Misplaced Pages

#500499

36-608: The Electronic Poetry Center ( EPC ), is an online resource for digital poetry . It was founded on July 10, 1994 by Loss Pequeño Glazier and Charles Bernstein , of the Poetics Program at The State University of New York at Buffalo , making it one of the oldest resources for poetry on the World Wide Web. It was the sponsor of E-Poetry 2001, the world's first festival exclusively dedicated to electronic poetry , which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2011. The EPC

72-557: A B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1959. While there, he made an experimental humorous student film, The Epiphany of Slocum Furlow , in which the titular hero discovers the meaning of life. His contemporary at the college, musician and composer Peter Schickele , scored the film. Following a year of graduate study in sociology at the University of Chicago , Nelson began graduate work in Social Relations, then

108-588: A 1997 Forbes profile, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac , or 'the Orson Welles of software'." Nelson is the son of Emmy Award -winning director Ralph Nelson and Academy Award -winning actress Celeste Holm . His parents' marriage was brief and he was mostly raised by his grandparents, first in Chicago and later in Greenwich Village . Nelson earned

144-423: A Special Recognition Award. In 2014, Nelson was conferred with a Doctor of Science degree, honoris causa, by Chapman University . The ceremony took place during the 'Intertwingled' conference, featuring Nelson and other prominent figures in the field, including Apple Computer founder Steve Wozniak and former Association for Computing Machinery president Wendy Hall . At the conference, Nelson stated confidence in

180-513: A close friend; 1966-1967), Brown University (a tumultuous consultancy on the Nelson-inspired Hypertext Editing System and File Retrieval and Editing System with Swarthmore friend Andries van Dam 's group; c. 1967-1969), Bell Labs (hypertext-related defense research; 1968-1969), CBS Laboratories ("writing and photographing interactive slide shows for their AVS-10 instructional device"; 1968-1969),

216-407: A computer-based writing system that would provide a lasting repository for the world's knowledge, and also permit greater flexibility of drawing connections between ideas. This came to be known as Project Xanadu . Much later in life, in 2002, he obtained his PhD in media and governance from Keio University . Nelson founded Project Xanadu in 1960, with the goal of creating a computer network with

252-588: A department at Harvard University specializing in sociology, ultimately earning a M.A in sociology from the Department of Social Relations in 1962. After Harvard, Nelson was a photographer and filmmaker for a year at John C. Lilly 's Communication Research Institute in Miami, Florida, where he briefly shared an office with Gregory Bateson . From 1964 to 1966, he was an instructor in sociology at Vassar College. During college and graduate school, he began to envision

288-404: A long-standing interest in experimental, progressive, and avant-garde poetics. Glazier was a professor at Buffalo's Department of Media Study. The extensive curated archives at the site make it a popular destination for the study and enjoyment of contemporary poetry: a 2000 estimate has the site receiving 10 million visits a year. It is partnered with similar organizations, including UbuWeb and

324-414: A more digital sphere. Some people disagree on when exactly the term came to be. "Hypertext" has origins in the 18th century. Moreover, it is believed that Vannevar Bush's description of "the memex" in 1945 also referred to hypertext. While there are a variety of factors that have caused hypertext to be as well known as it is today, its popularization can be traced back to two particular events. One event

360-558: A simple user interface. The effort is documented in the books Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974), The Home Computer Revolution (1977) and Literary Machines (1981). Much of his adult life has been devoted to working on Xanadu and advocating for it. Throughout his career, Nelson supported his work on the project through a variety of administrative, academic and research positions and consultancies, including stints at Harcourt Brace and Company (a technology consultancy and assistantship where he met Douglas Engelbart , who later became

396-417: A text by interest, engagement, and reflection. This means readers can explore and think creatively about a poem that is digitized on a computer. Constructive hypertext poetry takes a different approach. This poetry is built by an audience over time to create a fully fleshed-out final draft. Along with this, audiences can look at previous versions of the text. In all, the focus of constructive hypertext poetry

SECTION 10

#1732797847501

432-488: A variable way. Reloading the page twenty times or so, it is remarkable how many of the poems read as if they have been individually intended by a human intelligence. Most of the haiku, perhaps 80%, cohere quite well as poetry." Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology , philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to

468-410: Is Apple's invention and heavy promotion of the "Hypercard" in 1987. This made hypertext less niche, where thousands of people could now recognize and understand the concept. In addition, there was a large national conference on hypertext held in 1987, drawing participants from multiple studies and disciplines. Interactive poetry is a form of digital poetry by which the reader may or must contribute to

504-461: Is a simple, spare web page. Every time a reader reloads the page, a new haiku is produced. Following a link to “Write haiku” individuals can submit their own haiku in three lines, each of which has its own button to post the line to bins of first, middle, and last lines. The poems delivered on each reload of the site are not the individual haiku as submitted by readers, but recombinations of these first, middle, and last lines of haiku pulled together in

540-446: Is how computer software and machinery can enhance the creation of poetry. As such, users can see first-hand the amalgamation of an author's inspiration, writing process, and cultural influences. The advent of hypertext poetry can be dated back to the mid-1980s. Ted Nelson is often credited for coining the term in the 1960s. Ted Nelson coined the term as he believed printed text would soon be outdated and that literature would move to

576-585: The Oxford Internet Institute in conjunction with Wadham College, Oxford . More recently, he has taught classes at Chapman University and the University of California, Santa Cruz . The Xanadu project itself failed to flourish, for a variety of reasons which are disputed. Journalist Gary Wolf published an unflattering history of Nelson and his project in the June 1995 issue of Wired , calling it "the longest-running vaporware project in

612-899: The University of California , the Jewish Museum , the Fretheim Chartering Corporation and the Deering-Milliken Research Corporation . He has alleged that the Nelson Organization was envisaged as a clandestine funding conduit for the Central Intelligence Agency , which expressed interest in Project Xanadu at an early juncture; however, the promised funds failed to materialize after several benchmarks were met. From 1980 to 1981, he

648-495: The University of Illinois at Chicago (an interdisciplinary staff position; 1973-1976) and Swarthmore College (visiting lecturer in computing; 1977). Nelson also conducted research and development under the auspices of the Nelson Organization (founder and president; 1968-1972) and the Computopia Corporation (co-founder; 1977-1978). Clients of the former firm included IBM , Brown University, Western Electric ,

684-647: The University of Pennsylvania 's PennSound project. Digital poetry According to Saum-Pascual (2019), digital poetry is the artistic heir to the avant-garde movements of the second half of the 20th century, including Lettrism , concrete poetry , and conceptual poetry . A significant portion of current publications of poetry are available either only online or via some combination of online and offline publication. Digital poetry types hypertext , kinetic poetry, computer generated animation , digital visual poetry , interactive poetry, code poetry , experimental video poetry, and poetries that take advantage of

720-476: The World Wide Web , but he dislikes the World Wide Web, XML and all embedded markup – regarding Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification of his original vision: HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management , no rights management. Jaron Lanier explained the difference between

756-402: The programmable nature of the computer to create works that are interactive, or use a generative or combinatorial approach to create text (or one of its states), or involve sound poetry, or take advantage of things like listservs , blogs , and other forms of network communication to create communities of collaborative writing and publication (as in poetical wikis ). Digital platforms allow

SECTION 20

#1732797847501

792-484: The World Wide Web and Nelson's vision, and the implications: A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network and what we have become familiar with online is that [Nelson's] network links were two-way instead of one-way. In a network with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are linked to it. ... Two-way linking would preserve context. It's a small simple change in how online information should be stored that couldn't have vaster implications for culture and

828-636: The computer industry, and encouraged people to experiment with Hypertext features. In 1998, at the Seventh WWW Conference in Brisbane , Australia, Nelson was awarded the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award . In 2001, he was knighted by France as Officier des Arts et Lettres . In 2007, he celebrated his 70th birthday by giving an invited lecture at the University of Southampton . In 2014, ACM SIGCHI honored him with

864-510: The content, form, or performance of the work, thereby influencing the meaning and experience of the poem. Interaction allows the reader to participate and influence the work and their experience of it. Interactive poetry is limited to a digital medium as it cannot perform the same function in other media such as print, which limits accessibility. Interactive poetry can also provide a different experience with each reading or from reader to reader so analysis of this type of poetry can be challenging as

900-473: The creation of art that spans different media : text, images, sounds, and interactivity via programming. Contemporary poetries have, therefore, taken advantage of this toward the creation of works that synthesize both arts and media. Whether a work is poetry visual art music or programming is sometimes not clear, but we expect an intense engagement with language in poetical works. Early digital poems include Christopher Strachey 's love letter generator (1952),

936-652: The economy. In 1957, while a student, Nelson co-wrote and co-produced what he describes as a pioneering rock musical. Entitled "Anything and Everything", it was produced and performed at Swarthmore College . In 1965, he presented the paper "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" at the ACM National Conference, in which he coined

972-460: The experience is not static. An example of audience participatory poetry is haikU by Nanette Wylde . Elit scholar, Scott Rettberg writes of this project "Nanette Wylde’s haikU (2001) is a project based on principles of user participation and on the use of a randomizing function to produce haiku that startle in the sense of producing unintended juxtapositions—no single author has determined which lines will appear together. The reading interface

1008-589: The history of computing". On his own website, Nelson expressed his disgust with the criticisms, referring to Wolf as "Gory Jackal", and threatened to sue him. He also outlined his objections in a letter to Wired , and released a detailed rebuttal of the article. As early as 1972, a demonstration iteration developed by Cal Daniels failed to reach fruition when Nelson was forced to return the project's rented Data General Nova minicomputer due to financial exigencies. Nelson has stated that some aspects of his vision are being fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee 's invention of

1044-669: The mechanics of digitization. This form of cyberpoetry has a specific focus on visual arts that are connected across different mediums. In other words, hypertext poetry is a classification of digital poetry that links the reader to different places in a document or different documents on the Internet. In general, hypertext poetry combines the elements of culture and intertextuality to marry poetry to various digital mediums such as images, videos, texts, and songs. Hypertext usually falls into two categories: exploratory and constructive. Exploratory hypertext poetry allows users to navigate through

1080-636: The potential of personal computing to the team that three years later launched the IBM PC . From the 1960s to the mid-2000s, Nelson built an extensive collection of direct advertising mail he received in his mailbox, mainly from companies selling products in IT, print/publishing, aerospace, and engineering. In 2017, the Internet Archive began to publish it online in scanned form, in a collection titled "Ted Nelson's Junk Mail Cartons". As of 2011, Nelson

1116-576: The project as a non-managerial Distinguished Fellow in the San Francisco Bay Area until the divestiture of the Xanadu Operating Group in 1992–1993. After holding visiting professorships in media and information science at Hokkaido University (1995-1996), Keio University (1996-2002), the University of Southampton and the University of Nottingham , he was a fellow (2004–2006) and visiting fellow (2006–2008) of

Electronic Poetry Center - Misplaced Pages Continue

1152-624: The stochastic texts which were indirectly produced by the German mathematician Theo Lutz in 1959 by programming a Z22 of Konrad Zuse ; Nanni Balestrini 's "Tape Mark I" in Italian, published in 1961; and Brion Gysin 's English permutation poems from around 1959, done automatically with the collaboration of Ian Somerville . These and other early digital poems are discussed in C. T. Funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital Poetry . Hypertext poetry refers to creative works that are interconnected through

1188-524: The term "hypertext". In 1976, Nelson co-founded and briefly served as the advertising director of the "itty bitty machine company", or "ibm", a small computer retail store that operated from 1977 to 1980 in Evanston, Illinois . The itty bitty machine company was one of the few retail stores to sell the Apple I computer. In 1978, he had a significant impact upon IBM 's thinking when he outlined his vision of

1224-591: Was called "an epicenter of poetic evolution and teaching" as it celebrated its twentieth anniversary, "EPC@20", a two day in festival in Buffalo, September 2014. In addition to its focus on digital poetry , it also is dedicated to the promotion and archiving of other "contemporary formally innovative poetries." This is a reflection of its origins in SUNY Buffalo's Poetics Program, a program founded in 1991 by Charles Bernstein and Robert Creeley , which maintains

1260-469: Was the editor of Creative Computing . At the behest of Xanadu developers Mark S. Miller and Stuart Greene, Nelson joined San Antonio, Texas -based Datapoint as chief software designer (1981–1982), remaining with the company as a media specialist and technical writer until its Asher Edelman -driven restructuring in 1984. Following several San Antonio-based consultancies and the acquisition of Xanadu technology by Autodesk in 1988, he continued working on

1296-510: Was working on a new information structure, ZigZag, which is described on the Xanadu project website, which also hosts two versions of the Xanadu code. He also developed XanaduSpace, a system for the exploration of connected parallel documents (an early version of this software may be freely downloaded). In January 1988 Byte magazine published an article about Nelson's ideas, titled "Managing Immense Storage". This stimulated discussions within

#500499