Thursday, May 20, 2010

Final Project

Digital Implementations of the Book of Change: A Personal Exploration

64: Nearing Completion The situation is incomplete, but the chaos of the past is slowly giving way to order, and the goal is in sight. Nevertheless, you are still treading on thin ice – the way ahead is unobstructed, the goal is clear, but a cautious and careful attitude is still essential, lest you slip and fall.

http://divination.com/practice/iching/lookup/64/

Whatever else the I Ching/Yijing (the Book of Change) might be, it is one of the oldest surviving examples of a hypertext document. Upon the undifferentiated expanse of human experience, the Book of Change imposes a framework of sixty four particular situations. Each moment may be characterized by a prevailing situation from within which an emerging situation is beginning to arise. This provides 4096 possible categories into which phenomena may be classified.

Each of these sixty four situations is presented as a six line figure, referred to as a hexagram. Each of these lines may be either broken/open or unbroken/closed and either young/unchanging/stable or old/changing/moving. Moving lines produce a new hexagram which characterizes the emerging situation.

Although hexagrams can be analyzed in terms of their structure, each hexagram is the starting point of an endless flow of text. First of all, each hexagram has been given a name or title. A text is associated with each hexagram considered as a complete figure. Each moving line also has an associated text. The sixty four Judgment texts and the 384 line texts comprise the earliest strata, known as the Zhouyi, the Changes of Chou/Zhou.

The earliest layer of commentary, the Ten Wings, and the Zhouyi together form the basic text of the I Ching/Yijing, the Book of Change. The Third and Forth Wings, the Xiang Zhuan, provide an additional text, referred to the Image, for each hexagram. The Image text interprets the hexagram in terms of its component trigrams. Ever since the establishment of the basic text of the Book of Change, vast numbers of commentaries and interpretations have proliferated.

Many uses have been found for the Book of Change, including providing a framework for structured meditation. However, the Book of Change is usually approached in one of two ways. Scholars of the Chinese language study it as an ancient text and either try to recover the “original meaning” of the text or investigate what the text meant to readers in various historical periods. Other folks use it as a tool for contemplating what might be a favorable course of action in a particular situation. There have always been people who have considered the Book of Change as a predictive prognosticator, a fortune teller, a magic eight ball with 4096 possible responses. However, most folks who find the Book of Change a helpful aid to decision making understand it not as describing the future, but as a tool for exploring the texture and structure of the present moment . The moment is understood as experiential, lived time, as distinguished from the instant of abstract, calculated punch clock time of physics and train schedules. The Book of Change is momentous, rather than instantaneous.

Some people who consult the Book of Change for guidance are strongly attached to the traditional text, or in many cases their favorite translation of the traditional text. Other folks consider the traditional text only one of many possible descriptions of the situation represented by a particular hexagram. These folks are open to considering, or composing, alternative descriptions, as well as considering or composing contemporary commentary or interpretation of the traditional text.

One light hearted example of a contemporary text is I Ching Me! Timeless Wisdom for Modern Cubicles (http://www.ichingme.com). Hexagram 6, Conflict, becomes Change Management. “You are sincere/And are being obstructed . . . It furthers one to see the great man” becomes “A plan of transition to a state of Total Quality Culture. No one knows the goal; no one understands the metric; everyone says ‘proactive’ nine times a day. The wise worker speaks correct buzzwords . . . Seek advice from Quality Assurance and Marketing. Avoid IT and Sales. Call your mother.”

Another example of a nontraditional text is The Portable Dragon: The Western Man's Guide to the I Ching (originally published as The Man of Many Qualities: A Legacy of the I Ching). The editor, Ralph Gun Hoy Siu, chose selections from Western literature to elucidate each of the hexagrams. Dr. Siu's other books include The Tao of Science, and The Craft of Power.

As Aarseth points out:

"the I Ching continues to be transformed, specialized and extended (note such titles as “I Ching for the Successful Businessman”). These numerous paradigmatic and syntagmatic transformations and translations of the Book of Changes are not to be regarded as perversions or mutations of the text, since in the case of the I Ching it seems doubtful that any specific and original text ever existed. Rather, we should consider the "text" as an unfinished historical process of system transformation, the sum of all evolutionary stages and paraphrases" (Aarseth, 177 ).

From oracle bones to iPhones, the Book of Change has appeared in many formats and media. This discussion will consider several examples of how the Book of Change has been adapted for presentation on the computer screen. According to Tom Van Vleck: “The first computer implementation of this ancient text that I am aware of was done in the early 60s on CTSS by C. Tillman. It is documented in the Second Edition CTSS Manual, section AJ.11.03, dated 9/24/65. The program was called ORACLE” which ran on an IBM 7094 at MIT. (http://www.multicians.org/thvv/i.html) Some distributions of Unix included an I Ching/ Yi jing program in the games tree.

In 1987 I was sitting in the staff room of the Iowa City Public Library with a couple of issues of MacWorld reading about HyperCard. In his article “The Challenge of Hypermedia,” David Bunnell, citing Ted Nelson and Doug Englebert described hypertext as “nonsequential writing on screen (p.17).” Considering this, I thought that nonsequential writing would require nonsequential reading. In that case, the Book of Change would be an example of hypertext.

The last paragraph of Danny Goodman 's introduction to HyperCard in the previous issue declared that: “Because it puts powerful programming tools into the hands of nonprogrammers . . . HyperCard should inspire a quick rise in the number and variety of applications available for the Macintosh. We no longer have to rely on the programming skills of big-name software houses for specialized applications. HyperCard is what we've needed all along” (p.129).

When I read this, I took it to mean that HyperTalk made scripting so accessible that it would not be necessary to learn it. HyperCard stacks would be available in such profusion that someone else would have designed the one you needed before you had time to build your own. Proceeding from this assumption, I mail ordered all the Book of Change stacks available from the BudgetBytes catalogue. However, when they arrived I discovered that none of them worked they way I understood the Book of Change to work. Typically, these programs would provide a single hexagram with no changing lines. If any text was provided, it was usually just the Judgment.

What I was looking for was a program which would include the possibility of changing lines, provide the text for the Image as well as the Judgment, and the text for any changing lines and take you to the resulting second hexagram with its Judgment and Image. Of course it would be possible to consult twice to produce two hexagrams, and then consider which lines had to change to produce the second hexagram, but my understanding was that one should not be expected to resort to this workaround. Although there are many methods of casting a hexagram, the two most prevalent are the three coin method and the yarrow stalk method. These two methods result in somewhat different probabilities for the various possible lines. An adequate computer emulation should provide the user with a choice of methods, or at least be explicit about which probabilities it is utilizing.

With some trepidation, I began working on my own version: Disk of Change: yet another I Ching HyperCard stack . Working on this project took me deeper into scripting than I have ever been before or since. At this point I'm not sure I could ever get back there again. Princeton University Press had begun to complain about unauthorized computer versions of the Wilhelm/Baynes version. For the text I freely adapted the 1882 public domain translation by James Legge . For the Image texts, my adaptations leaned very heavily on Thomas Cleary ’s Taoist I Ching.

When I began the project I had no computer of my own. Most of the work was done on machines provided by the generosity of friends who let me wander into their homes unattended. Some work was also done in university ITCs, since these were the olden days when anyone could walk into an ITC and get on a computer without a HawkID login. Dot matrix printing was free, but a punch card was required for laser printing.

When the project was completed I was fairly satisfied with the result, but distribution was quite limited. There might have been a few friends who were persuaded to take a look. Moon Mystique at the Hall Mall agreed to make a few available, but I'm not sure than anyone actually paid the fifty cents to take one home, even though it was a fairly good price just for the disk itself. A few members of the Iowa Student Computer Association agreed to take a look at the scripts. Although I was hoping that there might be some suggestions for how to make the cumbersome kludges a bit more elegant, nothing substantial was offered.

To supplement the meager introductory material I had included in my stack, I asked Willard Johnson and Paul Williams for permission to make HyperCard versions of their articles about the Book of Change. They both agreed. Entering the text was a tedious but fairly straightforward procedure that required no complicated scripting. In the International Center ITC in the Old Law Building I made a few crude MacPaint scan graphics to include in these stacks. My scanning skills have not advanced much since that time. By the time I completed the project, HyperCard 2.0 had arrived. It seemed to me that I would never be able to keep up with the pace of technological innovation.

In addition to HyperCard versions of the I Ching, several standalone programs were available for Apple II, Macintosh, MS-DOS, Windows, and several other computers. For a fairly comprehensive list of these programs see I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography (Hacker, 318-326).

One of the most popular of these programs was Synchronicity, which was developed by Paul O’Brian. Synchronicity portrayed a garden setting for consulting the book of change. A small stream running through the garden was accompanied by the sounds of running water and croaking frogs. The commercial version was fairly expensive. A demo version with fewer features allowed four consultations. If one were careful to work from a copy and save an unused demo, another demo copy could be produced when the copy was expended.

O'Brian first encountered the Book of Change as a freshman at UC Berkeley in 1969.

“He skeptically tossed the I Ching for the first time, and his question was ignored. Instead, he received Hexagram #4: ‘Youthful Folly.’ Chalking it up to chance, he tried again and received a line that ‘questioned the sincerity of the seeker,’ ignored his ego-driven query. He was stunned ... and converted.” (http://www.tarot.com/iching/about-iching/paul-obrien-biography).

After dropping out of Berkeley, living on a communal goat farm, and visiting sourthern Asia to study Buddhist meditation, O'Brian began a career in software development and marketing. In 1988 he left the company he was working for to start Visionary Software to develop Synchronicity, his I Ching program for Macintosh, which became available in 1989.

In 1997 his new company, Visionary Networks, produced an I Ching CD-ROM, Oracle of Changes, and aquired the I-Ching.com and Tarot.com web domain names. In 2002 Visionary Networks won contracts to provide astrology and divination for AOL, MySpace, Belief.net and other web portals. After selling Visionary Networks and the Tarot.com website to Name Media in 2007, O'Brian established the Divination Foundation which publishes his books (Divination: Sacred Tools for Reading the Mind of God and Enlightened Decision Making) and podcasts (http://divination.com/about/paulo/).

In 1994 and 1996, just as graphical browser Mosaic was bringing a wider audience to the web, two major university presses published CD-ROM versions of their translations of the Book of Change. The Multimedia I Ching was published by Princeton University Press in 1996 and was based on their Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Change. Despite the fact that this version is an English translation of a German translation of the Chinese text, Wilhelm/Baynes is generally considered the “standard” English version. The CD-ROM edition presents the text in a context somewhat similar to a computer game. There is a library which can be explored and where the basic concepts of the Book of Change can be studied. To cast a hexagram one must enter a garden pavilion where one is offered the choice of the three coin or yarrow stalk method. The resulting texts are presented in a very readable, elegant fashion.

The Columbia I Ching is based on Richard John Lynn's translation, The Classic of Change : A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi. Although Want Bi lived for only twenty three years (226-249 CE) his commentaries of the Tao Te Ching and the Book of Change continue to be influential to this day. Apart from the introductory screens, The Columbia I Ching is not as elegant as the Princeton version. Each hexagram is illustrated by a photograph of Tibetan Himalayan mountains, with no obvious relation to the subject of the hexagram (with the exception, of course, of number 52, Mountain).

Kidder Smith , professor of Chinese history at Bowdoin College and senior author of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching, described The Columbia I Ching in at least two reviews. Smith considers Lynn's translation “the single best introduction to the Yijing currently available.” The CD-ROM version has been set up with a hexagram-generating mechanism, a simple changing line device, and a journal for recording one's results. A mouse click switches one easily from moving line to commentary to related text,and so on . . . Formally, the Yijing seems perfectly suited to this approach. Like a computer, it constructs a huge network out of the simplest bipolar alteration. From within that closed field of possibilities it generates the potential of vast meaning. Since its relationships are ever shifting, its user requires some means to make instantaneous connections to precisely defined objectives located far across the network, a task well suited to the computer's capabilites. And yet I haven't found this approach especially useful, or even that much fun. Perhaps it is best enjoyed by someone relatively new to the text (Smith 1999, 381).

In other words:

We can see how the computer might make a good mate for the I Ching — not just because both are based on binary math. Changing hexagrams and mutating lines necessitate quick connections to material "located" elsewhere in the book . . .True, the I Ching has no beginning, middle, or end, so one might relinquish the linearity of book pages. But those who love the text have learned their way around in it as surely as any computer – and with much richer synchronicity (Smith 1997).

In 1994, when Paul Gilster published his book Finding it on the internet: the essential guide to archie, Veronica, Gopher, WAIS, WWW (including Mosaic), and other search and browsing tools, the web did “not yet have its Veronica, the all-purpose search tool for Gopher that scours a database of collected resources to simplify the search process” (Gilster, 150). In those days I usually found web sites by reading books and magazines. One of the web sites I found in Gilster's book was what might have been the first I Ching server on the web. (Gilster found it at the WWW Virtual Library.) This I Ching website was run by a graduate student, Jonathan Katz, on a spare Sun workstation at the UCLA CAD Lab (http://constantname.blogspot.com/2009/09/i-ching-at-ucla-cad-lab.html). In 1995 I was able to find about a dozen I Ching related web sites and most of them were simply links to this site. This project has evolved into facade.com, where tarot, runes and biorhythms, as well as the Book of Change can be consulted.

Concerning the Book of Change, Gilster wrote that: “As for understanding what the I Ching tells you, you're on your own” (Gilster, 150). My understanding was that on the web one should never have to be on be “on your own.” On the basis of this understanding, I began to work on Old Fogey's Guide to the I Ching , not so much for any wisdom I might be able to impart, but primarily to make the introductory information provided by previously mentioned (HyperCard era) articles by Willard Johnson and Paul Williams available on the web. Again I contacted them, and again they gave me permission to disseminate their words.

After studying The HTML Manual of Style and Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 21 Days I put together a few pages. In order to find a web host I went door to door to various computer related storefront operations until I found Silicone Prairie, a free public web server provided by GIANT.Net (Global Information Analysis Networking Technologies, Inc) on Burlington Street. This situation did not last for very long. A short time after I put up my I Ching website, Silicone Prairie was no longer available as a free public web server. Several months later (October 1996) I received a postcard inquiring about my web site, which was no longer available. The postcard was from Joseph Morales, who maintains his own I Ching website at http://www.cdmag.us/books/I_Ching.

In those days, consulting the web was, for me, an occasional, rather than a perpetual, activity. After receiving the mysterious postcard I decided to take another look at the I Ching on the web. At that point there must have been some sort of search capability available on the text based Lynx browser that was available on the Iowa City Public Library catalogue terminals. What I found was I Ching Bookmarks (http://zhouyi.com/old) which listed hundreds of I Ching related web sites, including (to my surprise) Old Fogey's Guide to the I Ching on its dead links list.

In addition to compiling links to I Ching related web sites, Lorainne Patsco, the person who maintained the I Ching Bookmarks site, was involved in another project: putting together an bibliography of English language related I Ching material. Sorting through my two I Ching boxes, I sent Lorainne a few things she had not seen before. When I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography was published in 2002 my name was included among the contributors, even though not many of my contributions were actually included. This was probably because the software I submitted was sharware/freeware HyperCard stacks rather than commercial products, and the articles I provided were mostly from obscure countercultural publications rather than from academic journals.

With hundreds of I Ching related sites available, I considered my meager efforts redundant, but Lorraine encouraged me to put my pages back up, so I found a home for them on geocities. While I was updating these pages my login evaporated when yahoo! bought geocities. They persisted awhile, even though I was not able to modify them, before they faded away. Later I was astonished to discover that they had been preserved at the Wayback Machine on archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/20011217011126/www.geocities.com/heartland/prairie/6015/ofgyj.html).

A web search for “I Ching” or “zhouyi” still brings up I Ching Bookmarks fairly high on the list. However, very few links on the main page are functional. The previous version of the site has active links, but most of the pages they link to are no longer available. Although not as comprehensive as I Ching Bookmarks once was, The I Ching on the Net is one of the most useful directories of I Ching related web sites. Advances in search technology seem to have made hand crafted, subject specific bookmark pages less necessary than they once were. (Google: Results 1 - 10 of about 4,200,000 for i ching.) The I Ching on the Net is maintained by Greg Whincup, author of Rediscovering the I Ching, one of several efforts to recover the “original meaning of the text.”

Searching Facebook, rather than Google, also returns interesting results. There are several applications (I Ching : We have fixed the bugs reported by Steve, Tony, and Rob. Thanks for the input! January 9, 2008 at 3:23pm) and numerous pages and groups. Several of the group discussions are conducted in Spanish or Italian.

A recent new item on The I Ching on the Net is a link to an iPhone I Ching application (http://www.flatearthstudio.com/Apps/Apps.html). Here’s a message from Lorraine earlier this year: “Guess what, I got the iPod touch and downloaded all the I Ching programs! I got a ton of them. Some are kind of hokey though, like they don't have changing lines, that sort of thing. I kind of feel like doing a review of them all so people know which ones have the changing lines available. I just got it this weekend and all I want to do is play with it.” This is a review I'd like to see.


As new communication technologies continue to emerge, the Book of Change will continue to be adapted for them. This ancient text continues to speak to anyone with an interest in considering its wisdom and suggestions. Asking for suggestions for how to bring this discussion to a close I received 18 changing to 7 from Yi Jing, book of sun and moon (http://www.yijing.nl/).

Number 18 Ku / Work on what has been spoiled [Decay ], or as the book of sun and moon has it, can o’worms. It is certainly true that this composition is more of a sprawling ramble than I had envisioned and less of a coherent account than that for which I might have hoped. At this point there is not much time to work on substantial improvement, or to attempt to incorporate any analysis. “Working on what has been spoiled” will consist of proofreading, correcting typos, and formatting so that the what is submitted might have an acceptable appearance, whatever the limitations of its content. Nine in the third place offers some consolation: “ although he may at times have slight cause for regret, he remains free of any serious blame.” Nine in the sixth place is a challenge to set higher goals (including the challenge presented by Our Professor to incorporate more analysis into my writing). Meeting these challenges is something that will need to continue beyond the conclusion of this project.

As Hexagram 18 decays into Hexagram 7, it brings to mind a little story with which I will bring this discussion to a close. On March Fourth my wife and I attended a concert at the IMU performed by Abraham, Inc. , a klezmer/funk/hip-hop fusion music group led by “crackerjack clarinetist and klezmer maniac” David Krakauer. After the performance we had an opportunity to converse with several members of the ensemble.

While chatting with rapper C-Rayz Walz , I noticed that he had an I Ching hexagram tattooed on the side of his neck. When I asked him which hexagram it was he told me that it was number 7, “You know, The People.” At the time I didn't say anything more about it, but a couple of days later I sent C-Rayz an email message: “I was . . . wondering how you chose earth over water for the tattoo. If I remember correctly, you referred to it as The People, which is an interpretation with which I was not familiar. I'd be interested to know about any thoughts you have on that hexagram in particular or the I Ching in general.”

Hexagram 7 is usually referred to as The Army. The Army described by this hexagram is a people's militia rather than a standing army of professional warriors. “In the middle of the earth is water . . . Ground water is invisibly present within the earth. In the same way the military power of a people is invisibly present in the masses. When danger threatens, every peasant becomes becomes a soldier; when the war ends, he goes back to his plow” (Wilhelm/Baynes). Although I have no idea what the precise English translation of “shih” should be, by referring to the peasantry as The People it encompasses their roles as both defenders and producers.

While preparing for this paper I spent some time searching for computerized version of the Book of Change that I had not seen before. One that I found was a Mac dashboard widget called i.ching (http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/iching.html) which appears to be a full color descendant of the old I Ching desk accessories that provided a hexagram and its name, but no other text. As I was browsing through the hexagrams on i.ching (the widget) Hexagram 7 appeared as “Shih — The People .”

Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Aarseth concurs with my understanding that the I Ching is an example of a hypertext. He also concurs with my understanding that the traditional text is just one possible description of the hexagrams and their individual lines.

Bunnell, David. “The Challenge of Hypermedia.” MacWorld, November 1987, p.17-23.

Columbia I Ching. New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 1994.

A CD-ROM version of Richard John Lynn's book, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi.

Wang Bi (226--249) was a scholar of xuanxue, "dark (or mysterious) learning," sometimes characterized as Neotaoism. Although he lived for only 23 years, his commentaries on the I Ching and Tao Te Ching continue to be influential.

Gilster, Paul. Finding it on the internet : the essential guide to archie, Veronica, Gopher, WAIS, WWW (including Mosaic), and other search and browsing tools. New York: Wiley, 1994.

Goodman, Danny. “The Two Faces of HyperCard: Bill Atkinson serves up a Macintosh software revolution.” MacWorld, October 1987, pp. 122-129.

Most of what I was able to learn about HyperCard and HyperTalk came from Danny Goodman's books.

Hacker, Edward, Steve Moore, Lorraine Patsco, eds. I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Edward Hacker is Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Philosphy and religion at Northeastern University and the author of The I Ching Handbook (Paradigm Publications 1993), Steve Moore is the author of The Trigrams of Han: Inner Structures of the I Ching (Thorsons Publishers, April 1989). Lorraine Patsco is Webmaster of I Ching Bookmarks, www.zhouyi.com.

Johnson, Willard. A Beginners Guide to the I Ching. Berkeley: Shambala Publications, 1970.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040113090521/www.geocities.com/heartland/prairie/6015/wj1.html

Johnson wrote this brief introduction to the I Ching while he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. He continued his study of the I Ching after becoming a professor of religion at San Diego State University.

Multimedia I Ching. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

A CD-ROM Version of the Wilhelm/Baynes translations of the Book of Changes.

This digital version of the Book of Changes provides the user with a computer game like interface. One must enter the Library to study the text of the I Ching (and Helmut Wilhelm's Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching. It is necessary to go to a special pavilion to cast a hexagram.

Although numerous English translations and interpretations have appeared in recent years, the Wilhelm/Baynes translations remains the "standard English version." Cary Baynes translated Wilhelm's German translation of the Chinese text into English, which Paul Williams (see below) considers “less a good translation than an out and out miracle.”

Stephen Owen, in a review of Richard Lynn's translation (The New Republic, 11-28-94, pp. 66-70) compares it to Wilhelm/Baynes. Although Owen considers Lynn's work a more accurate translation of the Chinese:

“One reason that Lynn may not supplant Wilhelm/Baynes is a scholarly heaviness about his translation; but a deeper reason may lie in what an audience is seeking in the ‘Eastern Religions’ section. For the precise way in which the Wilhelm/Baynes translation twists the Chinese produces a remarkable oracular grace--passages that sound profound, and with sufficient ingenuity on the part of the reader, may even become profound. The combination of Wilhelm and Baynes was a lucky one: Baynes fashioned out of Wilhelm's German a distinct English idiom, compelling by its rhythms, by its biblical echoes, by its skillful choice of words, by its surprising conjunction of abstractions that perhaps owes more to Rilke than to the Chinese. Where the Chinese is clear, Wilhelm/Baynes is often mysterious. After such an encounter with mystery in the translation, the Wilhelm commentary then guides the translation back toward sense, formally embodying the experience of an obscure ancient text interpretable to the modern world.”

Smith, Kidder. “Do Your Own Ching.” Natural History, v. 106, no. 7, Sept. 12, 1997.

Smith, Kidder. "Review of The Columbia I Ching on CD-ROM.” Philosophy East & West.
v. 49, No.3, July 1999, p. 381

Kidder Smith is Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies and History at Bowdoin College. He studied China's culture at Princeton, Berkeley, and in Taiwan. He is senior author of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). With other members of the Denma Translation Group he collaborated on a new translation of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

Synchonicity. Portland, OR: Visionary Software, 1989-90.

Williams, Paul. “The Sources of the Nile: The “I Ching’ looks like a book but it isn't, really.” Crawdaddy, April, 1973, p. 10.

http://web.archive.org/web/20011221011202/www.geocities.com/heartland/prairie/6015/pw1.html

Paul Williams founded Crawdaddy magazine (http://web.archive.org/web/20020601080238/www.cdaddy.com/FormatHomePage.cgi), the first journal of rock criticism (as distinguished from teen fan mags like Tiger Beat). After a seemingly remarkable recovery after a fall from a bicycle, Paul developed early onset Alzheimers due to his brain injury.

http://paulwilliams.com/index.html

Here is a video of Paul being interviewed by his son for a school project:

Part one

http://www.youtube.com/user/cindyleeberryhill#p/u/7/DqAhMJTW-Q0

Part two

http://www.youtube.com/user/cindyleeberryhill#p/u/6/8yLpHYFaYPw

Paul's three wives have collaborated on benefit concerts to raise funds for his nursing home care.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=121382749378&id=80121576515&ref=mf

May 06, 2010

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

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Topics in Digital Media: New Media Poetics • Dee Morris • Spring 2010






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Schedule

Section 01 media ecologies: orality, literacy, electracy. terms due

Week 1

Jan. 19

Introduction



course goals & requirements, webpages, ICON board, and Wiki


William Carlos Williams' "The Great Figure":

--print

--Figure 5 Media Series: Image, Video, New Media

--X-5 by Andy Warhol


media ecology &

media-specific analysis



discourse network



 


 


Jan. 21

Orality

Ong, Orality and Literacy,

--
Ch. 1 "The Orality of Language"

--Ch.
2 "The Modern Discovery of Primary Oral Cultures"


Beowulf soundbites


annotation:

Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message" (Dee)


post: For this opening post, read Williams' poem The Great Figure as four different information structures: a written poem, a graphic design, a video, and a digital structure. Pick two: what differences do their differences make to the poem's "meaning" and to your position as its interpreter?


medium & message


primary orality


technotext


post


 

Week 2

Jan. 26

Ong, Orality and Literacy, Ch. 3: "Some Psychodynamics of Orality"


Felicia Hemans' Casabianca a.k.a. "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck"

--printversion

--web version


annotation:

Catherine Robson, "Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History," PMLA 120.1 (2005): 148-62


post: Most Victorian children were required to learn Felicia Hemans' "Casabianca" "by heart" and recite it aloud before their peers and parents. In this post, write a paragraph that reflects on your own experience in memorizing this poem: 1) if poems like "Casabianca" aim to teach a cultural lesson, how does it feel to "learn" this lesson not by analysis but by memorization?; 2) what structural features of this poem make it (relatively) easy to memorize?; 3) what gives memorized materials (prayers, songs, pledges, poems) their particular social power? 4) what's the effect, to add another medium to the mix, of this particular website as a carrier for this particular poem?

secondary orality

memorize 5 stanzas of Hemans' poem


post


annotation (Jacob)


add to Wiki table

(all)


Jan. 28

Literacy & . . .



Ong, Orality and Literacy, Ch. 4: "Writing Restructures Consciousness"

Introducing Le book (YouTube)


Imagining & demo-ing the digital:

--Vannevar Bush, As We May Think (1945) & Wikipedia entry& YouTube video

--Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect (1968 Demo) & Wikipedia entry

--Steve Jobs, Apple Macintosh (1984) & Wikipedia entry


Morris, "Introduction" to New Media Poetics & poem sampler

--Flash: Brian Kim Stefans' The Dreamlife of Letters

--QuickTime: John Cayley, windsound

Cayley's explanation of the technique of transliteral morphing


post: After spending time with the two poems above, pick one and compare its organization of information with 1) the organization of information in an oral composition; 2) the organization of information in a print book; 3) the organization of information in Bush's memex. What are the challenges of this poem? What are its rewards? What are its limits?


print culture



hypertext


thinkertoy


distributed cognition


media-specific analysis


Memex


transliteral morphing


post


 

Week 3

Feb. 2

Electracy



Hayles, Electronic Literature, Ch 1: "Electronic Literature: What Is It?"



poem sampler:

--David Knoebel, Heart Pole (Jacob, Derek, Erin)

--Loss Penqueno Glazier, White-Faced Bromeliads (Steve, Keelan, Galen)

--Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Regime Change (Wendy, Clarissa, Michael, Isaac)

--& (for fun) Brian Kim Stefans, Suicide in an Airplane--1919 (brand-new digital piece)



annotation:

--Memmott, Toward Electracy: A Conversation with Gregory Ulmer


post: After reading Hayles's overview of the genres of electronic literature, explore your poem, prepare to demonstrate how it works, and compose a post that assesses it in light of Hayles's claim that "contemporary electronic literature is both reflecting and enacting a new kind of subjectivity characterized by distributed cognition, networked agency . . . , and fluid boundaries dispersed over actual and virtual locations" (37).


digital born



electronic literature



networked & programmable

post on one of the 3 poems for today & prepare to play it in class


annotation

(Derek)

Feb. 4

first-generation electronic writing:

--Michael Joyce, Twelve Blue

--Greg Ulmer, "A Response to Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce," Postmodern Culture 8.1 (1997). Annotation by Keelan.


more second-generation electronic writing: a sampler

-- Shockwave: geniwate's When You Reach Kyoto

-- 3-D: Daniel C. Howe and Aya Karpinska's open.ended

-- cut-up: Talan Memmott's Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]

----interview with Memmott The nEARness/t of [I]rOny] U's


post: Innovative writing of any sort must always be, among other things, a reading lesson. Because new media writing departs from the print structures we know, it has to teach us how to think about its compositional strategies. Twelve Blue is, in this sense, a technotext: it mediitates on its own inscription techniques. As you navigate this text, watch for a series of embedded and overlapping metaphors for its construction: a quilt, a river, a particular kind of carnival ride, a thread through a labyrinth, etc. After thinking about the ways in which Joyce's formal choices organize our perceptions, explore an object or event within the story that serves as a figure for one or another aspect of hypertext narrative.




first-generation & second-generation electronic literature


hypertext


links & nodes


lexia


post


annotation (Keelan)

Week 4

Feb. 9

Remediations & the Differential Text


Versioning Homer

--Homer, Odyssey, Book XI in prose & verse

--Ezra Pound's Canto 1 & Canto 2

--Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry's Dakota


short interview with YHCHI


annotations:

--Pressman, "The Strategy of Digital Modernism: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries' Dakota," Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (2008).

--Bolter & Grusin, "Remediation," Configurations 4.3 (Fall 1996): 311-58


post: Like Book XI of Homer's Odyssey and parts of Pound's Cantos 1 & 2, YHCHI's Dakota tells the tale of a youthful road trip. By remediating parts of Homer's oral poem and Pound's print epic for the Web, YHCHI enter into conversation with them. With an ear and eye to the poem's oral and print predecessors, use this post to explore YHCHI's digital medium and message. What happens when Homer's material is remixed for digital culture?



Flash poem



post


annotation of Pressman

(Erin)


annotation of Bolter & Grusin

(Michael)


Feb. 11

Stephanie Strickland, "The Ballad of Sand and Soot"

--print version

--web remediation


annotation:

Jaishree K. Odin, Image and Text in Hypermedia Literature: The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot


post: For this post, follow the track of your topic away from then back toward Strickland's "The Ballad of Sand and Soot." What does the material you have researched contribute to this odd poem? Does it augment the version of the poem published in the Boston Review or detract from it? What does remediation for the web suggest about media-specific analysis?


post


annotation of Odin (Derek)


Week 5

Feb. 16

Christian Bök, Eunoia, Chapters E & U

--Bök's performance of Eunoia

--(optional, but fantastic) Bök's performance of Schwitter's Ursonate and score

Brian Kim Stefans, remediation of Bök's chapter e, for rené crevel


Wershler-Henry, review of Eunoia

Brian Kim Stefans, review of Eunoia


post: For this post, pick a vowel--e or u or, if you'd like, a vowel from any other chapter of Eunoia--and compose a short review of the corresponding chapter in the form of an imitation lipogram. Try to catch, if you can, the spirit of the whole. And, not least, have fun.

lipogram

discussion of wiki-teams


post



 

Feb. 18 PAPER CONFERENCES, WEEK OF FEB. 23RD

SIGN UP SHEET ON WIKI
 
conferences

Week 6

Feb. 23

new literacies of electronic communications


Marjorie Perloff, "Screening the Page / Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text," in New Media Poetics (all)

--Stefans, Dreamlife of Letters (review) & Star Wars, one letter at a time


Bergvall, ambient fish

--print version from Goan Atom

--sound file

--Hans Bellmer, La Poupée & Surrealist dolls



annotations:

--Perloff, Marjorie. Interview with Caroline Bergvall: ex/Creme/ental/eaT/ing

--cris cheek, Caroline Bergvall: writing and reading, the sites of performance


browse UbuWeb


review for Quiz #1 / bring any questions you have

differential text

annotation of Perloff interview (Clarissa)


annotation of cheek interview (Wendy)

Feb. 25 mid-course assessment / formation of Wiki teams  
Quiz #1
Section 02 cybertexts: computational & combinatorial texts terms due

Week 7

March 2

theories & practices: review and anticipation

 

PAPER DUE

March 4

Hayles, Electronic Literature, Ch. 2 "Intermediation: From Page to Screen"


Mencia, Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs & website/ Jacob

Larsen, Carving in Possibilities / Clarissa

--The Digital Michaelangelo Project

Glazier, Io Sono at Swoons / Steve

--"Io Sono at Swoons" (in Morris/Swiss)


post: In this post, pick one of the poem-machines assigned for today and use the terms "intermediation," "dynamic heterarchies," and "recombinant flux" at least once in a paragraph of interpretation.


1st in-class meeting of collaborative groups



intermediation


feedback loop



dynamic heterarchies



recombinant flux

post


players:

Clarissa, Steve, Jacob


Week 8

March 9

Laura Miller www.claptrap.com: example of the mainstream reaction to advocates' claims for 1st-generation electronic literature


Aarseth Cybertext, Ch. 1 "Introduction: Ergodic Literature"



Millie Niss, Sundays in the Park / Erin

Poundstone, Project for Tachistoscope / Wendy


Poems That Go: Games Issue

--Nick Montfort Literary Games / annotation by Keelan

--Natalie Bookchin The Intruder / Galen

--Jim Andrews, Arteroids 2.5 / Michael


post: In this post, pick one of the poem-machines assigned for today and use the terms "cybertext," "ergodic text," and "feedback loop" at least once in a paragraph of interpretation.


groupwork: each group should 1) make a quick definition of their field or topic; 2) draft an initial statement of purpose; 3) & each person should put into the table a quick sketch of the topic for their individual project. All this will change, but these initial statements can be a starting point. I will then suggest readings for the annotated bibliography.



cybertext



ergodic


textual machine



post


annotation / Keelan


players:

--Bookchin / Galen

--Poundstone / Wendy

--Andrews / Michael

--Ness / Erin


 

March 11

Aarseth, Cybertext, Ch. 2 "Paradigms and Perspectives"



OULIPO

--documentary clip

--Oulipo Library

--Wikipedia on OuLiPo & NuLiPo


OULIPEAN WORK:

--Raymond Queneau, --100,000,000,000,000 Poems / Michael

--Millie Ness, with Martha Deed, Oulipoems / Derek & Morningside Vector Space / Steve

----Jim Andrews' Vispo page on Millie Ness & her work


S + 7 poems

--Lee Ann Brown, Pledge

--Harryette Mullen, Dim Lady (scroll down to find this exercise)


annotations:

--Baetens, Jan. "Free Writing, Constrained Writing: The Ideology of Form." Poetics Today. 18.1 (Spring 1997). 1-14.

--Madden, Matt. 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. New York: Penguin Group, 2005.


post: write an S + 7 exercise on a cultural document of your choice then post your exercise with a paragraph that explores the result. EXTRA POINTS: choose a Bernstein or Mayer experiment, do it & comment on it.

--Charles Bernstein, Experiments

--Bernadette Mayer, Writing Experiments

OULIPO


interactivity


procedural poetics


database & algorithm


emergent behavior

post


 


comment on 2 papers on Wiki


annotations:

Baetens/Dee



Madden
/ Wendy



Oulipo Primer/ Erin


players:

Queneau/Michael

Ness/Derek & Steve

Week 9

March 23

combinatorial intertextuality, a.k.a. cut-ups & mash-ups


William Burroughs and Brion Gysin:

--Burroughs, The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin

--Gysin, Cut-Ups Self-Explained

--Gysin, Cut Me Up (from Minutes to Go)



experiment with the cut-up engine on this site


Jim Andrews, with Brian Lennon and Pauline Masurel, Stir Fry Texts/ Jacob

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich, Regime Change/ Wendy, Michael, Clarissa

cut-up

wiki-team bibliography: first entries


 


March 25

DJ Spooky, a.k.a. Paul D. Miller

--Rhythm Science & website

--Errata Erratum / Keelan

----notes from exhibit, including instructions & short essay

----excerpt from Duchamp's Erratum Musical

--Program 12


DJ Spooky's website / Michael

DJ Spooky in action


materials for a mash-up:

--Picasso portrait of Jacqueline Roque

--Gertrude Stein's portrait of Picasso

--Spooky's mash-up of Stein and Zeta Reticulli: Track 05 of DJ Spooky CD


post: The opening section of DJ Spooky's Rhythm Science mixes digital and sonic terminology: on the one hand, terms like link, log-in, extension, [feedback] loops, database logic, vectors, interface architecture, and dataspace; on the other, terms like rhythm, rhyme, freestyle, and improvisation. Taking one term from each column--say, for example, dataspace and rhyme--improvise on the logic of the combination. How do the two information fields inform, deform, or reform each other? In your post, follow a vector created by their (re)combinations(s).


mash-up




database logic




wildstyle


multiplex consciousness


rhythm science



post


DJ Spooky's website / Michael


player for Errata Erratumn / Keelan


Week 10

March 30

Plunderphonics

--manifesto: Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative / annotator

--website


DangerMouse, The Grey Album / Keelan

--Wikipedia entry

--GreyVideo


post: One of the most famous early mash-ups is DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, created in 2004 by mixing rapper Jay Z's Black Album with unauthorized samples from the Beatles' White Album. Use this or another mash-up of your choice (but describe it first) to speculate on why this form of "uncreativity," anticipated by Burroughs's cut-ups, seems to have become creatively urgent in our time. What do mash-ups test? What do they do? What do they tell us? Why are they, at this point in time, one of the most compelling popular art forms?


conferences Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week: sign-up- on Wiki homepage

plunderphonics

wiki-team bibliography: 2nd half


manifesto annotation


 


April 1

Kenneth Goldsmith



manifestoes:

--
Uncreativity as a Creative Practice


-- "The Bride Stripped Bare: Nude Media and the Dematerialization of Tony Curtis" (New Media Poetics)



works:

-- Head Citations / Clarissa

--Soliloquy

-- Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Sigmund Freud & Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Walter Benjamin

--Fidget: 10:00-12:00


UbuWeb / Erin

Goldsmith, UbuWeb Wants to Be Free


Simon Morris video Sucking on Words: Kenneth Goldsmith



uncreative writing


nude media



Goldsmith annotation / Jacob

Week 11

April 6

remediations of Fidget:

--Fidget (book)

--Fidget (audiotape)

--Fidget (digitized by Clem Paulsen)


annotations:

Marjorie Perloff, "'Vocable Scriptsigns': Differential Poetics in Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget" (Fidget 90-107)

Derek Beaulieu, Fidgeting with the scene of the crime

Gallo, Fidget's Body


review terms for Quiz #2: bring questions to class

short meeting for groups to confer on bibliographies and prospectuses


 


 


prospectus due


annotation for Perloff / Clarissa


annotation for Beaulieu / Michael


annotation for Gallo / Erin

Section 03 cyborg subjectivities terms due

April 8

anticipations:

--Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis & Wikipedia entry

--Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto

--Aarseth, Cybertext (53-57)


Hayles, Electronic Literature, Ch. 3 "Contexts for Electronic Literature: The Body and the Machine" - annotation / Dee

cyborg


man-computer symbiosis


deep attention / hyper attention


Quiz #2


Licklider annotation / Wendy

Haraway annotation/ Jacob


Week 12

April 13

Stelarc

--Obsolete Body

--Amplified Body / Michael

--Ping Body/ Wendy

--Third Hand / Clarissa


Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Nippon / Galen

Jessica Pressman, Reading the Code between the Words: The Role of Translation in Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries's Nippon [navigate to Issue 37] / annotation


Daft Punk, Technologic

Brody Condon
- gaming manipulations


distributed intelligence


Pressman annotation/ Derek

April 15

Memmott, Lexia to Perplexia (access through CD in Hayles, Electronic Literature) / Michael


readings of Memmott's L2P:

--Hayles, Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia / Keelan

--Hayles, section on L2P in Electronic Literature (120-25)

--Barrett Watten on L2P in New Media Poetics (351-65) / Clarissa


Galen and Steve on Egyptian mythology in L2P


post: Using the L2P lexicon handout, choose one term or cluster of terms from Memmott's poem-machine and use it to enter the world constructed by Lexia to Perplexia. How does this term or set of terms help de-perplex Memmott's perplexia? If new terminology is necessary to capture the dynamics of remediated thinking, what thoughts do Memmott's creole help the user construct?

cell.f

cyborganization


narra(c)tive

puncturate


creole

post


annotation for Watten / Clarissa


annotation for Hayles /Keelan


 

Week 13

April 20

codes & codework:


2nd reading of Memmott, Lexia to Perplexia (access through CD in Hayles, Electronic Literature) / Michael


code


 

April 22

Mez (explore her web page but see especially_the data][h!][bleeding texts_) / Jacob

Mez, The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing

Mez, Statement


Raley, Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework

Cayley, The Code Is Not the Text (unless it is the Text)


review of terms for quiz #3


meeting of small groups in preparation for annotated bibliography, Wiki pages, and class demo (including reading & assignment)

m[ez]ang.elle


code work

annotation for Raley / Steve



annotation for Cayley / Wendy
Section 04 tactical media: the politics, poetics, & ethics of the hack terms due
Week 14

April 27

Wark, Hacker Manifesto: read around in this text, but see especially "abstraction," "education," "hacking," "information," "subject," & "vector," "nature," "representation," "revolt," & "state"

--Luther Blissett Project

--John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

--Creative Commons


Optional: Preamble to the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)


post: After reading through the database that is A Hacker Manifesto, compose a brief definition of your term. How does this term hack the term's conventional definition? To what end?

 
Quiz #3
April 29

Tactitians



Yes Men/

--movie trailor




Critical Art Ensemble


--Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere

--Institute for Infinitely Small Things (video)


Giselle Beiguelman

-- Egoscopio

--
"Nomadic Poetry" (in New Media Poetics)


Tactical Media

--Tim Klimowicz, Iraq War Coalition Fatalities

--BorderXing Guide

--A Toy World

--Carbon Defense League


optional:

--
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

tactics


strategies


nomadic poetry


annotated bibliography due


 



responses sign-up sheet
Section 05 cyberculture(s): presentation by Wiki teams terms due
Week 15

May 4
procedural poetics / Erin and Wendy

--reading: Wiki pages including annotated bibliography

--post: select aprocedural constraint from the Wiki menu, try it out, and post the result with a brief commentary on ICON



sound and visual poetics / Clarissa, Galen, Michael

--reading: Wiki pages including annotated bibliography & gallery
 
galleries posted



post: procedural poem

May 6

gaming, virtual worlds, and net culture / Steve, Keelan, Jacob, Derek

--Derek's gallery

--Steve's gallery1 and gallery 2


gaming autobiographies: Derek, Steve, Keelan, Jacob



Frasca annotation

Gee annotation

Johnson annotation


 

galleries posted



INDIVIDUAL PROJECT
DUE (3 copies + Wiki entry)

 



 





May 14 responses need to be posted on the Wiki and/or put in my in-box--hard copy in EPB or virtual copy in email--no later than 4:00 pm  
responses due

 



Thursday, May 6, 2010

Final Project

Digital Implementations of the Book of Change: A Personal Exploration

64: Nearing Completion The situation is incomplete, but the chaos of the past is slowly giving way to order, and the goal is in sight. Nevertheless, you are still treading on thin ice – the way ahead is unobstructed, the goal is clear, but a cautious and careful attitude is still essential, lest you slip and fall.

http://divination.com/practice/iching/lookup/64/


Whatever else the I Ching/Yijing (the Book of Change) might be, it is one of the oldest surviving examples of a hypertext document. Upon the undifferentiated expanse of human experience, the Book of Change imposes a framework of sixty four particular situations. Each moment may be characterized by a prevailing situation from within which an emerging situation is beginning to arise. This provides 4096 possible categories into which phenomena may be classified.
Each of these sixty four situations is presented as a six line figure, referred to as a hexagram. Each of these lines may be either broken/open or unbroken/closed and either young/unchanging/stable or old/changing/moving. Moving lines produce a new hexagram which characterizes the emerging situation.
Although hexagrams can be analyzed in terms of their structure, each hexagram is the starting point of an endless flow of text. First of all, each hexagram has been given a name or title. A text is associated with each hexagram considered as a complete figure. Each moving line also has an associated text. The sixty four Judgment texts and the 384 line texts comprise the earliest strata, known as the Zhouyi, the Changes of Chou/Zhou.
The earliest layer of commentary, the Ten Wings, and the Zhouyi together form the basic text of the I Ching/Yijing, the Book of Change. The Third and Forth Wings, the Xiang Zhuan, provide an additional text, referred to the Image, for each hexagram. The Image text interprets the hexagram in terms of its component trigrams. Ever since the establishment of the basic text of the Book of Change, vast numbers of commentaries and interpretations have proliferated.
Many uses have been found for the Book of Change, including providing a framework for structured meditation. However, the Book of Change is usually approached in one of two ways. Scholars of the Chinese language study it as an ancient text and either try to recover the “original meaning” of the text or investigate what the text meant to readers in various historical periods. Other folks use it as a tool for contemplating what might be a favorable course of action in a particular situation. There have always been people who have considered the Book of Change as a predictive prognosticator, a fortune teller, a magic eight ball with 4096 possible responses. However, most folks who find the Book of Change a helpful aid to decision making understand it not as describing the future, but as a tool for exploring the texture and structure of the present moment . The moment is understood as experiential, lived time, as distinguished from the instant of abstract, calculated punch clock time of physics and train schedules. The Book of Change is momentous, rather than instantaneous.
Some people who consult the Book of Change for guidance are strongly attached to the traditional text, or in many cases their favorite translation of the traditional text. Other folks consider the traditional text only one of many possible descriptions of the situation represented by a particular hexagram. These folks are open to considering, or composing, alternative descriptions, as well as considering or composing contemporary commentary or interpretation of the traditional text.

One light hearted example of a contemporary text is I Ching Me! Timeless Wisdom for Modern Cubicles (http://www.ichingme.com). Hexagram 6, Conflict, becomes Change Management. “You are sincere/And are being obstructed . . . It furthers one to see the great man” becomes “A plan of transition to a state of Total Quality Culture. No one knows the goal; no one understands the metric; everyone says ‘proactive’ nine times a day. The wise worker speaks correct buzzwords . . . Seek advice from Quality Assurance and Marketing. Avoid IT and Sales. Call your mother.”
Another example of a nontraditional text is The Portable Dragon: The Western Man's Guide to the I Ching (originally published as The Man of Many Qualities: A Legacy of the I Ching). The editor, Ralph Gun Hoy Siu, chose selections from Western literature to elucidate each of the hexagrams. Dr. Siu's other books include The Tao of Science, and The Craft of Power.

As Aarseth points out:

the I Ching continues to be transformed, specialized and extended (note such titles as “I Ching for the Successful Businessman”). These numerous paradigmatic and syntagmatic transformations and translations of the Book of Changes are not to be regarded as perversions or mutations of the text, since in the case of the I Ching it seems doubtful that any specific and original text ever existed. Rather, we should consider the "text" as an unfinished historical process of system transformation,
the sum of all evolutionary stages and paraphrases" (Aarseth, 177 ).

From oracle bones to iPhones, the Book of Change has appeared in many formats and media. This discussion will consider several examples of how the Book of Change has been adapted for presentation on the computer screen. According to Tom Van Vleck: “The first computer implementation of this ancient text that I am aware of was done in the early 60s on CTSS by C. Tillman. It is documented in the Second Edition CTSS Manual, section AJ.11.03, dated 9/24/65. The program was called ORACLE” which ran on an IBM 7094 at MIT. (http://www.multicians.org/thvv/i.html) Some distributions of Unix included an I Ching/ Yi jing program in the games tree.

In 1987 I was sitting in the staff room of the Iowa City Public Library with a couple of issues of MacWorld reading about HyperCard. In his article “The Challenge of Hypermedia,” David Bunnell, citing Ted Nelson and Doug Englebert described hypertext as “nonsequential writing on screen (p.17).” Considering this, I thought that nonsequential writing would require nonsequential reading. In that case, the Book of Change would be an example of hypertext.
The last paragraph of Danny Goodman 's introduction to HyperCard in the previous issue declared that: “Because it puts powerful programming tools into the hands of nonprogrammers . . . HyperCard should inspire a quick rise in the number and variety of applications available for the Macintosh. We no longer have to rely on the programming skills of big-name software houses for specialized applications. HyperCard is what we've needed all along” (p.129).
When I read this, I took it to mean that HyperTalk made scripting so accessible that it would not be necessary to learn it. HyperCard stacks would be available in such profusion that someone else would have designed the one you needed before you had time to build your own. Proceeding from this assumption, I mail ordered all the Book of Change stacks available from the BudgetBytes catalogue. However, when they arrived I discovered that none of them worked they way I understood the Book of Change to work. Typically, these programs would provide a single hexagram with no changing lines. If any text was provided, it was usually just the Judgment.
What I was looking for was a program which would include the possibility of changing lines, provide the text for the Image as well as the Judgment, and the text for any changing lines and take you to the resulting second hexagram with its Judgment and Image. Of course it would be possible to consult twice to produce two hexagrams, and then consider which lines had to change to produce the second hexagram, but my understanding was that one should not be expected to resort to this workaround. Although there are many methods of casting a hexagram, the two most prevalent are the three coin method and the yarrow stalk method. These two methods result in somewhat different probabilities for the various possible lines. An adequate computer emulation should provide the user with a choice of methods, or at least be explicit about which probabilities it is utilizing.

With some trepidation, I began working on my own version: Disk of Change: yet another I Ching HyperCard stack . Working on this project took me deeper into scripting than I have ever been before or since. At this point I'm not sure I could ever get back there again. Princeton University Press had begun to complain about unauthorized computer versions of the Wilhelm/Baynes version. For the text I freely adapted the 1882 public domain translation by James Legge . For the Image texts, my adaptations leaned very heavily on Thomas Cleary ’s Taoist I Ching.

When I began the project I had no computer of my own. Most of the work was done on machines provided by the generosity of friends who let me wander into their homes unattended. Some work was also done in university ITCs, since these were the olden days when anyone could walk into an ITC and get on a computer without a HawkID login. Dot matrix printing was free, but a punch card was required for laser printing.
When the project was completed I was fairly satisfied with the result, but distribution was quite limited. There might have been a few friends who were persuaded to take a look. Moon Mystique at the Hall Mall agreed to make a few available, but I'm not sure than anyone actually paid the fifty cents to take one home, even though it was a fairly good price just for the disk itself. A few members of the Iowa Student Computer Association agreed to take a look at the scripts. Although I was hoping that there might be some suggestions for how to make the cumbersome kludges a bit more elegant, nothing substantial was offered.
To supplement the meager introductory material I had included in my stack, I asked Willard Johnson and Paul Williams for permission to make HyperCard versions of their articles about the Book of Change. They both agreed. Entering the text was a tedious but fairly straightforward procedure that required no complicated scripting. In the International Center ITC in the Old Law Building I made a few crude MacPaint scan graphics to include in these stacks. My scanning skills have not advanced much since that time. By the time I completed the project, HyperCard 2.0 had arrived. It seemed to me that I would never be able to keep up with the pace of technological innovation.

In addition to HyperCard versions of the I Ching, several standalone programs were available for Apple II, Macintosh, MS-DOS, Windows, and several other computers. For a fairly comprehensive list of these programs see I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography (Hacker, 318-326).
One of the most popular of these programs was Synchronicity, which was developed by Paul O’Brian. Synchronicity portrayed a garden setting for consulting the book of change. A small stream running through the garden was accompanied by the sounds of running water and croaking frogs. The commercial version was fairly expensive. A demo version with fewer features allowed four consultations. If one were careful to work from a copy and save an unused demo, another demo copy could be produced when the copy was expended.
O'Brian first encountered the Book of Change as a freshman at UC Berkeley in 1969.
“He skeptically tossed the I Ching for the first time, and his question was ignored. Instead, he received Hexagram #4: ‘Youthful Folly.’ Chalking it up to chance, he tried again and received a line that ‘questioned the sincerity of the seeker,’ ignored his ego-driven query. He was stunned ... and converted.” (http://www.tarot.com/iching/about-iching/paul-obrien-biography).
After dropping out of Berkeley, living on a communal goat farm, and visiting sourthern Asia to study Buddhist meditation, O'Brian began a career in software development and marketing. In 1988 he left the company he was working for to start Visionary Software to develop Synchronicity, his I Ching program for Macintosh, which became available in 1989.
In 1997 his new company, Visionary Networks, produced an I Ching CD-ROM, Oracle of Changes, and aquired the I-Ching.com and Tarot.com web domain names. In 2002 Visionary Networks won contracts to provide astrology and divination for AOL, MySpace, Belief.net and other web portals. After selling Visionary Networks and the Tarot.com website to Name Media in 2007, O'Brian established the Divination Foundation which publishes his books (Divination: Sacred Tools for Reading the Mind of God and Enlightened Decision Making) and podcasts (http://divination.com/about/paulo/).

In 1994 and 1996, just as graphical browser Mosaic was bringing a wider audience to the web, two major university presses published CD-ROM versions of their translations of the Book of Change. The Multimedia I Ching was published by Princeton University Press in 1996 and was based on their Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Change. Despite the fact that this version is an English translation of a German translation of the Chinese text, Wilhelm/Baynes is generally considered the “standard” English version. The CD-ROM edition presents the text in a context somewhat similar to a computer game. There is a library which can be explored and where the basic concepts of the Book of Change can be studied. To cast a hexagram one must enter a garden pavilion where one is offered the choice of the three coin or yarrow stalk method. The resulting texts are presented in a very readable, elegant fashion.
The Columbia I Ching is based on Richard John Lynn's translation, The Classic of Change : A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi. Although Want Bi lived for only twenty three years (226-249 CE) his commentaries of the Tao Te Ching and the Book of Change continue to be influential to this day. Apart from the introductory screens, The Columbia I Ching is not as elegant as the Princeton version. Each hexagram is illustrated by a photograph of Tibetan Himalayan mountains, with no obvious relation to the subject of the hexagram (with the exception, of course, of number 52, Mountain).
Kidder Smith , professor of Chinese history at Bowdoin College and senior author of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching, described The Columbia I Ching in at least two reviews. Smith considers Lynn's translation “the single best introduction to the Yijing currently available.” The CD-ROM version has been set up

with a hexagram-generating mechanism, a simple changing line device, and a journal for recording one's results. A mouse click switches one easily from moving line to commentary to related text,and so on . . . Formally, the Yijing seems perfectly suited to this approach. Like a computer, it constructs a huge network out of the simplest bipolar alteration. From within that closed field of possibilities it generates the potential of vast meaning. Since its relationships are ever shifting, its user requires some means to make instantaneous connections to precisely defined objectives located far across the network, a task well suited to the computer's capabilites. And yet I haven't found this approach especially useful, or even that much fun. Perhaps it is best enjoyed by someone relatively new to the text (Smith 1999, 381).

In other words:

We can see how the computer might make a good mate for the I Ching — not just because both are based on binary math. Changing hexagrams and mutating lines necessitate quick connections to material "located" elsewhere in the book . . .True, the I Ching has no beginning, middle, or end, so one might relinquish the linearity of book pages. But those who love the text have learned their way around in it as surely as any computer – and with much richer synchronicity (Smith 1997).

In 1994, when Paul Gilster published his book Finding it on the internet: the essential guide to archie, Veronica, Gopher, WAIS, WWW (including Mosaic), and other search and browsing tools, the web did “not yet have its Veronica, the all-purpose search tool for Gopher that scours a database of collected resources to simplify the search process” (Gilster, 150). In those days I usually found web sites by reading books and magazines. One of the web sites I found in Gilster's book was what might have been the first I Ching server on the web. (Gilster found it at the WWW Virtual Library.) This I Ching website was run by a graduate student, Jonathan Katz, on a spare Sun workstation at the UCLA CAD Lab (http://constantname.blogspot.com/2009/09/i-ching-at-ucla-cad-lab.html). In 1995 I was able to find about a dozen I Ching related web sites and most of them were simply links to this site. This project has evolved into facade.com, where tarot, runes and biorhythms, as well as the Book of Change can be consulted.
Concerning the Book of Change, Gilster wrote that: “As for understanding what the I Ching tells you, you're on your own” (Gilster, 150). My understanding was that on the web one should never have to be on be “on your own.” On the basis of this understanding, I began to work on Old Fogey's Guide to the I Ching , not so much for any wisdom I might be able to impart, but primarily to make the introductory information provided by previously mentioned (HyperCard era) articles by Willard Johnson and Paul Williams available on the web. Again I contacted them, and again they gave me permission to disseminate their words.
After studying The HTML Manual of Style and Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 21 Days I put together a few pages. In order to find a web host I went door to door to various computer related storefront operations until I found Silicone Prairie, a free public web server provided by GIANT.Net (Global Information Analysis Networking Technologies, Inc) on Burlington Street. This situation did not last for very long. A short time after I put up my I Ching website, Silicone Prairie was no longer available as a free public web server. Several months later (October 1996) I received a postcard inquiring about my web site, which was no longer available. The postcard was from Joseph Morales, who maintains his own I Ching website at http://www.cdmag.us/books/I_Ching.

In those days, consulting the web was, for me, an occasional, rather than a perpetual, activity. After receiving the mysterious postcard I decided to take another look at the I Ching on the web. At that point there must have been some sort of search capability available on the text based Lynx browser that was available on the Iowa City Public Library catalogue terminals. What I found was I Ching Bookmarks (http://zhouyi.com/old) which listed hundreds of I Ching related web sites, including (to my surprise) Old Fogey's Guide to the I Ching on its dead links list.

In addition to compiling links to I Ching related web sites, Lorainne Patsco, the person who maintained the I Ching Bookmarks site, was involved in another project: putting together an bibliography of English language related I Ching material. Sorting through my two I Ching boxes, I sent Lorainne a few things she had not seen before. When I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography was published in 2002 my name was included among the contributors, even though not many of my contributions were actually included. This was probably because the software I submitted was sharware/freeware HyperCard stacks rather than commercial products, and the articles I provided were mostly from obscure countercultural publications rather than from academic journals.
With hundreds of I Ching related sites available, I considered my meager efforts redundant, but Lorraine encouraged me to put my pages back up, so I found a home for them on geocities. While I was updating these pages my login evaporated when yahoo! bought geocities. They persisted awhile, even though I was not able to modify them, before they faded away. Later I was astonished to discover that they had been preserved at the Wayback Machine on archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/20011217011126/www.geocities.com/heartland/prairie/6015/ofgyj.html).
A web search for “I Ching” or “zhouyi” still brings up I Ching Bookmarks fairly high on the list. However, very few links on the main page are functional. The previous version of the site has active links, but most of the pages they link to are no longer available. Although not as comprehensive as I Ching Bookmarks once was, The I Ching on the Net is one of the most useful directories of I Ching related web sites. Advances in search technology seem to have made hand crafted, subject specific bookmark pages less necessary than they once were. (Google: Results 1 - 10 of about 4,200,000 for i ching.) The I Ching on the Net is maintained by Greg Whincup, author of Rediscovering the I Ching, one of several efforts to recover the “original meaning of the text.”
Searching Facebook, rather than Google, also returns interesting results. There are several applications (I Ching : We have fixed the bugs reported by Steve, Tony, and Rob. Thanks for the input! January 9, 2008 at 3:23pm) and numerous pages and groups. Several of the group discussions are conducted in Spanish or Italian.
A recent new item on The I Ching on the Net is a link to an iPhone I Ching application (http://www.flatearthstudio.com/Apps/Apps.html). Here’s a message from Lorraine earlier this year: “Guess what, I got the iPod touch and downloaded all the I Ching programs! I got a ton of them. Some are kind of hokey though, like they don't have changing lines, that sort of thing. I kind of feel like doing a review of them all so people know which ones have the changing lines available. I just got it this weekend and all I want to do is play with it.” This is a review I'd like to see.
As new communication technologies continue to emerge, the Book of Change will continue to be adapted for them. This ancient text continues to speak to anyone with an interest in considering its wisdom and suggestions. Asking for suggestions for how to bring this discussion to a close I received 18 changing to 7 from Yi Jing, book of sun and moon (http://www.yijing.nl/).
Number 18 Ku / Work on what has been spoiled [Decay ], or as the book of sun and moon has it, can o’worms. It is certainly true that this composition is more of a sprawling ramble than I had envisioned and less of a coherent account than that for which I might have hoped. At this point there is not much time to work on substantial improvement, or to attempt to incorporate any analysis. “Working on what has been spoiled” will consist of proofreading, correcting typos, and formatting so that the what is submitted might have an acceptable appearance, whatever the limitations of its content. Nine in the third place offers some consolation: “ although he may at times have slight cause for regret, he remains free of any serious blame.” Nine in the sixth place is a challenge to set higher goals (including the challenge presented by Our Professor to incorporate more analysis into my writing). Meeting these challenges is something that will need to continue beyond the conclusion of this project.

As Hexagram 18 decays into Hexagram 7, it brings to mind a little story with which I will bring this discussion to a close. On March Fourth my wife and I attended a concert at the IMU performed by Abraham, Inc. , a klezmer/funk/hip-hop fusion music group led by “crackerjack clarinetist and klezmer maniac” David Krakauer. After the performance we had an opportunity to converse with several members of the ensemble.
While chatting with rapper C-Rayz Walz , I noticed that he had an I Ching hexagram tattooed on the side of his neck. When I asked him which hexagram it was he told me that it was number 7, “You know, The People.” At the time I didn't say anything more about it, but a couple of days later I sent C-Rayz an email message: “I was . . . wondering how you chose earth over water for the tattoo. If I remember correctly, you referred to it as The People, which is an interpretation with which I was not familiar. I'd be interested to know about any thoughts you have on that hexagram in particular or the I Ching in general.”
Hexagram 7 is usually referred to as The Army. The Army described by this hexagram is a people's militia rather than a standing army of professional warriors. “In the middle of the earth is water . . . Ground water is invisibly present within the earth. In the same way the military power of a people is invisibly present in the masses. When danger threatens, every peasant becomes becomes a soldier; when the war ends, he goes back to his plow” (Wilhelm/Baynes). Although I have no idea what the precise English translation of “shih” should be, by referring to the peasantry as The People it encompasses their roles as both defenders and producers.
While preparing for this paper I spent some time searching for computerized version of the Book of Change that I had not seen before. One that I found was a Mac dashboard widget called i.ching (http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/iching.html) which appears to be a full color descendant of the old I Ching desk accessories that provided a hexagram and its name, but no other text. As I was browsing through the hexagrams on i.ching (the widget) Hexagram 7 appeared as “Shih — The People .”

Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Aarseth concurs with my understanding that the I Ching is an example of a hypertext. He also concurs with my understanding that the traditional text is just one possible description of the hexagrams and their individual lines.

Bunnell, David. “The Challenge of Hypermedia.” MacWorld, November 1987, p.17-23.

Columbia I Ching. New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 1994.

A CD-ROM version of Richard John Lynn's book, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi.

Wang Bi (226--249) was a scholar of xuanxue, "dark (or mysterious) learning," sometimes characterized as Neotaoism. Although he lived for only 23 years, his commentaries on the I Ching and Tao Te Ching continue to be influential.

Gilster, Paul. Finding it on the internet : the essential guide to archie, Veronica, Gopher, WAIS, WWW (including Mosaic), and other search and browsing tools. New York: Wiley, 1994.

Goodman, Danny. “The Two Faces of HyperCard: Bill Atkinson serves up a Macintosh software revolution.” MacWorld, October 1987, pp. 122-129.

Most of what I was able to learn about HyperCard and HyperTalk came from Danny Goodman's books.

Hacker, Edward, Steve Moore, Lorraine Patsco, eds. I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Edward Hacker is Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Philosphy and religion at Northeastern University and the author of The I Ching Handbook (Paradigm Publications 1993), Steve Moore is the author of The Trigrams of Han: Inner Structures of the I Ching (Thorsons Publishers, April 1989). Lorraine Patsco is Webmaster of I Ching Bookmarks, www.zhouyi.com.

Johnson, Willard. A Beginners Guide to the I Ching. Berkeley: Shambala Publications, 1970.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040113090521/www.geocities.com/heartland/prairie/6015/wj1.html

Johnson wrote this brief introduction to the I Ching while he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. He continued his study of the I Ching after becoming a professor of religion at San Diego State University.

Multimedia I Ching. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

A CD-ROM Version of the Wilhelm/Baynes translations of the Book of Changes.

This digital version of the Book of Changes provides the user with a computer game like interface. One must enter the Library to study the text of the I Ching (and Helmut Wilhelm's Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching. It is necessary to go to a special pavilion to cast a hexagram.

Although numerous English translations and interpretations have appeared in recent years, the Wilhelm/Baynes translations remains the "standard English version." Cary Baynes translated Wilhelm's German translation of the Chinese text into English, which Paul Williams (see below) considers “less a good translation than an out and out miracle.”

Stephen Owen, in a review of Richard Lynn's translation (The New Republic, 11-28-94, pp. 66-70) compares it to Wilhelm/Baynes. Although Owen considers Lynn's work a more accurate translation of the Chinese;

“One reason that Lynn may not supplant Wilhelm/Baynes is a scholarly heaviness about his translation; but a deeper reason may lie in what an audience is seeking in the ‘Eastern Religions’ section. For the precise way in which the Wilhelm/Baynes translation twists the Chinese produces a remarkable oracular grace--passages that sound profound, and with sufficient ingenuity on the part of the reader, may even become profound. The combination of Wilhelm and Baynes was a lucky one: Baynes fashioned out of Wilhelm's German a distinct English idiom, compelling by its rhythms, by its biblical echoes, by its skillful choice of words, by its surprising conjunction of abstractions that perhaps owes more to Rilke than to the Chinese. Where the Chinese is clear, Wilhelm/Baynes is often mysterious. After such an encounter with mystery in the translation, the Wilhelm commentary then guides the translation back toward sense, formally embodying the experience of an obscure ancient text interpretable to the modern world.”

Smith, Kidder. “Do Your Own Ching.” Natural History, v. 106, no. 7, Sept. 12, 1997.

Smith, Kidder. "Review of The Columbia I Ching on CD-ROM.” Philosophy East & West.
v. 49, No.3, July 1999, p. 381.

Kidder Smith is Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies and History at Bowdoin College. He studied China's culture at Princeton, Berkeley, and in Taiwan. He is senior author of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). With other members of the Denma Translation Group he collaborated on a new translation of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

Synchonicity. Portland, OR: Visionary Software, 1989-90.

Williams, Paul. “The Sources of the Nile: The “I Ching’ looks like a book but it isn't, really.” Crawdaddy, April, 1973, p. 10.

http://web.archive.org/web/20011221011202/www.geocities.com/heartland/prairie/6015/pw1.html

Paul Williams founded Crawdaddy magazine (http://web.archive.org/web/20020601080238/www.cdaddy.com/FormatHomePage.cgi), the first journal of rock criticism (as distinguished from teen fan mags like Tiger Beat). After a seemingly remarkable recovery after a fall from a bicycle, Paul developed early onset Alzheimers due to his brain injury.

http://paulwilliams.com/index.html

Here is a video of Paul being interviewed by his son for a school project:

Part one

http://www.youtube.com/user/cindyleeberryhill#p/u/7/DqAhMJTW-Q0

Part two

http://www.youtube.com/user/cindyleeberryhill#p/u/6/8yLpHYFaYPw

Paul's three wives have collaborated on benefit concerts to raise funds for his nursing home care.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=121382749378&id=80121576515&ref=mf

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Temporarily employed at a public library since 1982.