Announcing the release of Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 4 ! This fourth volume of Rebooting Electronic Literature (REL) continues with the Electronic Literature Lab’s mission to document born-digital literary works published on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other media formats held among the 300 in Dene Grigar’s personal collection in the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver. Since the publication of the Volume 1 in 2019, this annual publication has provided in-depth scholarly information that includes images of the physical media, videos of performances by and interviews with the authors for and critical essays about hypertext literary works no longer accessible to the public. The methodology used to document this art follows the Pathfinders…

Dene Grigar’s “The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project” (2009) and Annie Grosshan’s The World Is Not Done Yet V2.0 (2020) were both accepted for the Electronic Literature Organization’s Electronic Literature Collection (ELC) Volume 4, forthcoming in December 2021. The ELC is an anthology of works published every five years by the organization. As such, it provides “a mirror of a specific moment in time occurring across continents, languages, and platforms during the second decade of the twenty-first century” (“About,” ELC 3). The former was authored by the Director of the lab, while the latter is one recently preserved by members of the ELL Team. Grigar’s work is a collection of 24 works of micro-fiction she…

Today John Durno’s and my DHSI 2021 course, “Retro Machines and Media,” began with a Flash preservation workshop, led by Arlo Ptolemy, Andrew Thompson, and me. We used Alan Bigelow’s “This Is Not a Poem,” which the lab has not yet preserved for The NEXT, for a live demo of implementing Ruffle and Conifer to preserve it. Interestingly Ruffle did not resurrect it because, I surmise, the sound, video, and effects are just too complex for a simple solution. Conifer, however, did work. So, we were able to aptly show our process of moving from one method to another until something worked.  Tomorrow Greg Philbrook and I will take the…

We are pleased to introduce Dan Walker, a recent graduate of Reed College in Portland, OR, who is joining us in the lab this summer as a Post Baccalaureate Fellow to work on our annual publication, Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 4. Dan is funded by two grants from Reed, Summer Opportunity Fellowship Award, geared to students looking for mentors to work with at other institutions; and the  Eddings Opportunity Grant, offered to English majors at the college. He will spend his time learning how to create content and code in the Scalar platform, writing descriptions of the videos and images from our various Traversals, and working with with lab members to…

We are presenting The NEXT to the Electronic Literature Organization’s Board of Directors on Wednesday, May 8, 2021. The space goes live nine days later on Monday, May 17. Below is the curatorial statement I created for it that explains the vision underlying The NEXT as well as the process it took to build it. As I prepared it for inclusion at the space, I thought of all of the people and organizations that supported us over the three years of The NEXT’s development: the three other Co-PIs involved in Phase 1; Washington State University Vancouver; Electronic Literature Organization and its Board of Directors; my lab (Electronic Literature Lab) and…