Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}

Electronic literature is a rapidly growing area of creative production and scholarly interest. It is inherently multimedial and multimodal, and thus demands multiple critical methods of interpretation. Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} is a collaboration between three scholars combining different interpretive methods of digital literature and poetics in order to think through how critical reading is changing―and, indeed, must change―to keep up with the emergence of digital poetics and practices. It weaves together radically different methodological approaches―close reading of onscreen textual and visual aesthetics, Critical Code Studies, and cultural analytics (big data)―into a collaborative interpretation of a single work of digital literature.

Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} is a work of electronic literature that presents a high-speed, one-word-at-a-time animation synchronized to visual and aural effects. It tells the tale of a mysterious pit and its impact on the surrounding community. Programmed in Flash and published online, its fast-flashing aesthetic of information overload bombards the reader with images, text, and sound in ways that challenge the ability to read carefully, closely, and analytically in traditional ways. The work’s multiple layers of poetics and programming can be most effectively read and analyzed through collaborative efforts at computational criticism such as is modeled in this book. The result is a unique and trailblazing book that presents the authors’ collaborative efforts and interpretations as a case study for performing digital humanities literary criticism of born-digital poetics.

Jessica Pressman is the author of Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media and co-editor, with N. Katherine Hayles, of Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. She is the associate editor of American fiction for Contemporary Literature, articles editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly, a board member of the Electronic Literature Organization, and a board member for the online journal of digital art, Dichtung-Digital. She lives in San Diego, California.
 
Mark C. Marino is an author and scholar of digital literature. His creative digital works include “Marginalia in the Library of Babel,” “a show of hands,” “Living Will,” and a collection of interactive children’s stories called “Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House.”  He is a co-author with Douglass (and 8 others) on 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. He teaches writing at the University of Southern California where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab, a research group dedicated to humanities approaches to the exploration of computer source code. He is also the director of communication for the Electronic Literature Organization. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
 
Jeremy Douglass is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is a researcher in games and playable media, electronic literature, and the art and science of data mining and information visualization. He is active in the software studies and critical code studies research communities, which study software society and the cultural meaning of computer source code. Douglass is a founding member of Playpower, a MacArthur/HASTAC-funded digital media and learning initiative to use ultra-affordable 8-bit game systems as a global education platform, and a participant in an NSF grant exploring creative user behavior in virtual worlds. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.