Jill Walker Rettberg

• PhD in Humanistic Informatics
• Professor at University of Bergen

Humans have used technology to expand our limited vision for millennia, from the invention of the stone mirror 8,000 years ago to the latest developments in facial recognition and augmented reality. We imagine that technologies will allow us to see more, to see differently and even to see everything. But each of these new ways of seeing carries its...

This commentary tests a methodology proposed by Munk et al. (2022) for using failed predictions in machine learning as a method to identify ambiguous and rich cases for qualitative analysis. Using a dataset describing actions performed by fictional characters interacting with machine vision technologies in 500 artworks, movies, novels and videogame...

This paper proposes situated data analysis as a new method for analysing social media platforms and digital apps. An analysis of the fitness tracking app Strava is used as a case study to develop and illustrate the method. Building upon Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge and recent research on algorithmic bias, situated data analysis allows re...

This article proposes a new method for tracing and examining agency in heterogeneous assemblages, focusing on the role of machine vision technologies in creative works. We introduce the concept of the “machine vision situation”, defined as the moment in which machine vision technologies come into play and make a difference to the course of events....

This data paper documents a dataset that captures cultural attitudes towards machine vision technologies as they are expressed in art, games and narratives. The dataset includes records of 500 creative works (including 77 digital games, 190 digital artworks and 233 movies, novels and other narratives) that use or represent machine vision technologi...

This chapter draws upon a dataset that documents and analyses representations of machine vision technologies in 500 creative works, including digital artworks, video games and science fiction novels and movies. Drones are involved in 72 of these works. Analysing a range of examples from contemporary science fiction and video games (e.g. Little Brot...

This paper extends Raymond Williams' insights on technology and society by asserting that not only scientific , social, and economic conditions but also aesthetic factors are crucial for technological adoption. The concept of 'algorithmic narrativity' is introduced to describe the combination of the human ability to understand experience through na...

Plain language summary Machine vision – the ability of machines to “see” and interpret visual information – has advanced significantly in recent years, with applications ranging from self-driving cars to medical diagnosis. However, there is a growing recognition that this technological advancement does not simply power a wide variety of new tools a...

Artificial intelligence is reshaping society, but human forces shape AI. Social scientists and humanities experts explore how to harness the interaction, revealing urgent avenues for research and policy.

This visual report presents the main findings of a six-year research project that asked how everyday machine vision affects the way ordinary people understand themselves and their world. We approached this from two main angles: analyses of art, games and narratives about machine vision, and ethnographic research on how people use, promote and respo...

During 2022, both transformer-based AI text generation sys-tems such as GPT-3 and AI text-to-image generation systems such as DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion made exponential leaps forward and are unquestionably altering the fields of digital art and electronic literature. In this panel a group of electronic literature authors and theorists consider...

This commentary tests a methodology proposed by Munk et al. (2022) for using failed predictions in machine learning as a method to identify ambiguous and rich cases for qualitative analysis. Using a dataset describing actions performed by fictional characters interacting with machine vision technologies in 500 artworks, movies, novels and videogame...

R scripts for analysing "A Dataset Documenting Representations of Machine Vision Technologies in Artworks, Games and Narratives". Scripts are included to provide general import and reformatting of the data as well as scripts for plotting figures showing geographical distribution of the works in dataset, and showing distribution in time.

This dataset captures cultural attitudes towards machine vision technologies as they are expressed in art, games and narratives. The dataset includes records of 500 creative works (including 77 digital games, 191 digital artworks and 236 movies, novels and other narratives) that use or represent machine vision technologies like facial recognition,...

This paper follows the threads of speculative interfaces through electronic literature and the digital humanities, arguing not only that the speculative interface is a key attribute of electronic literature, but also that speculative interfaces are an important methodology in the digital humanities. I will discuss the interfaces of three works of e...

Objective We aimed at developing a pilot version of an app (Rosa) that can perform digital conversations with breast cancer patients about genetic BRCA testing, using chatbot technology, to identify best practices for future patient-focused chatbots. Methods We chose a commercial chatbot platform and participatory methodology with a team of patien...

This paper analyses the way that the popular Norwegian television and web series SKAM (2015-17) included viewers in the narration. There has been a recent interest in narratives that uses the third person plural voice (“we-narratives”) in print literature. This paper takes this narrative research and connects it to transmedia and social media story...

VR narratives and artworks have been exhibited and discussed at ELO conferences for years, but this experimental session will be the first ELO panel to take place in a VR space. This 90 minute session will be held as a free, public event in AltspaceVR, a VR social space which works best for participants using consumer VR headsets but can also be a...

Data visualizations combine numeric data with visual representation, and these modes allow them to express certain kinds of knowledge more easily than others. This chapter uses examples of historical data visualizations in order to examine what ways of knowing they privilege. What is the di!ference between the spatial organization of tools in prehi...

Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasi...

This is a book chapter for a comprehensive anthology on The Diary edited by Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos, and published by Indiana University Press in 2020. The chapter provides a history of early online diaries and discusses the transitions to recording our lives using technology. My final revised version of the chapter that I sent to the ed...

Automated Media offers a theoretical framework for understanding digital, algorithmic media. As usual, Mark Andrejevic excels in producing theoretical analyses of contemporary technology and society that make immediate sense and thus are useful for others. However, the theory presented in this book is marred by a lack of attention to the actual fla...

In April 2016 I launched a series of Snapchat Research Stories: short videos created and shared on Snapchat, that addressed topics within digital culture, and often about Snapchat itself. This is the first video I made for the series. I designed it to both use selfie filters and to be about selfie filters. Until Snapchat’s selfie filters made biome...

Machine vision technologies are increasingly ubiquitous in society and have become part of everyday life. However, the rapid adoption has led to ethical concerns relating to privacy, agency, bias and accuracy. This paper presents the methodology and preliminary results from a digital humanities project that maps and categorises references to and us...

This paper analyses the way that the popular Norwegian television and web series SKAM (2015-17) included viewers in the narration. There has been a recent interest in narratives that uses the third person plural voice (“we-narratives”) in print literature. This paper takes this narrative research and connects it to transmedia and social media story...

Machine vision technologies are increasingly ubiquitous in society and have become part of everyday life. However, the rapid adoption has led to ethical concerns relating to privacy, bias and accuracy. This paper presents the methodology and some preliminary results from a digital humanities project that is mapping and categorising references to an...

Algoritmer styrer i økende grad visuelle medier, ikke bare ved å sortere og rangere bilder i sosiale medier, men også ved å styre hvilke bilder som i det hele tatt blir tatt, gjennom algoritmer for estetisk inferens som er innebygd i kameraene våre. Denne artikkelen utforsker hvordan disse algoritmene fungerer, og hva slags estetiske kriterier som...

Pre-print of book chapter for anthology on diaries.

Data visualisations combine numeric data with visual representation, and these modes allow them to express certain kinds of knowledge more easily than others. This chapter uses examples of historical data visualisations in order to examine what modes of knowing are privileged. What is the difference between the spatial organization of tools in preh...

Self-tracking apps gather intimate information about our daily lives. One way apps encourage us to entrust them with this knowledge is by taking the role of a confidante, an anthropomorphized companion we can trust. Humans have long confided in non-human companions, from diaries to apps, and the relationship between user and app is structurally sim...

This chapter discusses Snapchat as an ephemeral, conversational and narrative app. It is forthcoming in Jeremy Morris and Sarah Murray's anthology Appified, which is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press later in 2018.

In this chapter, I will discuss three modes of self-representation in social media: visual, written and quantitative, building upon my book Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs, and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (Rettberg 2014b). Visual self-representation includes selfies, of course, but also other images an...

The project summary part of B1 in my successful ERC-CoG application, which was awarded €2 million. The project will run from August 2018-July 2023.

Video-based communication is increasingly common online. This article looks at the hand signs that are used in lip-syncing videos on the app musical.ly and argues that they constitute a codified, non-verbal language of pictograms that is equivalent to emoji in text-based communication. Seeing the lip-syncing videos as performances allows us to situ...

This is the slides and audio of a talk that summarises the start of research I’m currently doing to understand the narrative voice used in SKAM. The talk looks at how the audience is included in the narrative voice of the show, both through its elegant use of social media and through its use of focalisation. I’m currently working on a more nuanced...

The journalistic hype and institutional exuberance embracing the sudden emergence of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) could easily have led to the mistaken conclusion that online learning in higher education emerged, fully formed, in 2012 (Kent & Leaver, 2014; Leaver & Kent, 2014). However, there is a long history of different forms of distanc...

Machines are an important audience for any selfie today. This chapter discusses how our selfies are treated as data rather than as human communication. Rettberg looks at how facial recognition algorithms analyse our selfies for surveillance, authentication of identity and better-customised commercial services, and relates this to understandings of...

This presentation analyses three recent works of art that interrogate the relationship between human perception and machine vision: Nadav Assor's art-documentary Lessons on Leaving Your Body (2014), Muse's VR music video Revolt (2015), and Erica Scourti's Body Scan (2014). How do these works present the relationship between human and machine vision...

This paper analyses three recent works of art that interrogate the relationship between human perception and machine vision: Nadav Assor’s art-documentary Lessons on Leaving Your Body (2014), Muse’s VR music video Revolt (2015), and Erica Scourti’s Body Scan (2015). The goal is to understand how these works present the relationship between human an...

In 2001 I wrote a hypertextual reading of a hypertextual poem cycle, Juliet Ann Martin's oooxxxooo. Since then, the journal I published it in has become even more a slave of pdfs and the only way to read the work is to download the simple html files as a zip file. When first published, it was written to be read as a series of pages embedded in a fr...

Data from a survey of 35 students in a Norwegian high school class (mostly 17-year-olds) on 1 June 2016, by Jill Walker Rettberg, Professor of Digital Culture, University of Bergen. See http://jilltxt.net/?p=4505 for details. I gathered this data for a project on Snapchat narratives that is still in an early phase. I want to understand how stories...

This paper documents the results of an intensive “data sprint” method for undertaking data and algorithmic work using application programming interfaces (APIs), which took place during the Digital Method Initiative 2013 Winter School at the University of Amsterdam. During this data sprint, we developed a method to map the fields of Digital Humaniti...

The earliest example of wearable technology discussed in Susan Elizabeth Ryan’s book Garments of Paradise is Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress from 1956. The artist dressed herself in a kimono made from pear-shaped and cylindrical lightbulbs, all connected to a power source by a multitude of wires that drape down from her like the skirt of a dress. Th...

In this short commentary, we examine images and words shared on the Twitter hashtag #refugeesNOTwelcome to understand the portrayal of male Syrian refugees in a post-9/11 context where the Middle-Eastern male is often primarily cast as a potential terrorist. Queer theorist Jasbir Puar (2007) and Middle- East scholar Paul Amar (2011) provide us with...

The relationship between humans and media is a central trope of classic science fiction, and one where media is frequently portrayed as a threat. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is focalised through Mildred's husband, who sees her as distant from him, imprisoned by the media she loves and surrounded by her soap opera heroes: " His wife stretch...

Fear of the Dehumanizing Effect of Media: Future Media Seen through Science Fiction. A Response to Jon Bing. In 1994 the Norwegian science fiction author and professor of law informatics Jon Bing wrote an essay about the media of the future. This article, written after a re-reading of Bing’s essay, reflects upon the changes that have taken place s...

Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices have become important ways in which we understand ourselves. Jill Walker Rettberg analyses these and related genres as three intertwined modes of self-representation: visual, written and quantitative. Rettberg explores topics like the meaning of Instagram filters, smartphone apps that write your diary for you,...

Jill Walker Rettberg’s Visualizing Networks of Electronic Literature maps the fragmentary and dynamic field of electronic literature by analyzing citations in 44 doctoral dissertations published between 2002 and 2013. Applying “distant reading” strategies to the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, Rettberg identifies key works in the field, shifting genres, and...

This 500 word encyclopedia entry defines email novels and gives examples of the genre.

A 500 word encyclopedia entry defining internet hoaxes and providing examples of the genre with analysis.

There are three distinct modes of self-representation in digital media: written, visual and quantitative. Each mode has a separate pre-digital history, each of which is presented briefly in this chapter. Blog and written status updates are descendents of diaries, memoirs, commonplace books and autobiographies. Selfies are descendants of visual arti...

The title of this chapter is taken from the quantified self movement, where people track and analyse aspects of their lives such as steps, travels, productivity, location, glucose, heart rate, coffee intake, sleep and more to understand and improve themselves. Quantified self-representation has rapidly become common far beyond this movement, though...

In addition to our intended self-representations, our digital traces are being gathered by entities far beyond our control: government agencies, commercial companies, data brokers and possibly criminals. We have little or no access to these representations of us, although the data that shapes them comes from us. Foucault’s idea of the panopticon is...

Social media genres are cumulative and serial. Looking at an individual post, tweet, status update or selfie tells us only part of the story. To really understand social media genres we need to see them as feeds and analyse each post or image as a part of a series. This chapter looks at visual self-representational genres that are strongly serial:...

This chapter proposes using the term ‘filter’ as an analytical term to understand algorithmic culture. In everyday speech, we filter our photos and filter our news. In today’s algorithmic culture the filter has become a pervasive metaphor for the ways in which technology can remove certain content and how it can alter or distort texts, images and d...

Today’s diary writes itself for you. Apps can turn your smartphone into an automated diary that will keep track of where you go, sort your photos for you and pull in your social media updates to generate detailed records of your life. Lifelogging cameras like the Narrative Clip are clipped to your shirt and automatically take a photo every 30 secon...

More than 60 dissertations in the field of electronic literature have been documented in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, including tags, abstracts and in most cases links to full texts of the dissertations. This paper performs a network analysis of the citations in 29 of these dissertations to identify trends, patterns and informat...

This is a work-in-progress report from an exploration of the intersection between the fairly conventional digital humanities method of creating a database - specifically, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase) and the digital methods strategy of directly analysing online, digital content. We are testing ou...

This paper outlines the development of the hypertext fiction community that developed in the United States of America from the late eighties and onwards. This community was separate from the interactive fiction community (and largely thought of its works as different from “games”) and largely revolved around the use of Storyspace, a software tool f...

Playful geosocial services are being used more and more widely, yet we still don't understand people's experiences with them. With wide-ranging privacy issues and enormous choice between rival services, it is important to understand this area. We present the methodology and results of a study delving into experiences with a GPS-based scavenger hunt...

Jill Walker Rettberg is Associate Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, where she researches online narratives and social media. She is the author of "Blogging" (Polity Press, 2008) and co-editor of "Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader" (MIT Press, 2008). She has published on electronic literature, hyp...

This article explores the historical development of hypertext, arguing that we have seen a transition from early visions and implementations of hypertext that primarily dealt with using hypertext to gain greater control over knowledge and ideas, to today’s messy web. Pre-web hypertext can be seen as a domesticated species bred in captivity. On the...

We live in an age of ubiquitous digital textuality. We are teaching the first generation of digital-native students, who are more accustomed to writing and reading email than they are to writing and reading letters, more inclined to send an instant message to a classmate than to pass a note, and more likely to read their news online than they are t...

■ This article discusses the ways in which social media help us craft the narratives of our lives. Many discussions of social media look at self-presentation and the construction of identity on social network sites in particular and the Internet in general. This article switches the focus from the moment of self-construction and instead looks at wa...

Recent years have shown a dramatic shift in the balance between private and public that has distressed many cultural commentators, from scholars like Habermas and Sennett to mass media journalists. This paper sees participatory media as a significant factor in this shift and compares the transition to participatory media with the transition to prin...

Digital cameras have made self-portraits increasingly common, and frequently we post our self-portraits online. This paper compares online photographic self-portraiture with self-representations in weblogs and the creation of visual avatars. Contemporary projects and quotidian practice is connected to the history of self-writing and self-portraitur...

This paper presents a historical view of hypertext looking at pre-web hypertext as a domesticated species bred in captivity, and arguing that on the web, some breeds of hypertext have gone feral. Feral hypertext is no longer tame and domesticated, but is fundamentally out of our control. In order to understand and work with feral hypertext, we need...

Purpose Seeks to exemplify and discuss how students’ use of weblogs can prepare them for a networked world where writing has consequences outside grades. Design/methodology/approach Experiences using weblogs with university students are critically discussed with reference to related theoretical and practice‐based work. Findings While many student...

A new kind of narrative is emerging from the network: the distributed narrative. Distributed narratives don't bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in. This paper begins an in...

This paper presents a method for analysing an aspect of interaction that can help us understand how users can feel that they are part of a work. I argue that interaction can be a form of depiction, causing the user to imagine both her perceptual actions and her manipulation of the work as being fictional as well as actual. This produces an ontologi...

In hypertexts, games and certain other electronic texts, an apostrophe to the reader can and often does require a response. The readers answer is inscribed in the text, and enacted by the reader. That is what this essay is about. Its about how you seem to be part of the texts you read and the games you play, and how, in electronic texts, your scrip...