We’re been posting a lot lately about the preservation work we’ve been doing in the Electronic Literature Lab. Now it’s time to talk about the exhibit curation we also do here. This month Mariah Gwin, the Undergraduate Researcher who specializes in video game studies and handles the games collected in the ELL Collection, has mounted an exhibit called, For the Love of the Game,” that focuses on narrative role-playing games, interactive fiction, and media. As she write in her curatorial statement: The exhibit features works and their intended hardware dating back to the 1980s and into the late 2000s. It focuses on Western-made and Japanese works, as well as individual…

For the second year, the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) at Washington State University Vancouver is hosting live stream Traversals of pioneering born digital literature. These events feature authors or readers performing the work on computers on which the works were originally experienced at the time of the works’ release. We are pleased to announce that four of the seven authors will be on hand at ELL for the Traversal: Deena Larsen will perform her work, Samplers; Richard Holeton, Figurski at Findhorn on Acid; Stephanie Strickland, True North; and George Landow, The Dickens Web. Live streaming means that the online audience can view the performance via YouTube and participate by interacting…

As they walk by, students stare curiously into the window, taken in by the scene of people hunkered down around a long table surrounded by three banks of vintage computers. The boldest and most inquisitive among the onlookers often poke their heads into the door and ask, “What is this place?” Welcome to the Electronic Literature Lab, where seven intrepid Undergraduate (UG) Researchers work with faculty and staff to preserve, document, promote, and build resources for born digital literature. We are busy this fall with many different activities: A Comprehensive Online Portal for Electronic Literature Works (COPE) Four UG Researchers––Katie Bowen, Austin Fields, Mariah Gwin, and Holly Slocum––are working with the…

ELO’s Digital Archivist Abby Adams and I attended Rhizome’s Linked Open Data/Wikibase Summit last week with two goals:  1) to learn more about how Rhizome structured information in its Wikibase because ELO is using it––along with the Library of Congress Name Authority File and ELMCIP––for tracking authoritative data for the ELO Repository; and 2) to become better acquainted with how Wikibase functions so that ELO may assist Rhizome with adding metadata about artists and works that cross between media art and born digital literary art. Following three days of sessions about Data Modeling, Tools, and UX/UI, to name a few, Abby and I agreed that we left the workshop having achieved…

Imagine a medium untethered to gravity, where no wind carries the spoken word and where no magnetic field bounds writers to express thought in a particular direction. In such an environment, what would poetry be? This is the question that media artist Eduardo Kac explores in his work, Inner Telescope. This is the first work of space poetry––that is, poetry produced for creation and performance in space. It was was propelled by rocket ship to the International Space Station (ISS) and enacted by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The Electronic Literature Lab is screening Kac’s video documentation of the production and performance of Inner Telescope. The video is recorded in French…

Bill Bly, the author of We Descend (1997), will visit the Electronic Literature Lab on Friday, September 14. Bly also authored the online chapbook Wyrmes Mete (2002). His print poems and stories have appears in 5 AM, Amelia, American Poetry Anthology, Antigonish Review, Encore, Explorations ’95, MacGuffin, Runes, Yahoo! Internet Life, and Zone 3, along with articles and reviews in Books & Religion, Didaskalia, The Drama Review, Tekka, and Trinity News. He has taught writing at New York University, Fordham University, and Wagner College, where he ran the Writing Program, and has won the Stanley Drama Award, competitive residencies at Shenandoah Valley Playwrights Retreat, Ploughshares International Fiction Seminar, and Vermont Studio Center, as well as fellowships from the…

The Electronic Literature Lab’s collection of important––and fragile––works of hyperfiction and poetry published on removable disks are again the focus of this year’s Live Stream Traversals (re: performances) via YouTube. All events are free & open to the public. Friday, October 26: Kathryn Cramer’s “In Small & Large Pieces” (1994) Friday, November 9: Deena Larsen, “Samplers” (1996) Friday, January 25: Megan Heyward, “Of Day, of Night” (2004) Friday, February 22: Richard Holeton, “Figurski at Findhorn on Acid” (2001) Tuesday, March 26: Stephanie Strickland, “True North” (1997) Friday, April 26: Judd Morrissey & Lori Talley, “My Name is Captain, Captain” (2002) Friday, May 10, George Landow, “The Dickens Web” (1992) For…

“The Art and Science of Hypertext” highlights the way in which hypertext was envisioned and articulated from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. The exhibit features scholarly articles published in ACM Hypertext book of proceedings to hypertext fiction to software and user’s manuals for authoring systems, to the very computers that showcased works, and many other artifacts in an effort to show the deep connection between theory and practice that gave way to innovation and a new form of art. Special Note: All materials are part of the Electronic Literature Lab’s permanent collection, unless noted otherwise.   Materials Exhibited: Left Cabinet: The Art of Hypertext Top Shelf: Macintosh Classic,…

We are happy to announce that Nicholas Schiller, the Associate Director of the Electronic Literature Lab, has been awarded a 2018 Washington Digital Heritage (WDH) grant from the Washington State Library that funds either a new metadata schema or develop an application profile for an existing schema for use in the preservation of born-digital works of literature and other early software. As he states in the grant narrative: “The project can be separated into three distinct phases. The first stage, carried out by Schiller, involves research and examination of existing metadata standards and application profiles for collections of early computer software. Much of this knowledge has already been informally gathered, but…

Visiting ELL on Monday and Tuesday was Prof. Dr. Claus Atzenbeck, the Research Group Leader of the Visual Analytics Research Group at the Institute of Information Systems, Hof University, Germany. He had come to the U.S. for the ACM Hypertext 2018 conference held in Baltimore, MD that took place July 9-12, stopping over in Austin before flying to WSUV. Among many topics we covered were his research into hypertext systems and the knowledge base project he is developing to visualize data based on the proximity of digital objects. He spent much time studying ELL’s library of electronic literature works and reading through some its titles on our vintage computers. On Tuesday…