Judy Malloy, Editor

October 2013 Authoring Software Twitter Page

• Introduction
  Works Created with Twitter
  -- Authoring Software Statements from Jay Bushman, Dene Grigar, and Mez
• More Twitter Narratives and Performances
• Books, Papers, Essays, Discussions, and Online Catalogs
  - Twitter works and Culture
• Books, Papers, Guides, Instructions
  - Basic Information and Educational Uses

Detail from Jay Bushman: "Loose-Fish #1: "The Good Captain"

Introduction

Since the early days of the public Internet, there have been works of art and literature created in social networking environments, and there have been short exchanges of cultural dialog on Internet Relay Chat. Twitter, created in 2006, has brought to a wider audience, the opportunity to communicate in a way that is inherently literate -- asking the writer to confine his or her thoughts to 140 characters, a process that takes editing and teaches epigrammatic expression and the ability to convey meaning and layers of meaning in a few words. Twitter also challenges writers and artists to create performative or collaboratively performative works in a medium where the audience can be an intimate circle or friends, an art audience, or even a diverse global audience.

This Authoring Software page on Twitter is a resource in progress and invites contributions of works and references. It includes pointers to the work of three new media writers -- Jay Bushman, Dene Grigar and Mez -- whoo have created works using Twitter and have written about these works on Authoring software. It also features links to articles, documentation, and works that range from CreativeTime Tweets to Chindu Sreedharan's Mahabharata on Twitter -- A Narrative Experiment and were created by new media writers and artists including Man Bartlett; Joseph DeLappe; Mark Marino/LAinundacion; Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery; and An Xiao, among many others.

"'The Good Captain' is a science-fiction adaptation of the Herman Melville novella 'Benito Cereno'. Since the story relies heavily on the realtime, flawed POV of its main character, the medium I chose to use was the web service Twitter. Twitter limits its users to updates of 140 characters of text.

In writing the story, I relied on an adaptation method that I use regularly -- I downloaded a public domain e-text version of the original story, and pasted it into Microsoft Word, increasing the font to 16 point and the line spacing to Double, then printing out the story on three-holed punch paper and putting into a binder. The large text and double-spacing allowed me to focus on the line-by-line, beat-by-beat of the original, and the facing blank page is where I wrote the adaptation of. That text was then entered into a specially formatted Word document, using a monospaced font and tweaked margins so that 140 characters of text took up exactly 2 lines of text. When the full story was written, this text was transferred to an Excel spreadsheet, where each grid equaled one story update. Once the story began, I would copy a spreadsheet cell into the Twitter interface and update the main page http://twitter.com/goodcaptain anywhere from 8 to 15 times per day. The full story took four months to unfold."

Visit Jay Bushman's complete statement on the creation of The Loose-Fish Projectto find out more.

Dene Grigar, The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project", 2009

"The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project centers on a collection of 24 stories about life in an American city in the 21st Century and involves 140 characters or less delivered -- that is, "tweeted" -- on Twitter over a 24 hr. period. The launch date of the project was Friday, August 21, 2009 beginning 12 AM PST. Each hour until 11 PM, I posted one story, a method of delivery I chose so that others from other parts of the world who wished to participate could do so at a time convenient for them. These "participants" were encouraged to do more than simply read and respond to my work; they were actually invited to tweet their own stories. During the 24 hours of the project as I posted my stories, I also monitored and collected the participants' stories, adding them to the Project Blog. The project resulted in what can be considered an international anthology of micro-fiction comprised of over 85 stories and submitted by over 25 participants from five countries. In this essay, I address assumptions and viewpoints surrounding the art of producing a phenomenally short fiction collection over the net using Twitter."

Visit Dene Grigar's statement on The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project" to find out more.

"I began my MMOG interventions in the 90's using the _Everquest_ game interface 2 project/interject in2 the conventional game-chat stream by riffing off other players chatlines and reworking chat sections via poetic manipulations. I'd also mangle logs of these chats and project them into a wider networked sphere by reposting them to various email list forums.

I'm currently extending this type of poetic intervention/textual reworking of game_text during my time playing World of Warcraft. My latest intervention is titled "Twittermixed Litterature" and involves WoW characters ["toons"] on the Bloodscalp Server standing in Ironforge [an in-game location] + live remixing [in_game] chat that occurs between players and guild/character names that rotate past. I then remash these lines [+ any feedback I receive in-game from the players themselves] into a live Twitter stream, making a multi-access channelling or [as I labelled it in the press releases]: 'Twittermixing prefound identity marker texts from live-time character actions in World of Warcraft' and 'MMO Voyeur Aggregationistic Rem(H)ashing...'"

Index
Writers and Artists
Talk about Their Work
and the Software They
use to Create Their Work

Current Pages

Mark Amerika
Mark Bernstein: __Interview wirh Mark Bernstein
Bill Bly
Jay Bushman
J. R. Carpenter
__ The Broadside of a Yarn
__ Entre Ville
__ Chronicles of Pookie and JR
__ STRUTS
M.D. Coverley
__ Egypt: The Book of
Going Forth by Day
__ Tin Towns
Chris Funkhouser
Dene Grigar
__ 24-Hr. Micro-Elit
__ Fallow Field
Fox Harrell
Megan Heyward
Adriene Jenik
Antoinette LaFarge
Deena Larsen
Judy Malloy
Mark C. Marino
__Nick Montfort and
Stephanie Strickland
Sea and Spar Between
Judd Morrissey
__ Interview with
Stuart Moulthrop
Karen O'Rourke
Regina Pinto
Andrew Plotkin
Sonya Rapoport:
__Interview with
Sonya Rapoport
Aaron Reed
Scott Rettberg
Stephanie Strickland
__Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland
Sea and Spar Between
Dan Waber

Archived Pages
These pages are in the process
of being converted to the new format.

Stefan Muller Arisona
Alan Bigelow
J. R. Carpenter
__ Chronicles of Pookie and JR
Steve Ersinghaus
Caitlin Fisher
Susan M. Gibb
Dylan Harris
William Harris
Ian Hatcher
Chris Joseph
Rob Kendall
Donna Leishman
Mez
Ethan Miller
Nick Montfort
__Lost One
Stuart Moulthrop
__Under Language
and Deep Surface
Alexander Mouton
Kate Pullinger
Jim Rosenberg
__Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
Vniverse and slippingglimpse
Sue Thomas
Eugenio Tisselli
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Joel Weishaus
Nanette Wylde