ELL Welcomes Two ELO Fellows
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…
Project Update
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…
Data Collection, Final Results
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…
Data Collection, Week 4
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…
Week 3 Data Collection: The 1st Trial Run
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…
Preparing to Preserve Flash / Shockwave Works, Part 2
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…
Preparing to Preserve Flash E-Lit
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…
New ELL Trailer
We are pleased to present the new trailer for the Electronic Literature Lab, created by Moneca Roath and Mariah Gwin.
ELL’s Undergraduates Win Award
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…
ELL Undergraduate Researchers Reconstitute Deena Larsen’s Kanji-Kus
“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…
