Live Playthrough/Traversal/Performance of Robert DiChiara’s “A Sucker in Spades”
Friday, 9/11, 2020 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m. PDT Live on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzeZQ05p_1Tli0lDBeWMxOA/live #ELitLab Join us for a live YouTube event: A playthrough of Robert DiChiara’s detective-adventure game, “A Sucker in Spades” (1988). For the playthrough we’ll be using the 3.5-inch floppy disk on which the work was originally published and a Macintosh Classic running System Software 6.0.3. Performing the work are Mariusz Pisarski, an electronic literature researcher, editor, producer, and translator and Dene Grigar, director of the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University. Safety precautions due to COVID-19 means we will be using a combination of Zoom, YouTube, and OBS software to allow Pisarski, located in London, to remotely guide…
Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 3 Is Released!
Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 3, co-authored by Dene Grigar, Holly Slocum, Kathleen Zoller, Nicholas Schiller, Moneca Roath, and Mariah Gwin, was released on Monday, August 31, 2020 at 8 a.m. PDT. This open-source, multimedia book produced on the Scalar platform features born digital literary works published on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other media formats held among the 300 in Grigar’s personal collection in the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver. An annual publication, the book features selected works highlighted for a Traversal during the year. The five works selected for Volume 3 all constitute long-form narrative writing often identified as a hypertext novel or interactive narrative. Several of them have been deemed by critics over the…
How We Spent Our Summer Vacation, or No Rest for the Wicked
The ELL Team spent some time during our weekly team meeting yesterday reflecting about the projects we took up and/or completed over the 14 weeks of the summer. As the time passed, the list grew. A frequent, “Oh, we forgot this one!” and “Oh, remember we did that, too?” produced a litany of work recounted with no little bit of reverence by the five of us. So, in the spirit of documentation, here is the list that shows that we spent our summer vacation very fruitfully. . . Presented a paper the DHSI Project Management conference We kicked off our summer break with Holly, Kathleen and I preparing for the…
2020-2021 Traversal Schedule
Continuing with the documentation of born digital literature published on 3.5-inch floppy disks and CD-ROMs between 1986-2014, the Electronic Literature Lab is excited to announce the 2020-2021 Traversal Schedule. Additionally we are honored to be collaborating with two prominent scholars in the field––Mariusz Pisarski (Poland) and Astrid Ensslin (Canada)––in order to expand the Traversal schedule to nine works and the publication output for the Rebooting Electronic Literature series to Volumes 4 & 5. The Traversal process will differ from previous years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because we cannot bring authors to the lab to perform at the event, we are experimenting with remote performances via YouTube Live. The URL…
Well, Now What?
Having just spent the better part of a month preparing for ACM Hypertext ’20 and ELO 2020, especially on the reading and exhibition associated with “An Afternoon with afternoon,” the question is, “Now What?” Ah, dear readers, never fear! The ELL Team has plenty to keep itself busy with. Here is the rundown as of today: Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 3 Our annual book, now in its third year, is due at the end of August. Electronic Literature Lab Catalog Yes, we are still migrating content from the old catalog to the new one. But it is gradually getting done. Electronic Literature Repository We continue to add works to this…
ELL Is Participating This Week in 2 Virtual Conferences
The ELL Team is involved in two virtual conferences this week: ACM Hypertext ’20 and ELO 2020. Both were meant to be co-located in Orlando, FL and hosted by the University of Central Florida. The coronavirus, however, moved them both to Zoom, Discord, and other platforms. On July 15, we are hosting the virtual event, “An Afternoon with afternoon,” an event that takes place on Zoom during the last day of Hypertext ’20 and the 1st day of ELO 2020. Dene is moderating; Greg, Holly, and Kathleen are trouble-shooting and managing the Chat. Dene is also on an asynchronous panel, entitled “1990s Literary Hypertext in the 21st Century,” with…
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…
