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The following posts are extractions from Robert et al's 2012 article Creative Practice and Experimental Method in Electronic Literature and Human Experimental Psychology.
  1. APA: Roberts, A. M., Otty, L., Fischer, M. H., & Katharina, A. (2012) Creative Practice and Experimental Method in Electronic Literature and Human Experimental Psychology, Dichtung Digital. No. 42 – 2012-12-20, http://tinyurl.com/nne3pee Accessed on 12 12 2013
  2. Chicago: Andrew Michael Roberts, Lisa Otty, Martin H. Fischer and Anna Katharina Schaffner, Creative Practice and Experimental Method in Electronic Literature and Human Experimental Psychology, Dichtung Digital, No. 42 – 2012-12-20, (2012) http://tinyurl.com/nne3pee Accessed on 12 12 2013

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In the broadest terms, an experiment suggests the staging of some process in order to “see what happens.” Psychological research typically has a pre-arranged dimension of evidence: both what is to be measured and the scale of that measurement are decided in advance. “Experimental” creative practice also involves designing a process or context for a human experience, but “what might happen” is left more open—and is not usually measured in any explicit way. This raises the question of what the feedback loop is in such creative practice – how does the “result” of experimentation feed back into future work?

Katherine Hayles sees literature as transforming implicit (bodily) knowledge into conscious knowledge, but also calling into question conscious knowledge. In this instance, the feedback is not a flow from the participant and apparatus which is then managed by the experimenter (the scientist or artist), but an effect which can presumably be experienced both by participant / reader and artist. (132)

Hayles’s comment is an instance of the way in which critical and theoretical writing on new media practice sometimes applies the language of scientific experiment to the analysis of creative practice, suggesting a convergence in discourse. Other examples are found in the work of new media theorist Mark Hansen, who writes about “cognitive activity” (3) and “the flow of data” (2), and suggests that "by placing the embodied viewer-participant into a circuit with information, the installations and environments [created by contemporary media artists] ... function as laboratories for the conversion of information into corporeally apprehensible images." (Hansen 11)

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The human subject of aesthetic “experiments”—in the sense of “experimental” literary forms and practice, often associated with the avant-garde—is a potentially revolutionary or radicalisable political and social subject. Many experimental avant-garde poets and post-war concrete poets were operating on the assumption that poetic, linguistic and disciplinary transgressions enacted in their poetries would generate psychological and ideological changes in their readers. By breaking the linguistic contract and unmasking its arbitrary and convention-based foundation, the encounter with the avant-garde text is to create rupture, to “shock” readers, to make them question their habitual perception strategies and assumptions about literature, language and, crucially, more wide-ranging socio-political conventions by implication. This belief in the psycho-political transformative power of experimental literatures has been developed further in the realm of post-structuralist theory, most notably by thinkers such as Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault. What is at stake in experimental literature, according to them, is not just an exploration of new possibilities for poetry and thought that lie beyond the cognitive boundaries imposed by “ordinary” language, but also a potentially socio-politically revolutionary insight into the constructed nature of our value systems and social conventions.

The disruptive function of avant-garde works is frequently produced by programmatic violations of poetic, linguistic and cognitive-perceptual conventions. These violations include the generation of logical paradox, semantic incongruity, syntactical fragmentation and vacillations between word and image genres that require the reader to shuttle between different perceptual strategies, that is, reading and viewing modes. Whilst the avant-garde experiments are attempts to push further the boundaries imposed by convention on artistic expression, they are also, as discussed earlier, attempts to produce a more critically aware, self-reflexive and in many cases politically radicalised subject.

Biggs is sceptical about the association which is sometimes made between creative practice in contemporary emergent media and the idea of the “avant-garde”; he has argued that the absence of a homogenous mainstream or bourgeois culture in contemporary society (due to the rise of globalisation and multiculturalism), precludes the existence of an effective avant-garde, a position in accord with Peter Bürger’s arguments for the historical nature of the avant-garde project.

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In the context of HEP reading is conceptualized as a complex orchestration of perceptual, cognitive and motor processes in the service of extracting meaning from print. Perceptual processes include the encoding and identification of letters, while cognitive processes include grapheme-to-phoneme mapping for letters and letter combinations, semantic comprehension of words and syntactic ambiguity resolution across entire sentences. Finally, motor processes involve the planning and execution of targeted eye movements from one word to the next in order to integrate the spatially distributed information.

At the perceptual level, manipulations of line length, font, and contrast polarity (white characters on black background or vice versa) have been used in experiments aimed at improving simple legibility. For example, we know from classical work by Tinker that readers benefit from medium-long lines and that high positive contrast polarity (black on white) is more reader-friendly than high negative contrast polarity (white on black) or low contrast (grey text). Contrast manipulations have been used to study the interplay between overt attention shifts (eye movements) and so-called covert attention shifts (which occur independent of eye movements and refer to our ability to process information from peripheral vision). Differences in contrast or contrast polarity are common in works of electronic literature.

An HEP use of contrast effects is found in a study by Reingold and Rayner, who tested whether our covert attention is allocated serially to one word at a time or in parallel across multiple words within a line of text. They presented readers with normal black text on white background that included a single low contrast (faint) word. Once this word was fixated the authors measured the time it took readers to process the next word, also referred to as parafoveal word. If covert attention is deployed serially then the perceptual difficulty of a faint word should not affect processing of the parafoveal (normal) word. This is so because we would only attend to it once the fixated word has been successfully encoded, regardless of whether this is a fast or slow process. However, if we attend to multiple words at the same time, then two alternative predictions emerge: either the perceptual difficulty induced by the low contrast word should withdraw attentional resources from the simultaneous processing of other words, thus prolonging the dwell time of the eyes on the subsequent parafoveal word; or the longer dwell time on the faint word might enable more extensive parallel preprocessing of the parafoveal word, thus reducing the time it would subsequently take to read it. Consistent with the serial model of attention allocation, the authors found that there was indeed a strong effect of perceptual degradation on the dwell time on the faint word, but no penalty for processing the parafoveal word once it was fixated. Part of the point of this experiment was to support a model of the reading process (“the EZ Reader Model”) which distinguishes between “two stages of lexical processing: an early stage (L1), which includes the extraction and identification of the orthographic form of the word, and a later stage (L2), which is solely involved with processing at the phonological and semantic level” (Reingold and Rayner, 745). It was found that the “stimulus quality” of the word (in this instance, how faint or dark it was), affected the first stage but not the second.

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Psychologists, like digital poets, need to manipulate text for striking visual effects. A surprising font-related result in the field of HEP was recently reported by Miellet et al. who designed a text display that would present the letters in a size that compensated for the reduced visual acuity in peripheral compared to central vision. Given that we can resolve most detail at the point of fixation, and gradually less detail in more peripheral vision, text must be presented in a “butterfly” format. In this format, the directly fixated letter of a given word is printed in normal size, the two adjacent letters are printed in slightly larger size, and more distant letters in ever more increasing sizes.

The authors expected that readers would be able to process more text at any given fixation, thus leading to larger saccades (eye-movements from one point to another) and somewhat faster reading rates. However, they found that neither reading rates nor saccade lengths differed reliably between conditions. This result was taken to suggest that the crucial cognitive limitation in reading is not our limited perceptual acuity but our limited amount of attention which does not allow us to process more than a small number of letters at a time.

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Another experimental procedure with analogies to digital poetry is the Mental Rotation test, in which participants see a shape or letter which has been rotated at various angles. They are asked to identify whether it is “normal” or a mirror image. Speed and accuracy are assessed as a measure of spatial ability. Examples of this test, using both shapes and letters, can be seen in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry on “Mental Imagery”. This experimental procedure may be compared with the “dynamic topology” of John Cayley’s work Lens. Created in the CAVE at Brown University, Lens makes use of 3D-simulation technology to present text in (the illusion of) three rather than two dimensions.

"Letters are very good at defining space for literate humans. Letter forms give excellent visual clues concerning relative distance. It would require experimentation in perception and cognition to verify this empirically, but my hypothesis is that, because letter shapes are both complex and familiar (to their readers, to the literate), they are highly suitable as reference shapes for spatiality. Unlike abstract shapes, letters possess an intrinsic scale ... The implication is that virtual 3D structures made from letter forms will have, as it were, an appreciably enhanced spatial structure for literate readers ... it should be possible to “play”—affectively, viscerally—with their form and arrangement in ways that are likely to have aesthetic significance, and some bearing— potentially, ultimately—on literary practice." (Cayley, Interview)

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Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2004.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2008.

Miellet, Sébastian, Patrick J. O’Donnell, and Sara C. Sereno. “Parafoveal Magnification: Visual Acuity does not Modulate the Perceptual Span in Reading.” Psychological Science 20.6 (2009): 721-28.

Reingold, Eyal M, and Keith Rayner. “Examining the Word Identification Stages Hypothesized by the E-Z Reader Model. Psychological Science 17.9 (2006): 742-46.

Tinker, Miles A. Legibility of Print. Iowa: Iowa State UP, 1963.