My interest in born digital literature is born out of a fascination with creative uses of computing technologies for the purpose of human expression. This same interest extends to tools produced for teaching the foundations of that expression––namely born digital multimedia and interactive software for composition and literature college classrooms. Last week we received a donation of such media from my long-time Computers & Writing colleague, Janice Walker, who recently retired from teaching.  The box she sent was full of software many of us used––and created––from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s when book publishers and independent producers were all leaping (or putting their toe) in the multimedia waters that emerged…

After our meeting in Victoria, B.C. with our partners in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab about the Samvera installation, Leo Flores, Abby Adams, Nicholas Schiller, and I returned to Vancouver to hold the final portion of our kick off for the Coping with Bits project in the Electronic Literature Lab. Abby and Nicholas led the undergraduate researchers through the various fields they need to map and had the students run through several works from the Turbulence.org archives, which is the first collection we are planning to document. Leo worked with Greg Philbrook, the CMDC’s tech guru, on website issues. I went through media that Helen Thorington and Jo-Anne Green had…

For the last five years, the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) has been able to fund undergraduate researchers to work in the lab, participating in faculty research projects and undertaking their own. In 2018-19 the ELL has hired six students, four of which are able to begin this summer to work on the “A Comprehensive Online Portal for Electronic Literature Works” (COPE) project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Specifically, they will ensure the quality control of the metadata migrated to the digital asset management system, an experience that will help them gain knowledge of research methodologies, lab procedures, procedural logic, and library and archival practices. The four students involved in…

The Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) at Washington State University Vancouver announces the publication of their open source, multimedia book, Rebooting Electronic Literature, on June 1, 2018. Written and produced by the ELL Team––Dene Grigar, PhD; Nicholas Schiller, MLIS; Vanessa Rhodes, B.A.; Mariah Gwin, Veronica Whitney, B.A.; and Katie Bowen––the book provides scholars with access to fragile, seminal works published on floppy disks and CD-ROMs between 1986-1996, including: Sarah Smith’s science fiction hypertext novel King of Space (1991) David Kolb’s hypertext essay “Socrates in the Labyrinth” (1994) Yellowlees Douglas’ hypertext narrative “I Have Said Nothing” (1994) Thomas M. Disch’s text adventure “AMNESIA” (1986) Rob Kendall’s hypertext animated poem “A Life Set…

Friday, 5/18, 2018 1-2 p.m. PDT Live on YouTube and F2F in Electronic Literature Lab, WSUV Campus, VMMC 211A #elitpathfinders Experience a performance––what Stuart Moulthrop and I call a “Traversal”––of Mary-Kim Arnold’s short hypertext narrative “Lust” (1994). This is a live performance streamed on YouTube and also captured in video in the Electronic Literature Lab. To access the work, we will be using the 3.5-inch floppy disk from The Grigar Collection on a Macintosh SE running System Software 6.0.7. The work was published in the The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext, Vol. 1, No. 2, Winter 1994 and bundled with J. Yellowlees Douglas’s “I Have Said Nothing.” Performing the Traversal is Nicholas…

  The Electronic Literature Lab will be hosting a two-day con-fab on May 18 & 19, 2018 in preparation of the CELL Project meeting in Montréal during the ELO conference in August. Participating in the meeting are Joe Tabbi (UIC) and Davin Heckman (Winona SU), the two leaders of CELL and Board Member of the ELO; Will Luers (WSUV), Associate Editor of EBR; and Nicholas Schiller (WSUV, ELO’s Office Coordinator, and ELL Associate Manager) and me. The goal of the meeting is to develop the agenda for the summer meeting for its 11  member organizations who include: CIBERIA (Spain), led by Maria Goicoechea, Laura Sanchez Gomez, and Begona A. Regueiro…

Friday, 4/27, 2018 12 Noon-2 p.m. PDT Live on YouTube and F2F in Electronic Literature Lab, WSUV Campus, VMMC 211A #elitpathfinders Experience a performance––what Stuart Moulthrop and I call a “Traversal”––of an early book-length, hypertext poem: Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope (1989, 1990, 1993). This is a live performance streamed on YouTube and also captured in video in the Electronic Literature Lab. To access the work, we will be using the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk from The Grigar Collection on a Macintosh SE (1987) running System 6.0.7. The work was originally published in 1989 in BASIC for an artists book. Malloy reworked and published it via Narrabase Press, in 1990. This…

We’ve all been there––well, maybe most of us––in that relationship in which neither of you want to be but too cowardly to end. Each of you dish out insults to the other and consume the other’s in return in the hope that one day they will be fed up enough to leave and you get off guilt-free. In this life you had set for two, what you really are hoping for, ultimately, is one, and it is one without them. This experience is all too familiar and all too human, and it is one chronicled in Robert Kendall’s long narrative poem, A Life Set for Two. Situated in a café, the story unfolds through…

  We all know that information comprising a digital object can be studied forensically and that doing so can verify the authenticity of that object. Matthew Kirchenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008) documents this feature of digital media well with William Gibson’s Agrippa along with other examples. That is not what this post is about. What I am talking about are the stories surrounding digital objects. More precisely, I am talking about the human experience with digital objects that results in stories that ultimately give a work its own “life” beyond the lives reflected in the content of the work itself. Watch Antiques Roadshow any night and you will see…