Electronic Literature Lab

For Advanced Inquiry into Born Digital Media

  • Home
  • People
  • History
  • Research Output
  • Projects
    • ELO’s The NEXT
    • Restorations & Reconstructions
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 1
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 2
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 3
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 4
    • Live Stream Traversals
  • Catalog
    • Beta Catalog
    • Expanded Catalog
  • Podcasts
  • CMDC Studios
  • Home
  • People
  • History
  • Research Output
  • Projects
    • ELO’s The NEXT
    • Restorations & Reconstructions
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 1
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 2
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 3
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 4
    • Live Stream Traversals
  • Catalog
    • Beta Catalog
    • Expanded Catalog
  • Podcasts
  • CMDC Studios
ELL icon

About

Founded and directed by Dr. Dene Grigar, ELL contains 61 vintage Macintosh & PC computers, dating back from 1977, vintage software, peripherals, and a library of over 300 works of electronic literature and other media. It is used for the advanced inquiry into the curation, documentation, preservation, conservation, and production of born-digital art, literature, and video games. The lab has created and continues to manage the ELO's The NEXT and supports video game R&D through CMDC Studios.

For more information about the lab or for help with preserving or recovering born-digital work, contact Dr. Dene Grigar at dgrigar[at]wsu[dot]edu.

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CATALOG

Visit the online catalog of computers and media works; designed and coded by the CMDC technical assistant Greg Philbrook. The new version of the catalog with expanded entries is now on preview.

other labs icon

Other Media Archaeology Labs or Working Archives in the U.S.

Obsolete Computing & Media at the University of Victoria, directed by John Durno

Media Archaeology Lab at U of Colorado-Boulder, directed by Dr. Lori Emerson

The Trope Tank at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, directed by Dr. Nick Montfort

The Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, directed by Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum, with Amanda Visconti

The Bill Bly Collection at the Maryland Institute in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, directed by Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum, with Amanda Visconti, and Porter Olson

  • Updates

    Madison McCartha, PhD Fellow at the Electronic Literature Lab

    July 21, 2022 /

    We are pleased to welcome the Electronic Literature Lab’s first PhD Fellow––poet, critic, and multimedia artist, Madison McCartha. Their debut book of poetry and visual art, FREAKOPHONE WORLD, was published by Inside the Castle, in 2021. Their second book, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean. McCartha holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their Fellowship is funded by N. Katherine Hayles, the Luesebrink Family, and the WSU College of Arts & Sciences. Madison’s interest in kinetic poetry has led them to work directly this summer on the metadata for The New River Journal Collection,…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Ruffle Preservation Report #3

    February 20, 2021

    ELL Activities

    September 29, 2018

    The Ethics of Digital Preservation: Obligation to Future Generations

    September 6, 2021
  • Updates

    Principles that Guide Restoration and Reconstruction of Born-Digital Literature

    June 28, 2022 /

    The restoration and reconstruction projects the lab has produced, in varying degrees, required approaches like migration, emulation, and collection as part of the digital preservation process. In some cases, text and are were migrated while code is completely rebuilt. Other cases see a bit of code added to a HTML page that result in the emulation of the Adobe Flash Player so that the work can be displayed on a contemporary browser. Still in other cases, no migration nor emulation is required but a slight change in the code predicates the need to check the new version against the original on legacy computers. What this means, then, is that preservation…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Chapter 1 of Rebooting Electronic Literature is Released

    January 28, 2018

    Why I Care about Early Interactive Media

    February 22, 2020

    2020-2021 Traversal Schedule

    August 12, 2020
  • Updates

    Victory Garden 2022 Builds & Changes

    June 21, 2022 /

    Compiled by Arlo Ptolemy, Project Manager, Victory Garden 2022 Below are the various builds associated with the reconstruction of Stuart Moulthrop’s 1991 hypertext novel Victory Garden, published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. The new edition, Victory Garden 2022, was created by Stuart Moulthrop, Arlo Ptolemy, Andrew Thompson, with support from Holly Slocum, Dene Grigar, Sierra O’Neal, Greg Philbrook, and Austin Gohl. The information is drawn from the Github site on which the builds are retained (https://github.com/AndrewThompson1998/ell-victory-garden-reconstruction) and the archival Basecamp site where the files are permanently hosted.  X Builds The X Builds signify the beginning of the project of rebuilding Victory Garden, as well as the start of the Lab joining the project.…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Project Update

    June 15, 2019

    ELL’s Undergraduates Win Award

    April 12, 2019

    Traversal of Eric Steinhardt’s Fragment of the Dionysian Body

    October 13, 2019
  • Updates

    CMDC Studios: Video Games R&D

    June 9, 2022 /

    Announcing CMDC Studios! CMDC Studios is a team of multi-talented game developers, sponsored by the Electronic Literature Lab, who are passionate about creating narrative-rich games through immersive gameplay and thoughtful design. The team is proud to support developers that are interested in entering the games industry through structured opportunities to make games, polish their skills, and work in teams of all sizes. With an ever-growing game library of heartfelt, adventurous, and sometimes mysterious titles, CMDC Studios invites players to explore a wide range of digital experience.

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    Dene Grigar

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    Announcing the Publication of Rebooting Electronic Literature!

    May 26, 2018

    Moving Forward in 2020

    January 18, 2020

    Space Poetry: Screening Eduardo Kac’s Inner Telescope

    September 16, 2018
  • Updates

    Restorations & Reconstructions

    June 4, 2022 /

    For the last seven years the lab has rebooted numerous work of born-digital media by documenting them via Grigar and Moulthrop’s Pathfinders methodology, which has culminated in a series of electronic open-source books entitled Rebooting Electronic Literature, and by conserving them through various restoration and reconstruction initiatives. The former, documentation, involves no direct intervention into a work, but the latter, restoration and reconstruction, requires interventions to the code and other aspects of the work that may involve emulation, migration, and/or collection in varying degrees and, so, always results in new versions and, thus, editions of a work. We call the intervention into portions of the code (including changing linking structure) and/or aspects of…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Launch Party for Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid

    June 29, 2021

    Data Collection, Week 4

    May 31, 2019

    Introduction to Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities & Forthcoming Book Launch

    January 12, 2021
  • News,  Updates

    Reconstruction of Sarah Smith’s “King of Space”

    May 21, 2022 /

    The Electronic Literature Lab and the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program are proud to announce the launch of the reconstruction of Sarah Smith’s King of Space. In production since January 12, 2022, the work is now widely accessible via the Web at https://kingofspace.org/. Reconstruction was undertaken by 23 spring graduates of the program who were guided by staff from the lab and the author herself.  King of Space (KOS) Version 1.0 was begun in 1987 and published in 1991 by Eastgate Systems, Inc. on two 3.5-inch floppy disks for Macintosh computers. Rapid technological developments relating to hardware and software caused it to be inaccessible to the public by the late…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Consider It Down

    September 22, 2019

    2020-2021 Traversal Schedule

    August 12, 2020

    Rhizome’s Linked Open Data/Wikibase Summit

    September 23, 2018
  • News,  Updates

    Collection Selected for the Recovery Hub of American Women Writers

    May 11, 2022 /

    The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Collection that the lab developed and curated for ELO’s The NEXT was selected for inclusion in the July 2022 showcase of the “Recovery Hub of American Women Writers.” The Collection––consisting of 66 works the artists donated to The NEXT, 32 of which were created by the artist and preserved in various methods by the lab––was peer-reviewed in a process that involved “private, actionable feedback, and a public-facing showcase” (“Email,” 2 May 2022). It is an honor for Margie’s collection to be showcased by The Hub, an organization that “supports projects recovering the work of women writers by providing digital access to forgotten or neglected texts and/or extending them with…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Prof. Élika Ortega Speaks in ELL on March 9

    March 4, 2018

    Saving Flash Works: Report #1

    January 31, 2021

    Space Poetry: Screening Eduardo Kac’s Inner Telescope

    September 16, 2018
  • Updates

    Welcome Erika Fulop to ELL!

    April 30, 2022 /

    Erika Fulop, a Senior Lecturer in French at Lancaster University (UK), is a Hungarian scholar whose research focuses on “the impact of digitization and the internet on culture . . . and the modern and contemporary novel, especially metafiction and self-reflexive phenomena.” She is also a specialist in French e-lit and is working in the lab for three weeks to develop a range of projects, including a potential “The Alire Collection” at The NEXT. This journal, whose subtitle is A Relentless Literary Investigation, was begun in 1989 by Philippe Bootz, Frédéric Develay, Jean-Marie Dutey, Claude Maillard, and Tibor Papp of the Parisian group, L.A.I.R.E. (Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture). As Bootz reminds…

    Read More
    Dene Grigar

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    Live Stream Traversal of Bernstein and Sweeney’s Historical Hypertext, “The Election of 1912”

    October 13, 2020

    CMDC Studios: Video Games R&D

    June 9, 2022

    Saving Flash Works: Report #1

    January 31, 2021
  • Electronic Literature,  Updates

    Victory Garden, Version 5.0

    April 2, 2022 /

    “Experiencing the Garden, Again” By Dene Grigar     Since January 2022 the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) has been busy doing many reconstruction projects aimed at preserving early interactive media. One of them is Stuart Moulthrop’s hypertext novel Victory Garden, published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1991. Over its 30 year history the work has gone through numerous updates of its software and packaging, the last one in 2002––what I call “Version 4.0 CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows Computers.” Unfortunately, that version was rendered inaccessible to Macintosh computers in 2007 when Apple upgraded to MacOS x 10.5 (Leopard). And of course, today a CD-ROM drive is no longer a common…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Panel Accepted for the AWP

    August 16, 2022

    Inventorying Riding the Meridian

    February 8, 2019

    Traversal of Rob Kendall’s A Life Set for Two

    March 18, 2018
  • News

    Congratulations, Dr. Snyder!

    March 11, 2022 /

    We are very excited to announce that Richard Snyder, our Assistant Director and Metadata Specialist, successfully defended his dissertation yesterday (March 10) and so completed his PhD at Washington State University. His dissertation, “Word and Image in Early Modern Literature: A Digital Approach to Reading in Context,” is a hybrid one where he built a tool called the Early Modern Visual Reader (EMVR) that allows readers of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander to visualize concepts found in each work. Ultimately EMVR will be enhanced so that it can be used for a variety of texts and aid in the ability to produce scholarly digital editions of works…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Finding Stephanie Strickland’s True North

    March 21, 2019

    2018-19 Live Stream Traversals Schedule

    August 28, 2018

    Why a Lab Like ELL Is Needed for Digital Preservation and Archival Research

    November 12, 2018
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People

Director: Dr. Dene Grigar, Professor, The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Associate Director: Dr. Richard Snyder, Blackburn Fellow, The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Technical and Instructional Assistant: Greg Philbrook, B.A., The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Project Manager & Senior Designer: Holly Slocum, B.A., The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Post-Bacc Researchers: Kathleen Zoller, Joel Clapp, Ruth Woodcock, Andrew Thompson, Arlo Ptolemy, Ariel Wallace, Sierra O'Neal, Ahria Nicholas, Stratton Slater, Danny Blanchard

PhD & 2022 PostDoc Fellow: Madison McCartha, UC Santa Cruz

2022 ELO Fellow: Alexandra Martin, QUAM (Canada)

Research Affiliates: Mariusz Pisarski, PhD (Poland); Erika Fulop, Phd, Lancaster University (UK; Agnieszka Przybyszewska, PhD, University of Łódź (Poland)

This website was created by Katie Bowen, Mariah Gwin, Holly Slocum and Austin Fields. Madeleine Brookman produced the ELL logo. All custom icons were designed by Holly Slocum. It is managed by Dene Grigar

Copyright © 2018