Live Traversal by Rob Swigart on February 14
Tuesday, 2/14/23, 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m. PST Live on YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/electronicliteraturelab Twitter: #ELitLab Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/electronicliteraturelab In person on the WSUV campus, VCLS 3 Join us for the Live Stream Performance by Rob Swigart, who will read from the two works he published with Eastgate Systems, Inc.: Directions (1994) and Down Time (2000). Both will be read via the CD-ROM on the Mac G3 iMac “Tangerine” running System Software 9.2 held in Grigar’s personal collection. The event is hosted by the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver and moderated by the lab’s Director, Dene Grigar. About the Works Directions (1994), subtitled “A quasi-sentimental pseudo-scientific hyperpoem,” is a collection of hypertextual…
Visualization Space Is Live at The NEXT!
The Visualization space, long planned for The NEXT, is now live at https://the-next.eliterature.org/visualizations. When artists and scholars send the lab their digital works, they often also ship their physical archives. This means that we are holding boxes of personal papers, notebooks, books, and ephemera that correspond to the digital media The NEXT is hosting. In an effort to share some of the most historically compelling of these artifacts, the lab called upon our lab mates, Sierra O’Neal and Kathleen Zoller, to re-create them as 3D models. Visualizations you will see at The NEXT include packaging used for early born-digital media as well as objects, like the beach ball that Richard…
Report about the Lab’s Update to ELO’s The NEXT
The Electronic Literature Lab has been busy during its planned Winter Refinement period: 1) enhancing the metadata for many collections held in The NEXT, 2) preserving works produced with Flash and other outmoded software, such MIDI and Java Applets, and 3) completing the “Cite” feature that allows visitors to cite all the works in The NEXT. Metadata, Preservation, and Citation Feature To date, the lab has updated the metadata for and preserved works in The frAme Collection, The Word Circuits Collection, and close to 50% of the 369 works in The Turbulence Collection. These efforts bring those collections donated early in the development of the ELO’s Repository to the level of…
Metadata for VR Narratives
Richard Snyder and I submitted our essay, “Metadata for Access: VR and Beyond,” to forthcoming volume of The Future of Text, edited by Frode Hegland. As we write in our abstract Interacting with virtual reality (VR) environments requires multiple sensory modalities associated with time, sight, sound, touch, haptic feedback, gesture, kinesthetic involvement, motion, proprioception, and interoception––yet metadata schemas used for repositories and databases do not offer controlled vocabularies that describe VR works to visitors. This essay outlines the controlled vocabularies devised for the Electronic Literature Organization’s museum/library The NEXT. Called ELMS (Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema), this framework makes it possible for physically disabled visitors and those with sensory sensitivities to know…
Treasures from the Rubenstein
by Dene Grigar After Triangle SCI 2022 ended on Thursday, I stay an additional day in Durham so that I could visit the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University again. This was my third visit to the library to do archival research into the Stephanie Strickland, Rob Kendall, and Judy Malloy Papers that the library holds. No matter how many times, though, I visit, I discover new treasures that I somehow overlooked before. Yesterday was no different. After researching information about Kendall’s hypertext poem, “Penetration,” which along with “Dispossession” is part of his The Seasons collection (and that we are adding to the Rob Kendall Collection at The…
Triangle SCI Begins
Triangle SCI began today in Durham today. Dene and Richard are here developing the metadata fields for visitors to The NEXT with disabilities for better access. We kicked off the event with an opening event at The Rickhouse where we met with the other teams invited to the week-long retreat. This year’s theme is Reckoning, Care, and Repair, and we are one of five teams invited to participate. Besides ours, entitled A Post-Pandemic Reckoning: Improving Metadata for Better Accessibility to Scholarly Archives for People with Disabilities, there are: *Joshua Neds-Fox, Matt Ruen, Teresa Schultz, Brianne Selman, Leila Sterman, Stephanie Towery’s Building a contextual alternative to scholarly journal un/safelists *Karen Stoll Farrell, Kimberly…
Victory Garden 2022 in The Digital Review
The lab’s efforts to reconstruct Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden is featured in The Digital Review (TDR), Issue 02 in the “Rediscoveries” section of the journal in an essay appropriately titled, “Reconstructing Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden.” As the editors of TDR write, “Rediscoveries of electronic literature are no different than rediscoveries of print literature. Without structured acts of rediscovery, the works that shape a given era can easily be lost – and this is even more the case for a digital canon whose platforms are changing all the time. . . . The Digital Review and the Electronic Literature Lab will be doing the same, over the current decade, for at…
Panel Accepted for the AWP
The panel I was invited to join, entitled “Cripping & Digitizing: (Re)Imagining the Poetry eBook,” that was organized by poet C. R. Grinner for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2023 conference was accepted. Grinner teaches at the UW in Seattle and author of The Lyme Letters (Texas Tech University Press). Other panelists besides Grinner and me include Molly E. Ubbesen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Director of Writing at University of Minnesota Rochester; and Dr. Katherine “Kate” Deibel, the systems librarian at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and advocate for usable and accessible technologies. Our Panel Description: “The emergence of eBook formats creates an opportunity to accessibly digitize and archive poetry.…
Madison McCartha, PhD Fellow at the Electronic Literature Lab
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,…
Principles that Guide Restoration and Reconstruction of Born-Digital Literature
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…
