Seven undergraduates worked in this research lab during the fall semester. They ranged from sophomores to graduating seniors, with hard skills in coding, videography, multimedia design, and animation. All of them excellent writers and verbal communicators. All of them probably some of the best problem-solvers I’ve ever worked with. All of them Digital Technology & Culture majors offered through the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. All of them also helped to turn out numerous (very) important academic resources for scholars in my field: The ELO Repository, the site that provides the metadata for 1508 works of electronic literature; the ELO 2013 Proceedings, Chercher le texte; the…

This week Leonardo Flores (U of Puerto Rico Mayaguez) and Abby Adams (Ransom Humanities Center) flew in for two days of meetings about the Comprehensive Online Portal for Electronic Literature Works (COPE) project. Since June 1, 2018 when they––along with Nicholas Schiller (WSUV), four Undergraduate Researchers, Greg Philbrook, and I––kicked off the project, we have Developed the metadata for close to 1000 works that constitute the seven collections of electronic literature owned or managed by the Electronic Literature Organization into CSV files Conceptualized the site where we are hosting this metadata (called the “ELO Repository”) and led the efforts to build this site Developed a workflow for processing and archiving e-lit Began…

ELL congratulates two of its UG Researchers, both of whom are graduating next week from WSUV. After serving as the Project Manager of the lab this fall, Katie Bowen is graduating. Joining her is Austin Fields, who like Katie, comprised two of the four UG Researchers hired to work on the COPE project funded by the Mellon Foundation. Katie was first hired as the lab’s Document Specialist for the Electronic Literature Lab and later as one of the four UG Researchers on the COPE project. She will earn a B.A. in Digital Technology and Culture with a minor in Psychology and graduate magna cum laude. During her time at ELL,…

  I found more archived papers and software  in a leftover old tub of stuff from my 2006 move, and I gave them to [ELO] so we can have more places to study these ephemera. –Deena Larsen, 30 November 2018 I love leftover stuff in tubs. They can––like this “stuff” that Deena gave us––be treasures for future generations to enjoy. 607 items of treasures to enjoy, to be exact. And they are all here in the Electronic Literature Lab inventoried, organized, and housed in archival folders and boxes just waiting for us to digitize them in the spring. The Deena Larsen Collection consists of three boxes, categorized into 12 series: Published…

by Dene Grigar Director, Electronic Literature Lab One of the early online communities I became a part of was the trAce Online Writing Centre, founded in 1995 by Sue Thomas, a professor at Nottingham Trent University in Nottingham, UK. My participation in trAce was an oddity in that I am not British (I’m of Czech heritage on both parents’ sides) nor a citizen of the United Kingdom (I’m an American citizen, 2nd generation). At the time (circa 2002-4), however, I had residency in England due to my post-doctoral study at the University of Plymouth. In 2003, when the announcement was made to participate in trAce’s TextLab fellowship, I applied and…

This photo, taken on Friday, November 9, 2018 in the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) after Deena Larsen’s Traversal of her fiction anthology Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts, exemplifies why a media archaeology lab like ELL is needed for digital preservation and archival research. What had become clear during the event was that the CD-ROM version of the work, marked as compatible for both Apple and PC computers, differed from the original Mac version Larsen personally produced beginning 1994. In fact, as we moved through this version of Samplers on both platforms––working side by side, lexia by lexia, link by link––Larsen and I came to realize just how different the work is…

Deena Larsen, the pioneering electronic literature artist who created such important works as Marble Springs (1993) and “Disappearing Rain” (2000),  among others, is coming to ELL to give a Traversal of her work “Samplers” (2001), her collection of “Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts.” In preparation, she sent us four boxes of her papers, media, and ephemera to be added to ELO’s collection of artists works and papers––including her planning materials for “Samplers.” We gave the audience at the last Traversal a peek at the contents of the posters, so if you were there, you got to see a teaser of the materials going into the ELO Repository. One of my favorite…