“Let Her Name Be Remembered: A Final Post about the #womenofelit Project”
By Dene Grigar, Professor & Director, Electronic Literature Lab 280 women e-lit pioneers and visionaries hailing from 30 countries, 162 of which were featured on Twitter shout outs: This was the final tally for the celebration of women e-lit pioneers and visionaries the Electronic Literature Lab held during Women’s History Month. (See Appendice) The event generated from the simple desire to honor women, tell their stories, amplify their deeds, and encourage others to know about them. For the Electronic Literature Lab, such an event exemplifies one aspect of the mission of a feminist lab. That said, the impetus for this particular approach to the event––that is, honoring women e-lit pioneers…
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.,…
Celebrating Women in E-Lit
March is National Women’s History Month and, so, in 2020 the Electronic Literature Lab celebrated the contributions women have made to the field of born digital literature, from its roots in early hypertext literature and theory to the more recent artistic practices of Virtual Reality and sensor-based haptic experiences, to name but a few. Each day we tweeted about women and the work they have done to grow the field. At the end of each day, we archived the tweets here on this site so that people could return and find them. It was a very successful event in that this blog post about the project was one of two…
Why I Care about Early Interactive Media
The question I get asked a lot is, Why do I care so much about early interactive media, particularly since they are generally relegated to the black and white (or green on green) environment of a computer monitor (and a small one, at that), are text-heavy, and whose images–-if they exist at all––are comprised of ASCII art, and mood, augmented by 8-bit sound (if there is any sound at all)? This is a valid question in light of contemporary interactive storytelling techniques that involve robustly immersive environments created with Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and 3D technologies. It boils down to this: I am fascinated with the way ideas develop over time…
Versioning Rob Swigart’s Down Time
As Holly was updating the metadata for the ELO Repository, she realized that there were different CD-ROMs called Down Time held in the various collections. Upon closer inspection, she guessed that they were not copies but rather potential versions of Rob Swigart’s interactive narrative and asked me to look over them. And, of course, she was right. Versioning born digital literature is something I love to do and have been doing officially since working on the chapter about Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger (1986-2014) for Pathfinders. Curious about a work that has endured close to 30 years of technological upgrades to hardware and software, I set off on a journey to determine…
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…
Treasures from The Dene Grigar Collection
The Electronic Literature Lab holds the collection of over 300 works electronic literature, video games, and interactive media, along with the hardware and peripherals with with to view the work, collected for the last 29 years by Dene Grigar. The collection highlights include all works of electronic literature published by Eastgate Systems, Inc.; posters, catalogs, and proceedings from many conferences and media art shows that featured electronic literature; books and other printed materials published to accompany born digital works. The items featured in this exhibit, however, are among the rarest in her collection because they represent one of the last, the only iteration of a work or unique work.…
Collect, Not Correct: A Response to the U.S. National Archives’ Alteration of an Image from the 2017 Women’s March
The news that the U.S. National Archives had altered an image from the 2017 Women’s March to tone down political messages and references to women’s bodies spread quickly on Twitter and generated what can be considered condemnation for the deed. On January 18, the day of the 2020 Women’s March, the U.S. National Archives posted this apology: We made a mistake. As the National Archives of the United States, we are and have always been completely committed to preserving our archival holdings, without alteration. In an elevator lobby promotional display for our current exhibit on the 19th Amendment, we obscured some words on protest signs in a photo of…
Moving Forward in 2020
2020 marks the 8th year that our lab has been on the WSUV campus. We kick off this new year with some changes to our personnel and many, many exciting initiatives. First, we hired recent graduate, Holly Slocum, as the lab’s official Project Manager. Holly served for close to two years as an Undergraduate Researcher in ELL overseeing numerous projects for us. We are very excited to have her expertise and passion in the lab. Staying with us this spring is Undergraduate Researcher Kathleen Zoller who led The Progressive Dinner Party Restored project last summer. She is a Junior in the Creative Media & Digital Culture (CMDC) program and our…
A Successful Presentation at the MLA 2020
The ELL Team, led by Holly Slocum, gave an excellent presentation at the Modern Language Association 2020 conference on Saturday, January 11. We were part of the Electronic Literature Organization’s special session, #594 “Making, Preserving, and Curating Electronic Literature.” Close to 50 people attended the six interactive demonstrations. All visited our station and looked over the materials we brought with us to the event. Participating members of the team included (along with Slocum and Grigar) Kathleen Zoller, Moneca Roath, and Andrew Nevue. The team showed nine of the projects on which we have been working over the last year, including developing the metadata for the ELO Repository; preserving Flash and…
