In order to demonstrate how an exploratory approach to “software studies” might be developed, the remainder of this essay is devoted to a constraint popularized by the Oulipo known as a boule de neige or snowball. There are several types of snowballs.

Figure 1. Boule de neige de longueur	Figure 2. Boule de neige fondante
Figure 3. Boule de neige losange	Figure 4. Boule de neige sabient

Since they are essentially visual or “concrete” texts, Figure 1-4 above are visualizations of the geometric shapes that each of the snowballs represent. There are snowballs de longueur or growing snowballs (Fig. 1). There are others that are fondante or melting (Fig. 2). And there are snowballs that include both of these attributes. If they grow and then melt, they are losange (Fig. 3). If they melt and then grow, they are sabient (Fig. 4). Harry Mathews’ “Liminal Poem” is an example of a snowball losange (see Fig. 5 below).

Figure 5. Harry Mathews' "Liminal Poem"

In the glossary of his book about the Oulipo, Warren F. Motte, Jr, provides the following definition of a snowball de longueur: “A form in which each segment of a text is one letter longer than the segment preceding it” (213). The following untitled poem by John Newman represents Motte’s definition:

Due to the successive growth of each segment, the text is characterized as snowballing.

Motte’s definition limits the segments of a text to letters, but the segme¬nts of a snowball can be syllabic or word-based. For example, Dominique Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn’s poem titled “But” is a word-based snowball fondante. Each successive segment of Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn’s poem is one word fewer in length.

For a creative writer or artist, a snowball can be used as an inventional technique related to the Oulipo’s interests in constraint. By limiting or qualifying the ways in which s/he “naturally” writes, new associations among both words and concepts can be developed. Language becomes new again, or, as Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky would phrase it, language is defamiliarized. In the following excerpt from his essay, “Art as Device,” Shklovsky defines both the goal of art and the importance of its defamiliarizing capacity:

The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

A snowball, then, can lead to new experiences of both language and textuality.

Related to the way in which a constrained form of writing can lead to new perceptions of both language and text, a writer or artist can use a snowball to explore “concrete” dimensions of writerly expression. There are a number of competing definitions of concreteness in writing, but the one thing they all have in common is an interest in exceeding the conventional aspects of writerly meaning – grammar, syntactical structure, rhythm, and rhyme – with explorations of material considerations, which are usually visual, kinetic, or phonetic. In the introduction to her book, Concrete Poetry: A World View, Mary Ellen Solt explains this materialist focus as follows:

Emotions and ideas are not the physical materials of poetry. If the artist were not a poet he might be moved by the same emotions and ideas to make a painting (if he were a painter), a piece of sculpture (if he were a sculptor), a musical composition (if he were a composer). Generally speaking the material of the concrete poem is language: words reduced to their elements of letters (to see) syllables (to hear). Some concrete poets stay with whole words. Others find fragments of letters or individual speech sounds more suited to their needs.

There are some parallels between the Russian Formalist idea of defamiliarization and the concrete poet’s focus on the materialist. Specifically, the concrete poet is reacting against the conventional way of exploring and constructing linguistic meaning. S/he does not want to rely on the age-old modes of expressing emotional and conceptual meaning. Echoing this, Solt writes,

the old grammatical-syntactical structures are no longer adequate to advanced processes of thought and communication in our time. In other words the concrete poet seeks to relieve the poem of its centuries-old burden of ideas, symbolic reference, allusion and repetitious emotional content; of its servitude to disciplines outside itself as an object in its own right for its own sake.

If this unconventional, materialist focus on visual and aural meaning coincides with defamiliarization, so be it. It most assuredly echoes the Oulipo’s approach as when Le Lionnais writes, “Must we adhere to the old tricks of the trade and obstinately refuse to imagine new possibilities? . . . Should humanity lie back and be satisfied to watch new thoughts make ancient verses?” (27). As you should expect, Le Lionnais’ answer is no.

For scholars in computers and writing, the boule de neige can be valued in two different ways. The first is by associating it with several different forms of visual style, which is the subject of the next section of this essay. The second way is to recognize its potential as a form of invention—specifically as a form of heuretics, which is Gregory Ulmer’s neologistic twist on the tern, heuristics. In his book, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, Ulmer introduces his approach to invention as an alternative to the hermeneutic approach in the humanities: “Theory is assimilated into the humanities in two principle ways--by critical interpretation or by artistic experimentation” (3). A heuretic is the latter approach. It can be characterized as an off-shoot of inductive or experimental science. The boule de neige, like all of the Oulipo’s constraints, is a heuretic because it offers writers an open-ended method of inquiry. The value of this approach is to introduce new ways of viewing an otherwise well-known object (defamiliarization) and new forms of knowledge.