" or "closed," is not determined inside the text, but outside it in social relations of production. By rendering indecipherable the connection between the economic relations of society and its cultural representations, I argue that the dominant theories of the digital text actually "close" culture from critique by reducing the contradictions of class reality to a narrative without materiality and thus work to extend the economic relations of exploitation rather than intervene in them. Instead, I propose that only a digital cultural study which (re)connects the study of culture and class will be able to grasp the contemporary and act as a material force for social change.

Digital Poetry and/in the Poetics of the Automatic

"Metaphors of “machine” and “organism” have been connected to the creation of poetry – poetic writing – for some time. To some extent they can even be seen as rival figures. The figures and metaphors for literary creativity cherished by the Romantic poets of the 18th century were radical opposites to “machine”: nature, feeling, genius, tradition, organism. On the other hand, later poets of modernity – like the Futurists, Dadaists, and especially the Surrealists – were keener on the machine as the key metaphor of creation, authorship, and poetic action.

Since the days of Surrealists and their “automatic writing” (écriture automatique), the avant-garde poetry has plugged into a lot more concrete and "more automatic" automatisms. The tradition of procedural (or methodical) writing has applied pre-determined rules or patterns to writing, thus bringing forth regulation of expression and emergence of signifiers beyond authorial control. This in many respects qualifies as mechanized or automatized creation – at least when compared to écriture automatique or other forms of “free” composition. Mention should be made of such writers as Raymond Roussel (France, 1877–1933; his famous “method” for producing peculiar poetic images), Unica Zürn (Germany, 1916–1970; strictly regulated anagram poetry), Jackson Mac Low (USA, 1922–2004; “non-intentional” poetry), and the activities of the French group OuLiPo since the 1960s.

This tradition of rule-based writing is connected to digital literature, especially digital poetry. The 50-year (or so) history of digital literature has roots in the early surveys to combine programming languages and human languages to produce “poetry machines”. This tradition is very much visible in the contemporary digital poetry that uses source texts to generate new texts either by ergodic (reader-assisted) action, or “fully automatically”.

“Automatic” as a concept of literary creation – my concern in this paper – is closely connected to the most central notions of poetic writing: authorship, intention, expression/content, and instrumentality of writing. However, it is not a clear-cut opposite or antonym to the “Romantic” variants of nature and other anti-machines. Indeed, beside such meanings as ‘mechanical’, ‘robotic’, and ‘self-acting’, the term ‘automatic’ is commonly – and perhaps counter-intuitively – thought to carry such implications as ‘instinctive’, ‘natural’, ‘spontaneous’, and ‘unconscious’ (MOT Collins Compact Thesaurus Dictionary). They are all paradoxically close to the (broadly speaking) “Romantic” ethos of creation.

My paper asks why ‘automatic’ seems to be such a central concept to literary creation? How should it be understood in the scope of digital poetry, and in what ways are digital poems actually “automatic”? How has digital media of writing transformed poetics of the automatic?
I will also try to support the argumentation by presenting examples of the digital “poetic automata” from such authors as Brian Kim Stefans, John Cayley, or Marko Niemi.

Re: appearing and Disappearing Classics. Case Study on Two Digital Rewritings by a Finnish Poet Marko Niemi

I focus on two works by Marko Niemi, a renowned Finnish writer of electronic poetry. Such works both use and recontextualise literary heritage by using digital restructuring as their chief poetic device. However, both works use different methods and require different reading practices. With the help of those works I will also introduce two ways of understanding digital poetry. I have selected the works because they cover some of the most important aspects of digital poetry, and thus give me a chance to have a good overview of the subject.

The first text is “Little Mermaid”, a poem based on the principles of aleatoric and cut-up writing. The words used come from “The Little Mermaid” by H. C. Andersen. The text is arranged in a form of hay(na)ku, on a loop that consist of tree spheres. The text circles the spiral (or awhirl) and disappears, as a mermaid disappears in the water. The reader can only barely follow the text. This makes it impossible to follow both what happens as a whole and what happens at every given moment. I will focus on a number of different ways of interpreting this division. (keywords: time-basedness, open-endedness, non-linearity, aleatoric poetry)

The second text, “Afghanistan,” is based on a poem by William Wordsworth. The poem is presented in a form that resembles the map of Afghanistan. In the beginning the map is filled with bold capital Ts (standing for terrorists, for instance). By moving the cursor on the map, the reader can change the Ts into a text that originates from the poem by Wordsworth. In this re-contextualisation, the poem symbolizes the (romantic/political/ideological) ideals that Western countries are trying to implant on Afghanistan. But as time runs, the letters and words change back into T's, and the poem and the ideals it represents fade away. It is impossible to implant the poem by Wordsworth on the map as a whole, and so it turns out that the idea(l) is impossible to achieve. And because this is done by moving a cursor, the reader understands also on the level of hand-eye coordination something “significant” about the nature of this impossibility. There are also more sophisticated meanings in this poem, and I will deal with them as well.

Digital Literature II

Room 186  
14.30   

Cybertextuality and transtexuality

The multitude of cybertextual media positions implies many changes and challenges for traditional theories of inter- and transtextuality developed in the context of print literature. My paper focuses on certain novel types of relations existing between (and within) digital and ergodic texts and theorises them from a cybertextual perspective. It concludes by putting the results of this theorising into contact with traditional theories by expanding and negotiating their basic premises.

The paper has five empirical points of departure. First, ever since the emergence of the Internet, texts are no longer necessarily materially separated from each other and readers can seamlessly move between texts and chunks of texts that are mutually linked. Such movements are an obvious part of our everyday digital practice, but this type of relation (or should we say connection) is not recognized by traditional theories of inter- and transtextuality.

Second, traditional theories of intertextuality are fundamentally theories of textual relations that can only be interpreted (and not acted upon in any other way). Competent readers are expected to recognize the co-presence of texts within each other, or the way one text is modelled after another, but beyond recognition and interpretation (in the broad sense of producing meaning, significance and joussance) they can do nothing with the relations they have either found or fabricated. In contrast, ergodic literature (especially text generators and textual instruments) often allows its users to affect, manipulate, and sometimes even create these relations.

Third, as printed signifiers are permanent, any relation between them, be it co-presence, commentary, imitation or transformation, is also permanent (although interpretations of the relations may vary). That does not have to be the case in digital media, where we have a field of (potentially) dynamic inter- and transtextuality instead of the old static one. Print texts are also inescapably intransient, and thus incapable of letting the users witness the real-time processes of textual transformations and eplacements  - for example from pre-existing source texts to pre-existing target texts (and vice versa) as in John Cayley's riverIsland.

Fourth, as print texts are also closed volumes they can only quote, allude to, comment, imitate and transform prior texts. However, dynamic textual machines connected to the continuously expanding and routinely updated resources of the Internet such as the Impermanence Agent can or could do all this also to the texts published after their own publication date. To a lesser degree this is also true with every text that accepts significant configurative textual input from the reader such as Eliza (1965- ). Based on these observations we seem to have two major fields of transtextuality: open and closed, the former actively oriented not only to the past, but to the future texts as well.

Finally, we should be more careful to specify at which level the relationships (and comparisons) between texts take place. In addition to the level of scriptons, the relationships may also take place between textons and between the kinds of behaviours the compared texts exhibit.

Metafiction and going beyond traditional literary boundaries in hypertexts

This article will discuss two issues: 1 - metafiction constructions in hypertextual literature analysis existing in virtual reality, and 2 - invisible literary change studies, such as new structures and tools to present literary features in hypermedia and hypertext works. Discoursive structures which are presently used in the net offer new prospects for literature and leave space for many experiments, which so far have not been formalized. This issue opens an important debate - how the issue of literary transmodernism is formulated and how it is fully transformed in the virtual reality. Is the technology operating in the net responsible for the process or the narrative forms that undergo the change? Virtual reality can be defined as fiction itself, or even as metafiction, where everything that is presented goes beyond the literary boundaries and, using a special tool, enters new reality, where it becomes ephemeral. Therefore in our article, we will try to define the relation between the traditional and electronic literature.

Due to the NET and a new virtual reality a new model and structure innovations have been formalized, for instance the hypernovel, which uses the following techniques: digital technique, simulation, 3D picture interactivity and others. In our work we will refer to the virtual novel called 'Golpe de Gracia' by a Columbian writer Jaime Alejandro Rodriguez. As this is the digital novel, it is both hypertextual and exhibits hypermedia features. This is the classic example that will help us to understand the relationship between literature, virtual reality, hypermedia concept and hypertextuality. We will define these four categories. It must be noted that the text presentation itself only puts the reader in a complicated and complex context created by the NET from the very beginning. 'Golpe de Gracia', Jaime Alejandro Rodriguez and Javeriana University Columbia project, was designed and constructed to be a narrative hypermedium, an interactive multimedium, which can only be processed on the internet platform. The hypertextual and hypermedium form allows or even forces the reader to individualize the realization of its components, for instance a video game, simultaneous communication between the author and the reader, non-linear writing, synthetic pictures and others.   

The Concept of Appearance and the Art of publishing in Webblogs

Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1969) has developed the concept of public appearance connected with the theory of polis. For Arendt, the publicity has two sides: first, it refers to the discussion, second it refers to something that comes forth, appears. The work of art is an example of this latter. Arendt’s concept is based on the theory of public life, vita activa in community. Appearance of artwork can be seen as happening in the public sphere of community.

The two sides of publicity have also two forms of action, according to Aristotle's famous distinction they are praxis and poiesis. The making of an object is poiesis, but public action itself is praxis. Public speaking is an event that exists only in front of an audience, it is not produced as an object. I will ask how these ways of public action - praxis and poiesis - help us to understand webwriting.
The research of publishing in webblogs has focused on genres of discussion. The conceptualization of the public sphere in webblogs is mostly on the horizon of discussion, and works of art are seen only as a part of it. Habermas’ (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit 1981) theory of public discussion is then used as a theoretical basis. Habermas, however, speaks only about public discussions of literature in cafes, but not of literary works themselves.

Public action and public appearance are not opposites in web writing, but they are internal tensions. I will apply this conceptual distinction of publicity at Karri Kokko's webblog Varjofinlandia (Shadow Finlandia) and poetical work with the same name.

Kokko has used two ways of publishing: the daily webblog and the book that was published later. His blog Kokko offers collected sentences of melancholy and depression from Finnish weblogs. He picked up one sentence a day and published it in his blog. Later all these sentences are brought together in pdf -format and as a book in print form.

Generally, the public sphere of webblogs is mainly formed by the publicity of discussion. That is why the verbal art requires some specific frameworks to bring it forth, so that it can appear as art. On the other hand, new possibilities of publishing have also opened possibilities to make the publishing itself as a part of art.