MLA 2025 - Bespoke Platforms and Algorithmic Resistance

MLA 2024: Bespoke Platforms

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Bespoke Platforms and Alogrithmic Resistance: Electronic Literary Futures

MLA 2025 - Sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization

Session 271

Friday January 10, 2025 - 12:00 - 1:15 PM - Hilton Riverside New Orleans - Compass

Keywords: artificial intelligence, social media, electronic literature, digital humanities, software

Dramatic changes such as the slow death of Twitter and the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence are fundamentally reshaping the platforms on which we create, communicate, and publish. Panelists imagine possible futures of born-digital literature, considering tools of resistance, including feminist and queer approaches to code, “small” language models, mixed and virtual reality, and alternatives to corporate-owned platforms. This roundtable will feature short talks, followed by discussion.

Panelists

Presiding: Lai-Tze Fan, U of Waterloo

Speakers

The history of electronic literature is punctuated with amazing moments where we see writers and artists and theorists building the tools they need, influencing technology development and inspiring the creation of expressive authoring tools and platforms responsive to visions of what a text can be and do. Mostly underfunded, standalone and generally outside of networked environments – Storyspace, SnapdragonAr, and Korsakow, for example– experimental software responsive to the needs of the work itself and to visions of future elit is an important story to tell and one that can help us to imagine opportunities and platforms for elit’s future. The future, like the past, will see a proliferation of tools, both bespoke and corporate. And, as in the past, the success of future forms and platforms outside corporate software platforms will have a lot to do with the capacity to build audiences for our work in the near-term and the capacity to preserve and archive over the longterm. Working on corporate platforms challenges us to connect with built-in audiences for as long as the platform exists. It can be experienced as an exciting, creative constraint. Working outside mainstream, networked, environments requires us to build audiences and a user base for our tools mostly from scratch and requires us nurture new literacies. We lose things. But this talk will focus on what we might gain.

Caitlin Fisher* is a Canadian media artist, poet, writer, futurist and Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto where she also directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab and the Augmented Reality Lab. Fisher is also a Co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab, former Fulbright and Canada Research Chair, and an international award-winning digital storyteller.

A Cyborg Creative Coding Practice

This brief talk will use Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg to discuss my creative coding practice, particularly to produce code engines for electronic literature and other forms of digital writing. In this workflow, I iteratively prompt Chat GPT to generate valid HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code and modify the resulting output in a code editor to create unique works of electronic literature and digital writing. This practice is an example of Cyborg writing because it integrates human and artificial intelligence to produce code writing that results in electronic literature. I will showcase some of the work I have done to rescue now-inoperable Twitter bots created using Kate Compton’s Tracery JavaScript library, as well as some recent works published in Taper and The Los Angeles Review. The goal is to show how to leverage and subvert black box large language model generators to create open source small language models for computer generated writing.

Leonardo Flores is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. His research areas are electronic literature, with a focus on e-poetry, digital writing, and the history and strategic growth of the field. He’s known for I ♥ E-Poetry, the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, “Third Generation Electronic Literature” and the Antología Lit(e)Lat, Volume 1. He is a member of the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on AI and Writing. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.

The Future of Writing with XR Enhanced by AI

Current commercial efforts for XR development have focused, for the most part, on entertainment and social experiences. In regard to the latter, hosting meetings, performing architecture and engineering tasks where a 3D representation of the work is clear and valuable, and engaging in specific work tasks, such as interacting with large knowledge graphs, remain the main areas of use. Even the recent release of the Apple Vision Pro has shown little software development aimed to change the direction of use and open up the possibilities of this powerful tool for writing and creating. This paper discusses the project undertaken by the presenter, entitled “The Future of Text in XR,” funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, that is building open-source XR software for writing. It includes the work the team is planning for integrating AI for enhancing the environment, making it possible to access multiple documents from a library in an environment, add notations to and link those documents, and create new documents from them.

As the heart of our project is the belief that a fundamental change will occur when working in XR with AI, together, becomes the norm because when we see different and we can interact differently––as certainly working in a 3D environment allows––we become different. Our concern is that the paradigms of working with these technologies will be owned or controlled solely by commercial entities that have their own priorities. Therefore, our goal is to inspire and enable powerfully useful workspaces and workflows for academic and creative use.

Dene Grigar, PhD, is Professor and Director of Creative Media & Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Technology & Culture at Washington State University Vancouver whose research focuses on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of born-digital media.

Instagram as the New Twitter: Lessons from Filter Insta-Zine

This talk takes the three-year-old, experimental e-lit publication venue, Filter, as a case study for imagining possibilities and limitations of Instagram as a network or platform for digital humanities and electronic literature work.

In November 2020, Chloe Anna Milligan and I won an Emerging Spaces for e-lit start-up grant from the Electronic Literature Organization to create Filter, a venue for electronic literature hosted entirely on Instagram. In our initial conception of Filter, we imagined a critical-creative publication that would further the creation and circulation of electronic literature that was both optimized for and disruptive of Instagram, citing in particular the creative possibilities latent in features like Stories, Boomerangs, Reposts, 10-frame image carousels, interactive stickers, and Reels. As well, we argued that these features were not limited to expanding the possibilities for electronic literature creation, but also for its criticism. That is, we saw things like the looped effects of a Boomerang or the 24-hour limit of a Story as platform constraints that could prompt not just new works of e-lit and but also new forms of e-literary criticism. Indeed, to the latter point, we envisioned Filter as a place that could support and explore alternative peer review practices – what, we asked, might peer review look like if conducted through features like likes, hashtags, or reposts? – and publication temporalities that broke from traditions of print to embrace something more appropriate to contemporary social media, broadly, and Instagram, specifically.

To date, Filter has published two issues with the third in production as of this writing, and it would be a stretch to say that the publication has achieved many of its initial goals. However, it does represent a sustained project of trying to build an academic, creative environment through a corporate social media platform, and this talk focuses on illuminating that critical project, examining what has worked for supporting academic e-literary and DH work on Instagram, and discussing where we have run into major platform constraints and pitfalls to this project. While this is an examination of one singular project, it does offer a microcosmic glimpse into potentials for Instagram to become a post-Twitter platform for DH and e-lit

Sarah Laiola is an assistant professor of Digital Culture and Design at Coastal Carolina University. Her most recent publications appear in Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Hyperrhiz, and Criticism. She is the co-founder and managing editor of Filter, an Instagram-based venue for electronic literature and textual art.

Down and Out Online: Queer E-Literary Collectives Across Precarious Platforms

The phrase “Down and Out” primarily connotes the unlucky lot of those downtrodden and outcast at the margins of society. That would certainly apply online to queer creative communities scattered by the repeated collapses of social media services once trusted for the sense of virtual solidarity they fostered. But I am further interested here in “down” as slang for willing and “out” as in openly queer, other competing meanings for these words that describe the inventional resilience of queer coalition building across precarious platforms. In the tension of these dual definitions, I consider “Down and Out Online” to describe how what I call queer e-literary collectives pop up outside of corporate versions of social media on sites more geared toward art and their fandoms, such as itch.io. Where platforms like Tumblr and formerly Twitter failed to protect the features that made them viable commons for queer content creators, itch.io persists as a space where users connect over electronic literature, not just through collection and curation but also through opportunities of creation at regular game jams. I have formerly referred to itch.io as a Folk ELC (Electronic Literature Collection), and here I explore its capacity for folklore as connective tissue that queer e-literary collectives build shared culture out of. Queer creators and the communities that form around their content are down and out online in every sense, making art at the margins and forging a sense of belonging through them that lasts where platforms may not.

Chloe Anna Milligan is a Lecturer in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she offers writing in the disciplines seminars in media studies and digital rhetorics. She teaches, researches, and publishes primarily about topics in game studies and electronic literature through a queer lens, with emphases on post-digital affect and new materialities of writing. Her scholarly work is featured in journals such as Press Start, Computers and Composition, and ROMchip, as well as edited collections like Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom and Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell With, About, and Around Videogames. She is currently at work on her first monograph, Our Bodies Are Load Screens: Queer Materialities of Gameplay in Transition.

Patterns for Feminist Platforms in Generative AI

In classrooms around the world, educators are debating over the role of AI and its potential to “disrupt” norms. The MLA and CCCC task force is calling for “critical AI literacy” (2023) as an essential focus for humanities educators. To unpack this challenge, I approach generative AI through the history of computational creativity, positioning it as a historically-grounded practice and drawing on its relationship with existing datasets. Generative work has an extensive tradition as an assistant to creativity: building from that history and interrogating previous attempts to cast computers as authors, artists, and therapists, I will contextualize generative AI through a feminist lens beginning with “small” language models (such as grammars and Markov chains) through to current practices using both commercial and open-source generative AI tools. This feminist lens allows us to position both the pitfalls of AI, particularly in the context of labor and authorship, and the possibilities for feminist platforms that meaningfully engage the possibilities and challenges of computational creativity.

Anastasia Salter is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Programs for the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida, and author of eight books including most recently Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic (with Emily Johnson, 2022) and Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives (with Stuart Moulthrop, 2021). Salter is currently Vice President of the international Electronic Literature Organization.

Tiny, Bespoke, and Off-Grid: Computational Poetics and Language Models that are not Large

The acceleration of generative AI technology in recent years is often conveyed in a rhetorical move that uses the size of the language model as a proxy for its capabilities. While GPT-3’s reported 172 billion parameters (trained on 500 billion tokens) made it the largest publicly available generative AI service at the time of its release in 2020, successive products have only gotten larger. And yet, as Bender, Gebru, “Schmitchell,” and McMillan-Major argue in their oft-cited paper, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots,” bigger is not better. In this brief talk, I will discuss computational poetry generators that leverage small, custom language models in ways that implicitly or explicitly critique mainstream generative AI for its environmental impact, its hegemonic bias, and its reliance on exegetical fallacies. Creative text generators by Allison Parrish, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and Nick Montfort, respectively, each provide alternatives that operationally echo the critiques first made clear in the “Stochastic Parrots” paper. Furthermore, online literary magazines and small press book publishers, in keeping with the legacy of avant-garde and radical publishing traditions, are ideal platforms for disseminating this kind of creative-critical poetry. I argue that these platforms and the works they publish provide illuminating alternatives that are increasingly urgent as generative AI services become more deeply and problematically embedded in our creative workflows.

Zach Whalen is Associate Professor of English, University of Mary Washington, USA, where he researches video games, comics, and electronic literature. He is the co-editor of Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games (2008).

Presiding

Lai-Tze Fan is the Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change and Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada, as well as Professor 2 at the University of Bergen, Norway. She leads The U&AI Lab at UWaterloo, which intervenes in biased Big Tech design by creating alternative resources and methods for AI, with a focus on enhanced EDI outcomes. Fan is an Editor and the Director of Communications of the open-access journals electronic book review and the digital review. Fan is the Editor of recent special journal issues on research-creation, including 2021’s “Critical Making, Critical Design,” which won the ELO’s 2022 N. Katherine Hayles Prize for Criticism.

Session Sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization

ELO