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Postliminary 2 ComputersandWriters TheMTOEProject This project [A.R.T.A.] is of triple interest: first, it allows for the production of stories, which is nice when one likes that; second, it allows for the elaboration, in prudent little steps, of a unique grammar; third, it allows for the establishment of a stock of agms that may be used on other occasions, but that is an arduous project that is only beginning . It will take patience, work, and time (=money). (translation ours) —Paul Fournel, “Computer and Writer: The Centre Pompidou Experiment”1 The book read by each reader is always another book. —Italo Calvino, “How I Wrote One of My Books” If the previous postliminary looked at how this book can be traced back to a podcast out of our past, then this postliminary looks forward to how the project might evolve in a digital future. This book is part of a digital logics progression that blurs previous distinctions between forms of scholarship: the podcast as a serialized audiobook, this book as recombinatorial text, a (potential) potential database as means to generate serialized recombinatorics, and so forth. Each iteration of this project engages in a digital poetics that privileges converging and transmedia-inspired content (even while various scholarly forms will likely retain their specialized and distinct qualities for some time to come). While we cannot predict future technologies, nor anticipate what new forms of the continuing inquiry into noir and potential criticism they will enable, we propose one potential version of future remediation of our study—the MTOE Project (an acronym for “Maltese Touch of Evil” Project), a participatory, procedural (and ultimately, perhaps, encyclopedic) database dedicated to film noir.2 At the outset, we should say that the digital humanities logics driving the MTOE Project have (of course) already been plagiarized by anticipation by members of the Oulipo. Italo Calvino’s famous lecture on the role of cybernetics in the study of literature, “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” dates back to 1968, and the A.R.T.A. Project (which stands for “Atelier de Recherches et Techniques Avancées,” or “Workshop of Advanced Studies and Techniques”) has been exploring computer-based analyses of literature for over three de- cades. In the twenty-first century, more and more scholars will be turning toward the digital humanities as part of their writing and research (including utilizing digital tools and digital publishing), and oulipian methods are likely to motivate and shape such experiments and their resultant products—or so they should.3 The MTOE Project would start by building a multifunctional database of noiremes to support the activities of online film noir communities. Given that the database would be in a digital format, the potential would exist to add more than still images, and a robust version of this idea would seek to allow sound and video clips.4 Moreover the MTOE Project would allow readers to add their own investigative notes, to tag or annotate the filmic material with further information and metadata, to author new noiremes, and to suggest or create constraints for resequencing existing noiremes (percent of a frame in shadow, number of times “Baby” is uttered in one scene of a screenplay, etc.) to aid further synoulipistic and anoulipistic investigations into film noir.5 As is the case with the A.R.T.A. Project, the greatest benefits would be born of computers aiding the reader to engage in multiple and unanticipated ways with the texts. The MTOE Project would be fully oulipian in that it would be designed to be a “creation that creates” (création crééante) new analyses of existing films noir and new noir narratives (or even noir films). The role of the reader would be decisive in such a database. In fact, readers would always be, in some sense, the authors of the MTOE Project. This is in keeping with the procedural and participatory logics of digital networks and oulipian sewing circles. Clearly, The Maltese Touch of Evil manuscript is a precursor to the MTOE Project, and in its methodology —from podcast dictums to print transcriptums—it evinces and invites the collaborative ethos characteristic of the aforementioned communities. ThekeydistinctionbetweenTheMalteseTouchofEvilandtheMTOE Projectisthatthe latter would facilitate the addition of supplements and would allow each contributor to frame comments in his or her own words rather than relying on the “authors” to do that work. Indeed, as is true of the oulipian “ouvroir,” the MTOE Project would make authors of all who work through the given constraints (or new ones of...

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