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…
Celebrating Our Literary Heritage
This year, 2020, marks the 30th anniversary of the commercial publication of Michael Joyce’s hypertext novel, afternoon, a story. While editions of it were given out at conferences and to friends in 1987 and 1989, it is 1990 that figures as the date it was sold through the publisher, Eastgate Systems, Inc. As media theorist Terry Harpold and I both agreed when we discussed the event this week, honoring this work is not a nostalgic act but rather one that allows scholars to revisit Joyce’s contributions to literary history and situate it in contemporary culture, one markedly different than the one the novel both emerged from and reflects. Those…
Launch of The Digital Review
Launch of The Digital Review Thursday, June 11, 2020 10:30 a.m.-1:30 a.m. At TDR’s Twitter site: https://twitter.com/tdrbark We are very excited to announce the launch of the new journal, The Digital Review (TDR), a sibling online publication of the electronic book review, founded and edited by CMDC faculty member, Will Luers, and supported by a research grant from Washington State University. TDR is an annual journal dedicated to the preservation and publication of innovative, born-digital essays. Each theme-based issue will offer a curated combination of commissioned work, submitted work and “rediscovered” work. It draws inspiration from journals, like Vectors (2005-2007), which commissioned individual artist to create collaborative code, craft, and critical writing; Kairos, a long-established…
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,…
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.,…
Reconstituting Annie Grosshans’ “The World Is Not Done Yet”
This week we kick off our new project: to reconstitute Annie Grosshans’ personal narrative, The World Is Not Done Yet. Called “[a] weblication of theoretical poetics,” the work was originally produced with Adobe Muse, another in a series of software programs––like Flash and Shockwave––that Adobe sold to the public but then later decided no longer to support. The date the company gives for its “end of service” (Adobe) is March 26, 2020. To keep Annie’s moving multi-vocal story for the web accessible to the public, therefore, we will be capturing it with the Rhizome Webrecorder and doing a few other tasks to update the work for continued accessibility. Updates include making it…
