There was once a girl who lived in a small village by the sea. She was in many ways like all the other girls in the village, except for her desire to fly. One day, when she was sitting on the cliffs watching the stars and the lights in the sky, her imagination filled in the details of a vast space battle taking place above her.

When you see a paragraph like the one above, devoid of author, absent any context, you know that a story is being told. If the spell of the narrative is cast correctly, then the questions furthest from the reader’s mind are what the gender of either the author or the narrator. However, what you are absolutely aware of are two facts: not only is she different, but that she is a she. Does the fact that I wrote it change it any, even after you have read it?

Yes. I am male, if you hadn’t gathered from my name. I’ve written a number of female protagonists in stories I’ve work shopped. But each time that I’ve written of one, I relied on my imagination and what I thought it’d be like. Not the obvious physical parts, though when I first did explore writing fiction I was curious. Instead, I wanted to know what it would be like to see a world through the other set of chromosomes. How different would it truly be? Fantasy has offered many pathways to such an experience; curses of gender changes, online worlds where gender is often deviated from.

But as I explored gender out of curiosity, there are many reasons authors and players have chosen to portray themselves as other than they are. Jeanette Stingley writes of the many cases where women authors used male or male sounding pen names in order to be published. Many male players actually choose a female avatar for the social attention and advantages. It seems the reasons are similar at first glance: in a apparently single-male dominated world of MMORPGs, the advantage goes to the desirability of an almost always attractive looking female avatar. In the case with male pen names, the advantage goes to the ones with no “good image” to maintain with certain subjects, or with the desired readership.

But in the case of writing for a workshop, the gender of the author is usually very apparent, and the work itself is usually understood with a much greater knowledge of the author than any reader is likely to have when they first read something. How does a writer meet everyone’s preconceptions of a female, when they cannot ignore the fact that you are not? The variety of women is just as diverse as that of men, and furthermore judging a character’s believability based on whether they are a believable “female” is more revealing of the critic than the author.

The largest difference between writing a female character and portraying one in serious online roleplaying is the reaction of the world to you: in a fictional world, you are forced to concieve of every reaction, every response of other characters to yours. In the story above, would the villagers response be different if she were a male? Or would they be more accepting of her matching the male stereotypes? In MMORPGs, you cannot control the other players, and in many cases your responses are almost less important than the fact that your character appears a certain way.

In online settings, we are allowed to explore our gender and the society’s responses in many ways we can only imagine in stories and our own writings. Flirting and sexual overtones gives way to even more questions of how we understand this “play”. The ambiguity encountered with such a text as I began is present every time a player encounters a female avatar. The fantasy does not require verification or tests; like words and experiences in stories, the illusion is the point.

A hack is a clever way to overcome existing resistances and thus expose the potential for more. I once toured MIT and was introduced to a few such famous “hacks,” including one where a police car was reassembled on the roof of a building. Though this has no immediate relation to the popular idea of a “hacker,” it is in many senses what I believe should be present in those pressing the boundaries of knowledge and the institutions responsible for it’s creation, management and distribution.

I found my way into an undergraduate program after many changes of major, IVSP at the University of Maryland, College Park. That program in many ways defined what an individual pursuing research that unites and synthesizes multiple existing curriculums could be. It did this in part by its sheer lack of popularity; I was one of 15 graduates from my year. Through the program, I managed to study Computer Science (finishing my B.S. this past semester) along with Studio Art and Creative Writing. I did not, however, learn more about those fields than anyone pursuing an individual degree. No, the largest gain was in the responsibility to forge a new direction in the same way I expect to pursue my future graduate work — and future work as a postgrad. I constructed a new curriculum which was in many senses unique and experimental, where random availability of classes and requirements were as much of a part as my preconceived notions of how the fields would mesh.

What does interdisciplinary mean? It means the acknowledgment that the problems and solutions are in many senses broken up and scattered in many places, as Matthew Kirschenbaum observes of the need of humanities students to program. The problems of identity, logic and consciousness are treated with different tools in the humanities and the sciences, and in most cases those very people that hold parts of the problem are only a few sets of walls away from one another, from those who could provide the missing piece or the perspective that wasn’t even considered.

I knew this, running from one side of campus to another in the way I approached art projects as I approached code projects, the vacillation between part and whole, design elements and tools to manipulate them. If all disciplinary boundaries were to dissolve, the process of discovery which drives the hacks that are even now reshaping how we should deal with education within disciplines wouldn’t take place. Digital Cultures and Creativity, a new living learning program that accomplishes what I had set out to do alone at College Park is one result of my former advisor’s realization of the critical space between the humanities and computer science and the arts. Each of those students will be guided through the same epiphanies I came by, but their accretion in that path will only lead to the advancement of each discipline, of perspective and of synergy. It will not eliminate the majors of English, or Computer Science. Nor should it.

Instead, it should serve as a communication link and another experiment. How do students form a community around a shared interdisciplinary program? That community will not spawn another discipline, and in fact in some ways have ceased to become interdisciplinary. They’ve become something else, something that communicates between the two disciplines in the same way the corpus callosum facilitates communication between the two hemispheres. But for something, someone to be interdisciplinary, they must bridge a divide. Programs that seek those students, and programs that become so through their regular operation are two very different things. In my mind, it was never a question of whether humanities students should learn to program, it was always why they weren’t already. It became what they could do if they could.

The site has been suffering a little over the past few days, and I should have checked it more frequently. For the moment, I’ll cherry pick the old blog entries as I set up the new structure of the site. I’m looking to migrate the organization completely over to Flex, retaining this version for mobile devices.

This semester marks one of preparation and productivity. I will continue work on StorySigns even as I teach my first online course and continue work at the Bioinformatics lab on campus. TerpNav is closer now than it’s ever been to a release, and so I am anticipating its wide preview and media blitz by the end of the month.