Digital Writing - Blog 1

For the first blog our tutor has asked us to write something intelligent about three different works found at the following website, http://directory.eliterature.org/works

DIGITAL LITERATURE ANALYSIS 1      -      10:01

The first piece of digital literature I have chosen to analyze is called 10:01. When I first opened the website it started off by showing me a few random quotes made by unknown people, or at least people unknown to me. Then it changed to a picture of a group of people sitting in a cinema. I could not see any of their faces however if I clicked on a person a text box would appear with a story inside it about that person.

Basically from what I can gather this websites main purpose is to tell us a fictional story about each fictional individual sitting inside the fictional cinema watching the fictional movie. I cannot see what the point of this website really is besides being extremely boring and having annoying sound effects. Whoever made this website obviously had too much time on their hands and no life.

Heres the link http://www.lanceolsen.com/1001.html check it out if you want but I personally would not bother.

DIGITAL LITERATURE ANALYSIS 2   -   Oh

The second so called digital literature piece I analysed is called Oh. It first appears as a series of dots on a white screen which if you hover the cursor over make rather amusing Oh! sounds. The dots have a ripple effect that reveals part of a poem or what the author calls a concrete cyber poem - what ever that is supposed to be. After a short period of listening to a bunch of pointless Ohs! the ripple effect clears to reveal the poem in the background. The poem goes something like this, "Oh rain Oh writes in the puddles Oh Oh Oh".

Once again this website also seems to be completely pointless, however it is slightly more amusing than the first one I analysed. The poem does not make the slightest bit of sense either. I guess whoever made this website would probably justify its pointlessness by arguing that they were being creative but the whole website is just very random if you ask me.

Checkout the link if you like, http://nonfinito.de/oh/#top but there are better things you could waste time doing.

DIGITAL LITERATURE ANALYSIS 3  -  Jabber

The Jabberwocky engine by Neil Hennessey is designed to produce nonsense words that sound like English words. It does this by bouncing around a bunch of letters inside a box. When the letters run into each other they calculate the probability of them appearing contiguously in the English lexicon. If they do appear contiguously they then join together to form nonsense words. The Blue words are fragments, the green words are compound words created from two blue ones, and the red words are garbage words. 


The point of this website honestly eludes me. All I can put it down to is people with too much time, no life, and lots of creative madness sit down and design these websites, which begs the question what am I doing analyzing them? Do I have no life as well? .... I am a university student of course I have no bloody life, haha.


Check out the link to the Jabber website:
 http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/winter2004/jabber/index.htm# it really is just a bunch of Jabberwocky.