Fan I Chun was here at Stanford yesterday, visiting from Academica Sinica where he’s busy developing GIS datasets for China based on aerial photos, historical maps, gazetteers and atlases. Stanford has had authorized access to the Chinese Civilization in Time and Space (CCTS) GIS since October 2009 and Academic Sinica is steadily developing on-line and plug-in assets to give more freedom to work with their GIS data. CCTS data was instrumental in georectification of historic administrative units in my development of the Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty and is a valuable resource for any spatial historian who wants to study East Asia.
The Wikileaks Saga continues, and now the Internet group Anonymous–which originated as a self-organized campaign against The Church of Scientology and matured (some say splintered) into a rights-oriented hacktivist group with the rise of Why We Protest (notable for running campaigns during the Green Revolution in Iran)–has begun a series of DDOS attacks against government and corporate entities that they deem to be enemies of Wikileaks (including, today, MasterCard, VISA and PayPal). Interestingly the Wikileaks network, as seen from Twitterfeeds, is quite rarefied:
Effectively the origin of Wikileaks, with connections to Hacker and tech communities, makes it sustainable. It demonstrated that resilience through the use of mirror sites and multiple domains after Swiss Bank Julius Baer won a court ruling to block it. However, this resilience does not result in integration into the mainstream. Instead, Wikileaks has created a relatively small world of interconnected clusters, users, and sites. As important as resilience is, only when ideas can diffuse across bridges, from one network to the next, will Wikileaks achieve truly large-scale impact.
According to Fisher, though, the network is sorely lacking in connections outside the digerati, and will have a hard time gaining mainstream support and (positive) visibility.
Update: I keep being asked how the distributed denial of service (DDOS) is being performed. It’s a tool called Low Orbit Ion Cannon and it is a network denial-of-service and opt-in botnet in a box. The lack of programming ability required to take part in these protests is the reason why the practitioners are pejoratively known as “script kiddes”, since they’re only running scripts written by others, who are presumably more esteemed.
In a press release yesterday, the White House announced the nomination of Cathy Davidson as member of the National Council of the Humanities, which advises the NEH Chair. At Duke, Cathy has long been a proponent of integrating digital methods, tools and subjects into traditional scholarship and co-founded HASTAC, an organization that has given young scholars, such as myself, the opportunity to interact with other digital humanists (or digital historians or digital media studies–the debate still hasn’t ended) to help understand movements in the field as well as theoretical and practical issues.
I recently interviewed Andrew Hussie, the creator of Problem Sleuth and Homestuck at MS Paint Adventures. In my continuing belief that digital humanities scholars can learn practical and theoretical lessons from avant garde digital artists, I’m posting that interview here.
1) MSPA stories exist in the format of “mock games”, specifically text-based adventure games. You advance through the pages of the story by clicking links which sound like commands you would type in a text prompt to get a character to do something. Generally, the character will respond to that command on the following page.
2) MSPA stories are largely “reader-driven”, in the sense that most of the text commands were supplied by readers through a suggestion box. I would select a command from the list, and then illustrate the result of the command.
When I say “largely reader driven”, I mean this approach has undergone a lot of evolution from adventure to adventure, and continues to even now.
Hussie’s work, exemplified by his current project, Homestuck, is radically synthetic. The story is told using faux parsed commands, similar to old parser-based text and graphical adventure games, which were originally gathered from Hussie’s audience but now largely exist as a stylistic element with the commands explicitly by Hussie for the advancement of the story. These commands drag the story into surrealist territory with their absurd demands to find the character’s not-missing arms or to urinate at inappropriate times and locations. I was surprised to find out that rather than coping with absurd commands and developing a strange, tangential storyline, it was Hussie’s desire to subvert the most straightforward of requests to cause such storylines to emerge.
The subject matter is itself a stew of modern digital life–chat clients, programming, ironic comic websites, multiplayer gaming, inventory management systems and fractal imagery. Like Scott PilgrimVersus the World, it is constant and un-self-conscious and considers these new terms, situations and expressions no more novel than the traditional written or visual elements found in older media. And while the nostalgic references to “old timey” games and the ageless characters resemble that of Homestar Runner, Hussie insists that his intention is only to tell a good story, and not to wrestle with questions of melancholy or irony.
Representation of the story is similarly variegated. The characters may at one moment be represented as an 8-bit character sprite, and at the next moment in “heroic mode” with traditional techniques. “Bro”, while standing on a flaming meteor, looks and moves in the manner of a Street Fighter II combatant. The story is told in single panels, animated gifs, Flash animation, chat logs and, at one point, as a console game resembling any of dozens of RPGs seen on the Sega Genesis or Nintendo. Hussie’s own description of the process is practical and focused on maintaining regular updates, critical for maintaining his small but fanatical audience.
Jade Harley from Homestuck represented as an 8-bit character sprite
The same character in the same pose during the same moment as above, except rendered in Heroic Mode
When I questioned what kind of digital literacy and familiarity the story required, Hussie replied “To understand the story, you don’t need much of a background in anything. To understand every detail, you need a fairly diverse range of knowledge.”
Do you feel like the form and substance of the various stories on the site vary significantly from earlier work, especially in a more static medium (graphic novels on the web and in print)?
Aside from my one graphic novel, which is itself an incomplete story, there aren’t even many stories in my earlier work. Primarily gag comics. Otherwise the content is pretty similar. Same sense of humor runs throughout.
You use a variety of technologies in the creation of content, could you walk us through the various manners in which an individual page might be produced?
The average page is a .gif file created in Photoshop, and often modified from an existing template of a room or such, but just as often, something drawn from scratch using a tablet. And quite frequently, animated in a simple way, using Photoshop’s animation tools. The Flash animations involve porting graphics made in Photoshop into Flash. This animation process is much more daunting.
You’ve mentioned elsewhere that you only used Microsoft Paint for one page, and immediately switched to Adobe Photoshop. What was your aesthetic motivation for using such a limited image editing package (and, later, emulating such a package)?
The motivation was negligible to nonexistent. It began as a simple game on a forum without the slightest bit of thought put into it, other than the name of the game, which I decided would be called MS Paint Adventures. Consequently it should involve working with MS Paint. But since it’s unpleasant to use, I discarded that idea immediately, but continued the game. Clearly I didn’t think it was important to the process then, nor do I now.
Could you explain the style of storytelling wherein the author acts as a parser for community-decided commands? Has it been done before? What’s the appeal of this style? How and why did you start creating in this style?
I don’t know if it was done before I did it, at least not with the author illustrating the result. Many have emulated similar game action through text alone though. The appeal is in the absurd dialogue that develops between author/reader.
In Problem Sleuth, community involvement in decision-making seems to have lead you to develop an incredibly convoluted story, including time-traveling, the afterlife, a monster-infested alternate reality, a fantasy-adventure themed world of animal kingdoms, Lovecraftian horror and other strangeness. This all occurred in what was ostensibly framed as a hard-boiled detective story. Can you give some insight into how the community helped shape the story and what the experience was like for you to interpret their “commands”? Did you originally want to tell a hard-boiled detective story and allowed it to go astray, or did you expect it to go astray? Did the straying enhance your sense of story or did you feel confined by the absurdity?
There weren’t many expectations to even go astray from. Some of the absurdity was reader supplied, but even more absurdity was supplied by my reaction, resisting their will. It’s why he stayed stuck in an office for so long, to resist the reader’s strong will to escape. The absurdity comes not from absurd commands issued by the reader, which by themselves are uninteresting. It’s in the tension between what they want and what I supply.
And in reducing the reader’s role in guiding the story, it’s clear this absurdity can remain present even without it.
Your latest story, Homestuck, has moved away from the practice of letting the audience decide the actions of the characters. How has that affected your storytelling?
It’s made it easier, and more interesting. Reader commands are fun for a while, but boring over the long haul, and detrimental to bringing a story to a conclusion.
You’ve commented elsewhere that you’re including more linear narrative (in the form of chat logs and memos) to advance the story. What is your experience with integrating and balancing various types of media in your storytelling? How do you find the difficulty of production (for instance, the ease of producing a single static image or writing a chat log versus building a dynamic or interactive flash object with sound) affecting your storytelling decisions?
Flash stuff is the hardest, so I do it infrequently, and usually for major events.
Everything other than that is about on the same level. Writing a conversation is not much more time consuming than crafting a simple panel or two. I keep it all on the same effort level by design. I could expend more effort on any one thing, but don’t.
Would you consider your work post-ironic? There are earnest and jaded characters in Homestuck, is there an implicit critique of either view or some kind of middle ground that you’re trying to establish? Both types of characters (and here I’m thinking of John and Dave) engage with the ironic and earnest consumption of the same media. At times the work seems incredibly serious and idealistic, with heroic and dramatic that seems at odds with less serious moments. How do you reconcile this? How does it compare with stories that more traditional audiences may be familiar with?
There is no critique on those issues intended whatsoever. The mix of silly and serious is an aspect of the type of story I want to tell. It’s possible to do this in perfectly traditional formats, so I don’t know if the reactions of a traditional audience are relevant. It’s just not a blend that often arises in any sort of work, to my knowledge.
Wikileaks.org was shut down late last night or early this morning, and already a host of services and sites have rushed into the gap to provide access to the existing dataset of leaked material. It is all a very interesting phenomenon that exists at the intersection of public policy, technological optimism and social change.
This is a small piece of a larger dataset of operas, their composers, librettists, theatres of performance and dedicatees from the 17th and early 18th century. As I was sifting through the modules identified by network analysis, I came upon this small, tidy view into the past. From 1718 to 1729, Guiseppe Maria Orlandini composed eleven operas, playing in San Samuele, San Giovanni Grisostomo, and San Cassiano. He worked with seven librettists but of those, each only once except for Benedetto Pasqualigo, whom he worked with five times (at least, according to attribution). Of his eleven operas, four were dedicated but only the mysterious “G.A.G.”, the dedicatee for Orlandini’s first opera, has nothing else dedicated.
Updated to add a perhaps slightly better known Antonio Vivaldi, showing his 2nd degree network in the form of a tag cloud:
I’ve been digging into Alexis Jacomyal’s new network graph viewer SiGMa, which is still in development but the source is available at github. One of the features he’s developing is a fisheye viewer, which is fun and frustrating and affords a taste of ego networks and how a graph may appear drastically different from one perspective compared to another. This is particularly interesting in the studying the structure of and participation in digital humanities projects, such as those here at Stanford. Running the DH@Stanford graph in SiGMa allows for a pair of different perspectives, my own and that of a Nicole Coleman, co-investigator of the Mapping the Republic of Letters project:
There are a number of interesting artifacts in both these views. For one thing, Nicole is officially linked to the Stanford Map Warper, but her other links have drawn her far enough away from its orbit that it’s barely visible. Another is Dan Edelstein, whose node symbol is larger due to his number of connections, actually appears at the same size as Nicole’s. Dan also happens to be a PI on Mapping the Republic of Letters and I also happen to have done some work with the Stanford Map Warper and so it’s interesting to see these implicit relationships reflected in neighborhood locality–but this may only reflect the type of algorithm used to sort the graph and not an underlying spatial fact.
As usual, I find it necessary to point out that this network is roughly defined and incomplete and that these are only presented for the purpose of spurring exploration of the concept of perspective on the analysis and representation of networks.
Sanger has been largely irrelevant since the failure of Citizendium, a scholarly mediated competitor to Wikipedia, but still maintains a critical position toward the various peer collaborative projects that stray far afield from traditional, curated structures. Wikileaks and its clearinghouse, being the ultimate in uncurated data, must strike Sanger as not only untrustworthy, but literally immoral.
I disagree with those people who want government to be so “open”—open far beyond anything any government has ever experienced, open far beyond anything widely thought to be required—that they are perfectly willing to undermine privacy, public safety, and national defense in order to secure that openness. Such people are ideologues, and they are fun for other ideologues to argue with, and occasionally for philosophers too, but they can be safely ignored by more sane, grounded people and those with little time on their hands for philosophy.
There are a number of interesting artifacts in both these views. For one thing, Nicole is officially linked to the Stanford Map Warper, but her other links have drawn her far enough away from its orbit that it’s barely visible. Another is Dan Edelstein, whose node symbol is larger due to his number of connections, actually appears at the same size as Nicole’s. Dan also happens to be a PI on Mapping the Republic of Letters and I also happen to have done some work with the Stanford Map Warper and so it’s interesting to see these implicit relationships reflected in neighborhood locality–but this may only reflect the type of algorithm used to sort the graph and not an underlying spatial fact.