So the April Fools Comics got me thinking:

In one of the classes I took with him, Ulmer led us in using divining tools such as the I-Ching (I used the Greek Marketplace) as heuretic objects with which to read the internet (Zach's project from such a class). What I carry away from the divining projects we attempted was the drive to "read" the universe by means of this other object, which mixed things up and returns them to us in new combinations, which we understand through metaphor.

Of course, the Ouija board becomes the least exciting version of these because it uses letters--if it spells a nonsense word, you're stuck. The solution to that is perhaps to use whole words or phrases, which will then re-invoke the metaphorical. My random comic kind of works like that.

The question, then, is to ask how this becomes research and not just play. I was talking about this with a colleague here after my presentation at PCA, which went okay, but seemed to leave the audience in a confused state. Things to think about with this kind of project:

• Does the internet push scholars toward being artists? (Amy Hawkins' question from our coffee-chat.) Vis jrice's comic-blog entries.
• Does play count as research? LT, MS and I wrote about this a bit before.
• If digital writing moves the burden for argument from the writer to the reader (and I'll happily acknowledge that it may not), how does one present one's digital research? Academic research as database writing becomes the accumulation and juxtaposition of ideas, perhaps.
• Is random-ness funny?