Julian Ankney's Case
Second Year MA Student (Literary Studies)
Department of English, Washington State University
Email: julian.ankney@wsu.edu
This Twine 2 was project was inspired by “My body- a Wunderkammer” and “Patchwork Girl” by Shelley Jackson and “These Waves of Girls” by Caitlin Fisher whose works of electronic literature were my muses for this project. I fell in love with the hypertext story and ludic elements of electronic literature. Like the card game Memory, I wanted my stories to be infused with the cognitive ergodic elements of electronic literature to parallel the complex forms of interactive oral traditions and storytelling. The reader can also defer their memory to lines and passages from T. S. Eliot's poem, “The Wasteland” and E.E. Cummings, “In Just” and the Nimipuutímt titwáatit, Nez Perce stories.
I began having dreams of different ludic elements. Words began to fly off my page like birds and frogs came to life as a way to confront historic inadequacies and reclaim the indiginous elements of storytelling as an act of resistance. While reading Dani Spinosa’s book Anarchist in the Academy and Astrid Ensslin’s book Literary Gaming, I fell in love with aural, visual, and textual elements included in the narratives of electronic literature that all intertwine, stop, start, and bring the digital story to life like no paper book could possibly think of capturing.
In Anna Anthropy’s book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, And People Like You Are Taking Back An Art Form, are taking back gaming as well as signifying cultural interplay and gives her reader instructions and strategies on how to make a cognitive ergodic game successful. Anthropy says,
The usage of Twine 2 opened up the portal that infused all these elements into one piece of art that I was able to incorporate using the oral Nimipuutímt titwáatit, transcriptions and translations to bring words to life through aurality and visual representations of words instead of using the English translation of those words to aid in the facilitation of accrued indigenous knowledge as a space for resistance.“What I mean by this is that games, digital and otherwise, transmit ideas and culture. This is something shared with poems, novels, music albums, films, sculptures, and paintings. A painting conveys what it’s like to experience the subject as an image; a game conveys what it’s like to experience the subject as a system of rules” (3).
My conscious and unconscious mind to start processing my own, “hopeful monsters” as Katherine Hayles would say, and I began to create the counterstory through self-publishing in Twine 2. The hypertext interactive non-fiction allows me to use HTML, JavaScript, and the “node map view” so that I can use the visuals of the map to tell another story altogether (Rhettberg 104). While creating using this platform I was able to recreate my indigenous Panopticon.
The shape resembles an oblong balloon, has double wall, as the structure is meant to resemble the actual prison’s structure of surveillance as a metaphor for cultural repression. Inside the walls are different structures that resemble the spines of the jimson weed plant, native to the Northwest. I wanted to add a place-based element to connect the land and indigenous knowledge. The plant is my symbol of metamorphosis and the resurrection of language as place-based identities and language reclamation and revitalization are connection to indigenous identity. There is the formation of chemical elements also located in the center of the Panopticon’s framework; the chemical formula for Acetaminophen next to the images of the spines.
I wanted the reader to have to work to read, look for line breaks, words, puzzles of the brain and language acquisition elements of Nimipuutímt through Twine 2. I wanted to cut things up and make the reader use their own thought process to conceptualize what is going on inside the story through the textual elements and style. Twine as a tool for language acquisition came into focus with the interactivity of the text to facilitate learning in a new way. I wanted the “deep attention of ludic digital literature” to hold the attention of the reader (Ensslin 44).
Language is the heartbeat of our Culture and the principles of language learning towards a multicultural learning style fit in with teaching inside the classroom for me. While learning language we say a pledge that represents our language reclamation in the classroom. Cukwenéewit, know it. Hitemenéewit, learn it. Téecukwe, teach it. C’ixnew’ét, speak it. Titooqanáawit, live it. Wiyéleeheyn, every day. I was able to take our oral histories and facilitate learning through the counterstory and Nimiipuu oral stories. I chose to use Sun, Moon and Frog Girl narrated by Sam Waters and transcribed and translated by Hairo Aoki.
The story begins with Nimipuutímt, Figure 1. The reader is able to hover over the words in the selected sentences they do not know and select the highlighted word to find the hypertext linked word (in light blue) Figure 2, linked to the English translation of the word as well as other specific linguistic features, Figure 3. Once the word is selected the reader can either go back to start to view other words that they do not know or they can view the translation of the sentences in full, Figure 4.
Most of all, I want readers to know that it is an act of anarchy and resistance for indigenous peoples to be in higher education. Project Panopticon is a hypertext auto ethnographic novel that uses different poetic elements such as alliteration, metaphor and simile to capture the reader’s attention. The text has an elliptical element layered together that comes into being through stories with no timelines, centralizing culture and history infused with the counter story experiences in a decolonizing digital space. The fact that most indigenous culture has been erased by white society through colonization, genocide, linguicide, and ethnocide the ability to take up space on a digital platform to raise awareness of cultural linguistic reclamation and revitalization through Twine 2 opens up a new platform for this to happen in the digital age bringing accessibility of cultural knowledge learners to the forefront (McCarty et. al. 1). I want to again transform learning while quoting our ancestors and cultural place-based knowledge through the counterstory of identity in oral stories through interactive hypertext nonfiction in Twine 2.
Works Cited
Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, And People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. New York, Seven Stories Press, 2012.
Ensslin, Astrid. Literary Gaming. Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2014.
McCarty, Teresa L., Shielah E. Nickolas, and Gillian Wigglesworth, editors. A World of Indigenous Languages: Politics, Pedagogies and Prospects for Language Reclamation. Multilingual Matters, Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit, 2019.
Rhettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Cambridge, UK, 2019.
Spinosa, Dani. Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry. Alberta, Canada, The University of Alberta Press, 2018.