Archives

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 13 April 2026

  April 13, 2026: Update on the progress of our Flash preservation work: We have completed preserving 178 Flash works with Ruffle. Left to finish are 502 more. We will finish all but the 200 works held in “The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That Collection” in time for Wednesday’s anniversary celebration. This means […]

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 […]

ELL’s Retro Computing Series

As we have often stressed in our blog posts, the Electronic Literature Lab needs hardware and software in order to access the born-digital art, literature, and games we are collecting and making accessible via documentation and exhibitions. We emulate works when needed, but we prefer to encounter them on their original platform so as to […]

Stephanie Strickland’s Traversal of “slippingglimpse”

Stephanie Strickland’s poem “slippingglimpse” was produced with Flash. The lab attempted to preserve it with Conifer, but the results were not satisfactory. We opted to include it in our Traversals this summer and were glad to have Stephanie perform it for us herself. Here is the recording of that event, which took place on Thursday, […]