The Origins of a Passion
At first it was the little sugar flowers that adorned family members’ birthday, wedding, and anniversary cakes. You know what I am talking about––the pink roses or yellow generic flowers one could buy at the grocery store and affix to a freshly made frosted cake. Yes, I collected those and kept them in a large, round lidded glass jar until a decade later when ants found them. My eidetic memory afforded me the ability to recall the event where each flower had come, who had attended the event, and other details that stick with me today even without the mnemonic power of the artifacts. But in those days, I would…
Live Stream Traversal of Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid
Friday, 2/22/19 2:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m. PDT Live on YouTube and F2F in Electronic Literature Lab, WSUV Campus, VMMC 211A YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzeZQ05p_1Tli0lDBeWMxOA/live Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=elitpathfinders Twitter: #elitpathfinders Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/electronicliteraturelab/ Experience early born digital literature performed live via YouTube. Drawn from Stuart Moulthrop and Dene Grigar’s concept of the “Traversal,” these performances take place on the original hardware and software for which the work was produced. By broadcasting the Traversals live, audiences across the internet can access important works of electronic literature endangered by time and outmoded hardware, software, and media formats. The YouTube Chat function allows them to interact with the reader and members of the audience. Traversal Highlights Richard Holeton’s epic…
Richard Holeton’s Writings & Art about the 1970s Counterculture, Drugs, and Pigs
“Well, pigs, I guess.” –Richard Holeton This is the first line of Richard Holeton’s list of 11 “things I want to write about,” found among his papers, dated from 1993-1998, for his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree at San Francisco State University. The list is a collection of topics that includes the counterculture of the early 1970s; relationships between brothers as well as between fathers and sons; Star Trek (“both original and Next Generation plots”); and the murder by Theodore Streleski of his dissertation director––all of which end up in Holeton’s epic hypertext novel, Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, published in 2001 by Eastgate Systems, Inc. The work…
Spring 2019 Tasks
And we thought 2018 was busy . . . This coming year the ELL Team will continue with projects begun in the fall: Live Stream Traversals, new chapters in the Rebooting Electronic Literature multimedia book, and getting the CSV files of the ELO’s collections of electronic literature prepared for ingestion in the ELO Repository. Some new challenges await us, though: restoring Deena Larsen’s e-lit works; developing the exhibition for ACM Hypertext 2019 taking place in Hoff, Germany; organizing Richard Holeton’s archives into a cohesive collection; and researching Eduardo Kac’s media poetry in preparation for the book proposal about his art. We are down two UG Researchers from the fall: Both…
The Impact of Undergraduate Research on a Field
Seven undergraduates worked in this research lab during the fall semester. They ranged from sophomores to graduating seniors, with hard skills in coding, videography, multimedia design, and animation. All of them excellent writers and verbal communicators. All of them probably some of the best problem-solvers I’ve ever worked with. All of them Digital Technology & Culture majors offered through the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. All of them also helped to turn out numerous (very) important academic resources for scholars in my field: The ELO Repository, the site that provides the metadata for 1508 works of electronic literature; the ELO 2013 Proceedings, Chercher le texte; the…
Coping with Bits Project Meeting
This week Leonardo Flores (U of Puerto Rico Mayaguez) and Abby Adams (Ransom Humanities Center) flew in for two days of meetings about the Comprehensive Online Portal for Electronic Literature Works (COPE) project. Since June 1, 2018 when they––along with Nicholas Schiller (WSUV), four Undergraduate Researchers, Greg Philbrook, and I––kicked off the project, we have Developed the metadata for close to 1000 works that constitute the seven collections of electronic literature owned or managed by the Electronic Literature Organization into CSV files Conceptualized the site where we are hosting this metadata (called the “ELO Repository”) and led the efforts to build this site Developed a workflow for processing and archiving e-lit Began…
Congratulating Our Graduating UG Researchers
ELL congratulates two of its UG Researchers, both of whom are graduating next week from WSUV. After serving as the Project Manager of the lab this fall, Katie Bowen is graduating. Joining her is Austin Fields, who like Katie, comprised two of the four UG Researchers hired to work on the COPE project funded by the Mellon Foundation. Katie was first hired as the lab’s Document Specialist for the Electronic Literature Lab and later as one of the four UG Researchers on the COPE project. She will earn a B.A. in Digital Technology and Culture with a minor in Psychology and graduate magna cum laude. During her time at ELL,…
Deena Larsen’s Donation to ELO
I found more archived papers and software in a leftover old tub of stuff from my 2006 move, and I gave them to [ELO] so we can have more places to study these ephemera. –Deena Larsen, 30 November 2018 I love leftover stuff in tubs. They can––like this “stuff” that Deena gave us––be treasures for future generations to enjoy. 607 items of treasures to enjoy, to be exact. And they are all here in the Electronic Literature Lab inventoried, organized, and housed in archival folders and boxes just waiting for us to digitize them in the spring. The Deena Larsen Collection consists of three boxes, categorized into 12 series: Published…
Why Collecting Is Important
by Dene Grigar Director, Electronic Literature Lab One of the early online communities I became a part of was the trAce Online Writing Centre, founded in 1995 by Sue Thomas, a professor at Nottingham Trent University in Nottingham, UK. My participation in trAce was an oddity in that I am not British (I’m of Czech heritage on both parents’ sides) nor a citizen of the United Kingdom (I’m an American citizen, 2nd generation). At the time (circa 2002-4), however, I had residency in England due to my post-doctoral study at the University of Plymouth. In 2003, when the announcement was made to participate in trAce’s TextLab fellowship, I applied and…
Why a Lab Like ELL Is Needed for Digital Preservation and Archival Research
This photo, taken on Friday, November 9, 2018 in the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) after Deena Larsen’s Traversal of her fiction anthology Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts, exemplifies why a media archaeology lab like ELL is needed for digital preservation and archival research. What had become clear during the event was that the CD-ROM version of the work, marked as compatible for both Apple and PC computers, differed from the original Mac version Larsen personally produced beginning 1994. In fact, as we moved through this version of Samplers on both platforms––working side by side, lexia by lexia, link by link––Larsen and I came to realize just how different the work is…
