Treasures from the Rubenstein
by Dene Grigar After Triangle SCI 2022 ended on Thursday, I stay an additional day in Durham so that I could visit the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University again. This was my third visit to the library to do archival research into the Stephanie Strickland, Rob Kendall, and Judy Malloy Papers that the library holds. No matter how many times, though, I visit, I discover new treasures that I somehow overlooked before. Yesterday was no different. After researching information about Kendall’s hypertext poem, “Penetration,” which along with “Dispossession” is part of his The Seasons collection (and that we are adding to the Rob Kendall Collection at The…
From Pathfinders to The NEXT
Dene — I’m writing from Santa Cruz, where I’m at a workshop Noah’s organized for CS and digital humanities types. Anne Balsamo’s here, and has told me about the project you and she have discussed, to make video records of readings of early e-lit works. I’ve agreed to help Anne draft an NEH proposal. . . . —————- Those are the opening lines of the email message Stuart Moulthrop sent on August 27, 2012 inviting me to participate on a potential NEH project to document early electronic literature published on floppy disks and CD-ROMs. We did indeed move forward with a proposal, though Anne had dropped off the project. In…
Woman E-Lit Event & Initiatives
Welcome to Woman E-Lit, a very special symposium that took place on March 30, 2021 during Women’s History Month celebrating women who have contributed to the field of electronic literature. It also celebrated the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL). The two events intersect in that it was important to the ELL Team to celebrate the lab’s anniversary in a way that speaks to it mission––that is, to curate, document, preserve, and produce born digital literary works and other media. Hosting a symposium where women could come together to amplify achievements, provide a space of free and welcomed expression, and celebrate you, us, all of…
Celebrating 10 Years of the Electronic Literature Lab, Part 1
As I mention in the History section of this website, the idea for the Electronic Literature Lab was born out of the successful “Early Authors of Electronic Literature: The Eastgate School, Voyager Artists, and Independent Productions—Special Collection on loan from N. Katherine Hayles,” exhibition that I curated at ELO’s Visionary Landscapes conference held at WSUV in the summer 2008. Using legacy computers that I had collected and those lent to me by a former student in my program, Jeff Grisso, I was able to provide conference participants with the opportunity to experience, first-hand, hypertext literature and other forms of e-lit published on floppy disks on computers for which they had…
Women’s History Month 2021
Join us in celebrating Women’s History Month 2021. This year we are highlighting the output by women working in the area of born-digital literature from all over the world. Each day we will post, on Twitter, one work by one woman artist or scholar. All works will be accessible on the web and all posts will be archived at the Electronic Literature Lab’s (ELL) website for future study. Additionally, you are welcome to nominate works to be featured. Each Sunday during the month of March, we will post links to works by women you wish to honor. To nominate, contact ELL’s Project Manager. Posts Monday, March 1 Join us today…
The Future is Yesterday
On the side of a lonely stretch of highway in a bleak part of Kansas, a man is pasting a sign on a billboard. The activity frames this episode of Season 4 of Fargo, with the phrase, “THE FUTURE is,” lingering through the storyline until it is finally punctuated at the end of the episode with the word, “NOW!” The message’s optimism and urgency screams at the viewer and belies the unseemly demise of many character’s lives (a few by tornado) during the course of the hour. The future is Now! Hurry! I pondered that message on Friday during the launch of the book, The Future of Text, and excellent symposium of…
11 FAQs about Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story
For the past month I have been preparing for the live group reading of Michael Joyce’s hypertext novel, afternoon, a story and the paper Richard Snyder and I are giving about hypertext at the ELO 2020 conference. My research led to: identifying every available manifestation of the work renumbering past editions and organizing them with the, heretofore, unidentified editions so that there is consistency throughout all of the manifestations of the novel versioning the novel according to changes to software so that it is easier for scholars to know what tech to use when accessing it tracking down more precise publication dates through email interviews, databases, and the Internet Archive…
“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…
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…
Expanding the David Kolb Collection
On Friday, August 23, David Kolb, philosopher and author of the hypertext essay, Socrates in the Labyrinth (1994) spent the day with Astrid Ensslin and me in the lab. In the early afternoon, we held a formal event entitled, “For What Is Thinking, If Not Linear?’ – A Conversation with David Kolb, Astrid Ensslin, and Dene Grigar about Socrates in the Labyrinth, Hypertext, and the Lore of Electronic Literature,” that was videotaped by Undergraduate Researcher Moneca Roath and will be made available on Vimeo in early September. Later that afternoon, though, the three of us got together and went through the digital materials––lectures, published and unpublished hypertexts, printed essays, etc.––that David had brought…
