Electronic Literature Lab

For Advanced Inquiry into Born Digital Media

  • Home
  • People
  • History
  • Research Output
  • Projects
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 1
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 2
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 3
    • Live Stream Traversals
    • Afterflash
    • Reconstructing Kanji Kus
  • Catalog
    • Beta Catalog
    • Expanded Catalog
  • Podcasts
  • Exhibitions
  • Home
  • People
  • History
  • Research Output
  • Projects
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 1
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 2
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 3
    • Live Stream Traversals
    • Afterflash
    • Reconstructing Kanji Kus
  • Catalog
    • Beta Catalog
    • Expanded Catalog
  • Podcasts
  • Exhibitions
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. One of a handful of media archaeology labs in the U.S., it is used for the advanced inquiry into the curation, documentation, preservation, and production of born digital literary works and other media.

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

  • News

    ELL Welcomes Two ELO Fellows

    June 19, 2019 /

    The Electronic Literature Lab welcomes two Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Fellows in 2019-2020. They are Dr. Amy Spencer, a post-doctoral research assistant at Bath Spa University in the UK, and Julia Polyck-O’Neill, a Canadian artist, curator, critic, and writer completing her doctorate in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program. Both researchers will work under the mentorship of Dr. Dene Grigar to document works of electronic literature featured in the lab’s Traversal events in the organization’s scholarly ELD and in Wikipedia. Both are funded by Grigar in support of the lab. ELO Fellows is a new initiative by the Electronic Literature Organization aimed at supporting early career scholars interested in developing a…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Getting Ready for Pathfinders

    June 16, 2013

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

    October 13, 2020

    Hacking Electronic Literature Workshop

    February 24, 2018
  • Updates

    Project Update

    June 15, 2019 /

    With Holly and Kathleen finalizing the list of 447 Flash and Shockwave works held in the ELO Repository and Greg finishing up the copying of the 75 Voyager CD-ROMS that Bob Stein shared with us during his visit in March, the ELL Team is turning its attention to the completion of several other projects. They include: Photographing the packaging of all Voyager CD-ROMS Putting the final touches on the videos for the NEH grant Finishing our book about the 2018-19 Traversals, entitled Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 2, so that we make the August 15th deadline Getting the next two collections of the ELO Repository online––that is: The Stephanie Strickland and…

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    Coping with Bits Project Meeting

    December 20, 2018

    2020-2021 Traversal Schedule

    August 12, 2020

    Live Stream Traversal of Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid

    February 16, 2019
  • Updates

    Data Collection, Final Results

    June 9, 2019 /

    After spending the month of May identifying works as Flash and Shockwave works from the 12 collections from the ELO Repository that relate to journals, anthologies, and showcases for the grant, ELL Team Members Holly Slocum and Kathleen Zoller painstakingly revisited them last week to fine tune the dates and software versions. They then reviewed the information and re-categorized them, if needed, by the level of difficulty of preserving them with the WebRecorder. Here is final count of the works we will be including in the grant: There are 445 works of Flash and Shockwave e-lit and other interactive media forms in need of preservation in the ELO Repository. They…

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    Prof. Élika Ortega Speaks in ELL on March 9

    March 4, 2018

    Congrats to Holly, Kathleen, Mariah, and Moneca

    April 26, 2020

    Congrats to Nicholas Schiller

    July 30, 2018
  • Updates

    Data Collection, Week 4

    May 31, 2019 /

    We are at the end of our data collection in preparation for writing the grant. Kathleen and Holly double-checked the publication dates and software types and versions on the spreadsheet where we have listed all of the works we plan to record. Mariah double-checked if the works are accessible as local files or via a link to an external site, like the artists’ site or the Wayback Machine. Andrew worked on fine tuning the date of publication. And finally,  Moneca produced videos of the test runs that we held on Wednesday and created still photos from the footage. We plan to include in the grant application a short video trailer…

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    Live Stream Traversal of Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid

    February 16, 2019

    Live Stream Traversal of Kathryn Cramer’s In Small & Large Pieces

    October 23, 2018

    Conserving Community: The trAce Online Writing Centre

    April 6, 2020
  • Updates

    Week 3 Data Collection: The 1st Trial Run

    May 24, 2019 /

    Week 3 of our data collection in preparation for the grant saw the ELL Team continue to fine tune the list of Flash / Shockwave works to include in the project and engage in a trial run of the steps for preserving these works. After eliminating redundancies in the list since some works were published in several different venues, it now includes 477 and features many of the most important Flash / Shockwave e-lit published in the seven journals, three anthologies, and two showcases that the ELO has collected for its repository.  Fine tuning also saw us revisit all of the works and, then, categorize them by level of complexity…

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    Deena Larsen Is Coming!

    October 28, 2018

    Why I Care about Early Interactive Media

    February 22, 2020

    2018-19 Live Stream Traversals Schedule

    August 28, 2018
  • Updates

    Preparing to Preserve Flash / Shockwave Works, Part 2

    May 19, 2019 /

    Week 2 of our data collection for the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant saw the ELL Team hone in on an exact number of Flash and Shockwave works currently held in the ELO Repository. This meant we had to examine over 1500 works in the various collections held by ELO, identify those that were produced with Flash and Shockwave, and determine the versions of these software used to produce them. We then had to cross reference the works with the files held on the server to make sure that we had the local files for all. In total, we found that we have 487 that can be included in…

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    Richard Holeton’s Writings & Art about the 1970s Counterculture, Drugs, and Pigs

    January 11, 2019

    Linking Literature & Games

    August 21, 2019

    Working on The Alan Sondheim Collection

    October 4, 2020
  • Updates

    Preparing to Preserve Flash E-Lit

    May 11, 2019 /

    We kicked off Week 1 of our data collection for the “Preserving Flash Works” project with a tutorial on Rhizome.org’s Webrecorder by Dragan Espenshied, Lyndsey Moulds, and Anna Perricci. For those of you who do not know, Webrecorder is a tool that records a website in a way that allows for its full interactivity and performability. Essentially, it captures the traffic for one complete work, offering a selection of browsers with which to access works once they are recorded. It was funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and developed by Ilya Kreymer for Rhizome’s digital preservation program led by Dragan. Because it has been created to record dynamic web content by emulating a…

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    Dene Grigar

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    2018-19 Live Stream Traversals Schedule

    August 28, 2018

    Love and Loss in Kendall’s A Life Set for Two

    April 5, 2018

    Prof. Élika Ortega Speaks in ELL on March 9

    March 4, 2018
  • Updates

    New ELL Trailer

    May 3, 2019 /

    We are pleased to present the new trailer for the Electronic Literature Lab, created by Moneca Roath and Mariah Gwin. 

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    Dene Grigar

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    Live Stream Traversal of Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid

    February 16, 2019

    Researching E-Lit and Its Printed Materials

    March 14, 2018

    Completed the Development of the Metadata for Turbulence.org

    July 4, 2018
  • Updates

    ELL’s Undergraduates Win Award

    April 12, 2019 /

    So often scholars toil under the radar on their projects, unacknowledged for their contributions. But not yesterday: The five Undergraduate Researchers who have been steadily preserving Electronic Literature together since last fall––Holly Slocum, Mariah, Gwin, Kathleen Zoller, Andrew Nevue, and Moneca Roath––were awarded 1st Place at WSUV’s 2019 Research Showcase. They competed against 35 other undergraduates or teams of them from disciples like Biological Sciences, School of the Environment, Human Development, Fine Arts, and Psychology. Their project? “Reconstituting Electronic Literature.” Specifically they showed the work they had completed for two projects. The first was the one that saw them translate Deena Larsen’s “Kanji-Kus,” rendered obsolete on contemporary browsers, from Java…

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    Researching E-Lit and Its Printed Materials

    March 14, 2018

    Prof. Élika Ortega Speaks in ELL on March 9

    March 4, 2018

    Traversal of Eric Steinhardt’s Fragment of the Dionysian Body

    October 13, 2019
  • Critical Essay

    ELL Undergraduate Researchers Reconstitute Deena Larsen’s Kanji-Kus

    April 6, 2019 /

    “All of my kanji-kus are dead, and you can see their husks if you follow these links.”–Deena Larsen   So writes Deena Larsen on her website in 2014. But this is not true anymore: Undergraduate Researchers in my lab––Kathleen Zoller, Moneca Roath, Mariah Gwin, and Andrew Nevue––led by project manager Holly Slocum, have reconstituted this intellectually complex and visually stunning work so that it can be accessible to the public for years to come.  Kanji-kus are, according to Larsen, “short poems based on the Japanese kanji or ideogram for the word itself” that figure largely in her web-based work from 1999-2002. Larsen’s hypertext novel, Disappearing Rain (2000), for example, is described as…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Congratulating Our Graduating UG Researchers

    December 8, 2018

    Live Playthrough/Traversal/Performance of Robert DiChiara’s “A Sucker in Spades”

    September 3, 2020

    Coping with Bits Project Meeting

    December 20, 2018
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Current Exhibit
An Afternoon with afternoon: 30th Anniversary Celebration of Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story, Launch: Wednesday, July 15, 2020.

Podcasts
Listen to Traversals by and Interviews of prominent e-lit artists and scholars on our Soundcloud playlist

2020-21 Traversal Schedule
Friday, September 11, 10-11:30 am PDT: Robert DiChiara, A Sucker in Spades (1988)

Thursday, October 15, 10-11:30: Bernstein and Sweeney, The Election of 1912 (1988)

Thursday, November 12, 10-11:30: Carolyn Guyer, Quibbling (1992)

Thursday, December 3, 10-11:30: Deena Larsen, Marble Springs (1993)

Thursday, January 21, 10-11:30: Michael Joyce, Twilight: A Symphony (1996)

Thursday, February 18, 10-11:30: TBA

Thursday, March 25, 10-11:30: Kathryn Cramer, In Small & Large Pieces (1994)

Thursday, April 22, 10-11:30: Richard Smyth, Genetis: A Rhizography (1996)

Thursday, May 13, 10-11:30: Rob Swigart, Down Time (2000)

2021 DHSI Course for E-Lit Scholars “Retro Media & Machines.” Co-taught by Dene Grigar & John Durno. Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2020.  University of Victoria. 7-11 June 2021.

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People

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

Associate Director: Nicholas Schiller, MLIS, Associate Professor, Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

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

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

Videographer: David Alonzo, MFA, Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Undergraduate Researchers: Kathleen Zoller, Betsy Hanrahan, Andrew Thompson, Arlo Ptolemy, and Katya Farinsky ELO Fellow: Sean Braune (Canada) Research Affiliates: Mariusz Pisarski (Poland) and Astrid Ensslin (Norway)

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. Header graphic design by Katya Farinsky.

Copyright © 2018