The Electronic Literature Lab

+Archival Work

The NEXT

The lab’s most important archival project is The NEXT, the award-winning museum, library, and preservation space featuring born-digital literature, art, and games.

Seeded in 2018 by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it holds for 47 collections of net art, interactive fiction, hypertext poetry and fiction, games, and many other genres, organized around six collection types. A research space, The NEXT affords opportunities to innovate and experiment with born-digital archival and conservation practices, methods for exhibiting physical archives in virtual space, archival storytelling, and documentation formats.

+Exhibitions

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Talan Memmott: Works on Screen, 1998-2016

Our current exhibit, which opened March 2026, is “Talan Memmott: Works on Screen, 1998-2016,” featuring 13 net art pieces drawn from The NEXT’s various collections. The lab’s exhibitions for The NEXT are created as traveling exhibitions created by guest curators or treasure exhibitions that Grigar or other members of the lab curates. The lab’s curator is Dene Grigar, who, since 2005, has curated 26 exhibitions and performances.

Talan Memmott: Works on Screen exhibition in The NEXT

+Documentation

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Pathfinders

The lab’s first activity was documenting born-digital media, which began with the “Pathfinders” project in 2013. Co-led by Stuart Moulthrop and Grigar and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Pathfinders” formalized the method for documentation born-digital media resulting in a process they call a Traversal, which calls for a born-digital work to be recorded via video on the computing device on which they were originally experienced when released. The lab followed with annual volumes offered as OERs, called Rebooting Born-Digital Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born-Digital Media.

+Born-digital Preservation & Conservation

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We Descend

Beginning 2019, the lab began pioneering methods for restoring and reconstructing born-digital works, an effort that led to the reconstruction of nine classic video games and hypertext novels. Bill Bly’s hypertext narrative We Descend: The Complete Edition is one such example. Originally published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. as Volume 1, the reconstructed version was completed by the lab in 2023 with added features that take advantage of the affordances of the contemporary browser and with an aesthetic that speaks to the spirit of the work.

+Publications

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The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction

Scholarly publications constitute a major output of the lab. Our most recent book publication is The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction, co-authored by Grigar and Mariusz Pisarski. Published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press, the book addresses the growing concern about how best to maintain and extend the accessibility of early interactive novels and hypertext fiction or narratives. It also experiments with including an accompanying digital publication for presenting examples of the topic discussed via video clips, animations, images, and 3D models.

+R&D into Video Games

CMDC Studios

CMDC Studios is collective of multi-talented game developers passionate about creating narrative-rich games through immersive gameplay and thoughtful design. The lab sponsors CMDC Studios because it views video games as a dominant cultural media form and takes active interest in supporting research and development of them through creating, reconstructing, adapting, and conserving them. Additionally, the lab collects games and game consoles, such as Atari and the Commodore 64, maintaining a robust game library used for research and teaching.

+Exploration into Virtuality

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The Visualizations Space in The NEXT

The NEXT holds many unique that contextualize and/or document born-digital media associated with them. Determined to find ways to exhibit these physical archives in a digital space, the lab created the Visualization space, or “Viz” space. The first iteration features the artifacts as 3D interactable models via a Web browser. The next iteration, born out of Grigar’s long interest in Virtual Reality (VR) is a VR experience with the physical objects in an environment created via WebXR. The third iteration, now in development, is a VR experience that combines physical artifacts with the born-digital media to which they are tied or referenced.

+Experiments in Sound

Re-Imagined Radio

Founded and led by Affiliate Researcher John Barber in 2013, Re-imagined Radio experiments with sound and radio art through radio broadcasts and live performances. The project enjoys wide distribution via West Coast radio stations from Nome, Alaska to Sonora, CA and has a strong following for its hundreds of podcasts.

The lab supports this project through providing staff with expertise in multimedia design, video production, and social media content creation and SEO.

Projects