Welcome Brody Rodda to ELL
We are excited to announce that Brody Rodda, an undergraduate majoring in Digital Technology and Culture and a current ELL Fellow, received the 2026 Undergraduate Research Grant from WSU Vancouver. Starting June 1, he will be working with us to catalog all of the computers the lab owns and uses for their research. As he […]
The “Co-Evolution of Human Systems and Tool Systems” Poster
“Co-Evolution of Human Systems and Tool Systems” by Eileen Clegg and Valerie Landau and developed with Douglas Engelbart, 2008 Print from the original hand-drawn mural created for Bruce Horn Gifted to the Electronic Literature Lab by Bruce Horn, April 2026 On December 9, 2008, a celebration was held at Stanford University in honor of […]
Tending to Born-Digital Archives: Mission Statement from ELL’s 15th Anniversary Celebration
The video montage, above, produced by Holly Slocum, kicked off the lab’s 15th Anniversary Celebration on Wednesday, April 15, 2026. Below are my remarks about the lab’s mission that I gave at the event. The video recording of the event is available via our Vimeo site. —– I’m a gardener at heart. I grow […]
Celebrating 15 Years
It seemed a little concept––opening a reading space called the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) for scholars interested in experiencing born-digital literature on the hardware on which the works still function. I owned 16 legacy computers and since 1991 had been collecting floppy disks and CD-ROMs on which works were originally published. Why not share my […]
The Irony of Preservation: Update 21 April 2026
May 8, 2026: Update on the progress of our Flash preservation work: All 680 works of Flash have been converted via Ruffle. We are now going back through The NEXT and versioning them so that the original version is listed as Version 1.0. April 28, 2026: Update on the progress of our Flash preservation work: […]
Steadily Making Progress
In my last post, I mentioned that we had moved into our new space, the Restoration Space––or what we are referring to as “The Rez.” Just getting the computers, software, manuals, and peripherals (that we had to put storage for the real problem of not having enough space) out of the MOVE Lab and laid […]
The Restoration Space
The Electronic Literature Lab has been able to expand into a new space where we can hold our computers, software, and manuals. Named the “Restoration Space,” it is located just a short step away from the MOVE, our Sound and Video Studio where we had been stowing all of this equipment for the last decade. […]
A Most Amazing Site
Websites in the early wildcatting days of dial up modems filled our monitors with zany repetitive tile pattens and delighted us with dancing hamsters and talking cows. We could program a parallel narrative in the status bar and emulate pages turning with Java Applets. A trail of ants could follow our cursor across the […]
Final Report for the SAA Catalyst Grant
Final Report: Making Shockwave Archives Accessible by Dene Grigar, PhD, Director, The Electronic Literature Lab, Washington State University Vancouver Tracking document: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FFS8soClkctSoFLeORqXnclTzps_KBUKfvibTaEmeto/edit?usp=sharing. This is the final report for “Making Shockwave Archives Accessible,” a project undertaken by the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver. The Society of American Archivists awarded the lab the […]
Layne Wright and the PleXWriter 12/10/32A
Last week I received two boxes containing a PC replete with the much and long desired 5.25-inch floppy disk drive (PleXWriter 12/10/32A), a legacy Windows keyboard and mouse, and Viewsonic LED monitor––all in perfect working order from Layne Wright in Colorado. He had read the article in the BBC News that I was looking for […]