Audio Files of Rob Swigart’s Downtime
Back in early February I began a study of Rob Swigart’s hypertext narrative Downtime, produced with Director and published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 2000. Rob had begun the work in the 80s when he was “doing tech writing for Apple” (5 Feb. 2020). I own three copies of the work: The 1st is dated June 15, 1999, was created with Director 6.5, and requires QT 3. It has a hand-produced label. The 2nd is dated May 11, 2000. It is also created with Director 6.5 but requires QT 4.0.3. Someone used a marker to label the CD-ROM. Finally, the 3rd is the version published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. and dated June…
Happy Hour Featuring Alan Bigelow
Join us at a virtual Happy Hour featuring noted e-lit artist Alan Bigelow and the cast from his ensemble web comedy, The Forever Club, on Friday, June 5, 2020 at 5 P.M. EDT/2 P.M. PDT via Zoom. The Forever Club is a 6-episode series created as mash-up of videos, texts, interactive elements, and visual remnants of social media about the antics of four very close friends Jordan, CJ, Karen, and Gabe. At the Happy Hour we will screen Episode 3, “Let’s Get Drunk,” where the friends challenge each other to a drinking contest. Bigelow and members of the cast will be on hand to talk about the work and its production. No…
Congrats to Holly, Kathleen, Mariah, and Moneca
Last week WSUV held its annual Research Showcase. All other WSU campuses had cancelled theirs since COVID-19 forced us all to hunker down in our homes beginning March 18. But my campus found a digital solution to the very human problem of disease by hosting the event as an online exhibition. Kathleen, who had been awarded a 2019 Summer Mini-Grant for a preservation project relating to Jennifer Ley, Carolyn Guertin, and Margie Luesebrink’s The Progressive Dinner Party (1999), created and submitted a poster, entitled “The Progressive Dinner Party Restored.” She also joined Mariah and Moneca on a poster presentation, entitled “Preserving Electronic Literature,” that focused on numerous projects we’ve been…
TWINDY 2.0 Is Online
The recoded version of Annie Grosshans’ nonfiction hypertext essay, The World Is Not Done Yet, or what we in the lab have lovingly been referring to as TWINDY 2.0, is now online. TWINDY 1.0 was originally created with Adobe Muse, which since March 26, 2020 is no longer supported by the company. [1] For fear that over time the work would deprecate, Annie reached out to several folks, including Amaranth Borsuk, who recommended to Annie that she get in touch with me to see if my lab could do something to preserve it. The ELL Team considered capturing a copy of it via the Webrecorder but decided against this…
Conserving Community: The trAce Online Writing Centre
by Dene Grigar and Nicholas Schiller Welcome to the files from the trAce Online Writing Centre website, 1995-2005. Found here, currently, are four “pulls” of the trAce website from the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine. Planned also is the complete website, from 2005, reconstructed from the original files provided us from the trAce server. Rationale Anyone associated with the trAce Online Writing Community would quickly recognize the rationale for reconstructing its website: trAce was the premier online community for new media writing in the UK and beyond, offering conferences, online courses, workshops, readings, and many other activities. Numerous pioneers of electronic literature/digital writing were nurtured by and/or participated in trAce––Alan Sondheim,…
“Let Her Name Be Remembered: A Final Post about the #womenofelit Project”
By Dene Grigar, Professor & Director, Electronic Literature Lab 280 women e-lit pioneers and visionaries hailing from 30 countries, 162 of which were featured on Twitter shout outs: This was the final tally for the celebration of women e-lit pioneers and visionaries the Electronic Literature Lab held during Women’s History Month. (See Appendice) The event generated from the simple desire to honor women, tell their stories, amplify their deeds, and encourage others to know about them. For the Electronic Literature Lab, such an event exemplifies one aspect of the mission of a feminist lab. That said, the impetus for this particular approach to the event––that is, honoring women e-lit pioneers…
In Honor of International Women’s Day
A Bookstore on Bissonnet St. In college my literature courses were filled with Hemingway, Bellow, Shakespeare, Pope, Vonnegut, Milton, Dryden, Hardy, Byron, Lawrence. . . . Yes, the list of men writers goes on and on. Occasionally we would read a poem by Dickenson or a novel by one of the Bronte sisters, but as a whole I had no idea, back then in the early to mid-1970s, that women could be considered serious writers––indeed, were serious writers––rather than a flaw of natural law. So, imagine my surprise when, after settling in Houston in October 1975 after graduating from college, I discovered, a few blocks from my home off Bissonnet St.,…
Celebrating Women in E-Lit
March is National Women’s History Month and, so, in 2020 the Electronic Literature Lab celebrated the contributions women have made to the field of born digital literature, from its roots in early hypertext literature and theory to the more recent artistic practices of Virtual Reality and sensor-based haptic experiences, to name but a few. Each day we tweeted about women and the work they have done to grow the field. At the end of each day, we archived the tweets here on this site so that people could return and find them. It was a very successful event in that this blog post about the project was one of two…
Why I Care about Early Interactive Media
The question I get asked a lot is, Why do I care so much about early interactive media, particularly since they are generally relegated to the black and white (or green on green) environment of a computer monitor (and a small one, at that), are text-heavy, and whose images–-if they exist at all––are comprised of ASCII art, and mood, augmented by 8-bit sound (if there is any sound at all)? This is a valid question in light of contemporary interactive storytelling techniques that involve robustly immersive environments created with Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and 3D technologies. It boils down to this: I am fascinated with the way ideas develop over time…
Versioning Rob Swigart’s Down Time
As Holly was updating the metadata for the ELO Repository, she realized that there were different CD-ROMs called Down Time held in the various collections. Upon closer inspection, she guessed that they were not copies but rather potential versions of Rob Swigart’s interactive narrative and asked me to look over them. And, of course, she was right. Versioning born digital literature is something I love to do and have been doing officially since working on the chapter about Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger (1986-2014) for Pathfinders. Curious about a work that has endured close to 30 years of technological upgrades to hardware and software, I set off on a journey to determine…
