Map Marathon

I received an email about a wonderful new exhibit/collaboration "Map Marathon" organized by the Serpentine Gallery in London and those intrepid thinkers at Edge. The whole online gallery is fascinating, but what really caught my fancy was this image, apparently submitted by Bruce Sterling. It's a map of writers who are associated with Sterling, and therefor it has a lot in common with my research.

After some investigation it looks like the map was generated with Gnod, or Gnooks to be exact: "a self-adapting community system based on the gnod engine." I'm intrigued--it seems like the site's connections are based on user input to its adaptive learning system. I'd love to compare these networks to my own data.

Things are Cooking at First Person

I’m happy to share news of some exciting developments on the First Person thread over at the electronic book review.

First, we published a great riposte by Daniel Worden to Sean O’Sullivan’s essay on Deadwood, one of my favorite shows. The original essay appeared in Third Person and discussed the inherent tension between the plot demands of the television episode and the television series. Worden responded by thinking about the different definitions of necessity at work in the show, including the crossover between the narratological manifest destiny of a canceled season and the kind that drove all those characters to settle the deadly Black Hills of South Dakota.

Second, and ongoing, we’re running a series of entries drawn from the Critical Code Studies Working Group. The group took on the challenge of interpreting software not just as the mechanism for all of our new digital texts and toys, but as text itself. The conversation is a virtual who’s who of software studies, and I’m very excited to be editing its ebr instantiation. I find the subject fascinating and this is a great experiment in new models for digital scholarship. In Mark Marino's introduction and the Week 1 discussion participants tried to hammer out some basic definitions and discussed readings of the infamous Anna Kournikova worm.