Getting ready to open the "Early Authors" exhibition
ELL's first space, circa 2011
Preparing for a tour during the campus' 25th anniversary, circa 2014
ELL's students in front of exhibition case, circa 2019
Megan Heyward reading her interactive novel, of day of night
Grigar with Philbrook with one of the Macs Deena Larsen donated
2008
ELL opens as a reading room for scholars to engage with born-digital media collected by Grigar since 1991
May 29-June 1, 2008:
"Early Authors of Electronic Literature: The
Eastgate School, Voyager Artists, and Independent Productions" exhibition Grigar mounted for ELO '08
made her realize that a space for scholars to to access and experience electronic literature on legacy computers was needed
July 15, 2010: Grigar requests VCLS 210 as space for the Electronic Literature Lab
January 10, 2011: Grigar moves into ELL and sets up a reading room with her personal collection of electronic literature and 16 legacy computers
April 15, 2011: Anne Balsamo visits ELL and suggests ideas for its future use
April 2015: ELL moves to a more visible space, VMMC 211A
August 2019: ELL is given an exhibition case for showing its artifacts
December 2023: Deena Larsen donates 25 Macintoshes to ELL, bringing its number to 85
Cover of Pathfinders book, designed by Will Luers
Stuart Moulthrop giving his Traversal of Victory Garden
Shelley Jackson giving her Traversal of Patchwork Girl
Cover of Rebooting Electronic Literature series
2013
ELL expands its mission to include innovating the documentation methodology for electronic literature
April 9, 2013: With Anna Balsamo's and Stuart Moulthrop's support, Grigar and Moulthrop receive an NEH grant for Pathfinders
July 8-11, 2013: Pathfinders' Traversals start, with the first by Mouthrop held in ELL
August 7-10, 2013: John McDaid's Traversal at ELL
September 6-8, 2013: Judy Malloy's Traversal is held at Princeton University
October 17-20, 2013: Shelley Jackson's Traversal held at ELL
January 30-February 2, 2014: Bill Bly's Traversal is held at MITH with support from Matt Kirschenbaum
June 1, 2015:Pathfinders multimedia "Scalar" book is published
June 4, 2015: Grigar and Moulthrop sign the contract for Traversals with The MIT Press
April 2017: The MIT Press releases Traversals
2018-2021: ELL continues to hold Traversals and publishing results in Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volumes 1-5
Logo for frAme journal, published by trAce
Interface of the Electronic Literature Repository, circa 2019
Interface of The NEXT, designed by Holly Slocum
Sndyer organizing Rob Swigart's archives, circa 2022
Sue Thomas at The British Library before donating her archives to The NEXT
2016
ELL becomes involved in archiving and making born-digital art, literature, and games accessible to the public
December 2016: ELL begins to manage archives belonging to the trAce Online Writing Center, with support by Sue Thomas; and Turbulence.org, with support by Helen Thorington and Jo-Anne Green
May 2018: Grigar and her team is awarded a seed grant from The Alfred W. Mellon Foundation
to build a repository to hold the archives
December 30, 2019: The "Electronic Literature Repository" (ELR) goes live with seven
collections: trAce, Turbulence, Alan Bigelow, Stephanie Strickland, Marjorie C. Luesebrink, N. Katherine Hayles, and David Kolb
May 6, 2020: ELR is re-envisioned as a museum and library called The NEXT, built with open Web languages by graduating seniors in the Creative Media & Digital Culture program
2021: ELL team members Holly Slocum and Greg Philbrook rebuild The NEXT with Semantic Markup and ARIA and continue to innovate design
2022: ELL is given the 2022 Open Scholarship Award by The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute for The NEXT
2024: Grigar is awarded a grant from WSU Vancouver to make The NEXT's Visualization space accessible as a Virtual Reality experience
ELL's Undergraduate Researchers win WSU Vancouver's Research Showcase
The ELL Team with Annie Grosshan
Interface for Amnesia Restored"
CMDC seniors reading Disch's Amnesia as emulation
Bill Bly, Erika Fulop, and Grigar reading a hypertext novel
Invitation to Holeton's launch party
2019
ELL begins to restore and conserve born-digital art, literature, and games held in the archives it manages to ensure outmoded works are accessible to the public
2019: ELL restores Deena Larsen's "Kanji-Kus"
2020: ELL picks up its first conservation project: Annie Grosshan's The World Is Not Done Yet; it also begins to preserve Flash works with Ruffle
2021: ELL works with CMDC graduating seniors to translate Thomas Disch's Amnesia, for the Web, calling the project Amnesia Restored; the ELL Team conserves Richard Holeton's hypertext novel, Figurski at Findhorn on Acid
2022: ELL builds David's Kolb's "Caged Text," which had remained unfinished since 1997; its also leads a team of CMDC seniors to translate Sarah Smith's King of
Space for the Web and conserves Stuart Moulthrop's hypertext novel, Victory Garden
2023: ELL conserves Bill Bly's We Descend and leads CMDC seniors in conserving John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse
2024: In the spring ELL begins work on conserving Christy Sanford's "Red Mona;" it also oversees the work of its Undergraduate Researcher, James Lesperance, to develop a NetProv engine aimed at documenting Rob Wittig's corpus, a project funded by WSU Vancovuer's Undergraduate Research Fellow Award
ELMS space in The NEXT
Grigar showing The NEXT's metadata schema
Grigar and Snyder at Triangle SCI 2022
2020
ELL innovates metadata for born-digital media that are interactive, participatory, and experential
May 2020: ELL creates ELMS 1.0 by extending the MODS schema extended with the
controlled vocabularies developed by The CELL Project
2022: ELL updates the metadata schema to include more descriptive controlled vocabularies and additional fields, calling this version, ELMS 2.0
October 9-13, 2022: Grigar and ELL's Associate Director Richard Snyder participate in Triangle SCI 2022 to develop controlled vocabularies, a project resulting in ELMS 3.0
June 2023: Grigar and Snyder are awarded a grant from the Society of American Archivists
to test and implement ELMS 3.0 to 30 works in The NEXT
January 2024: Grigar submits a proposal for a Level III Advancement Grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities to fund the implementation of ELMS 3.0 to all works in The NEXT
Grigar and Philbrook in ELL's Archives Room
In ELL's Reading Room discussing the XR project
Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter, and Snyder in The Studio
2024
ELL is given more space and re-organized into three rooms: Reading Room, Archives Room, and The Studio
April 11, 2024: ELL is given VMMC 202G as an Archives Room and renames the MOVE Lab, where it has held Live Traversals, as The Studio
January 3, 2024: Grigar and Co-PI Frode Hegland are awarded a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to experiment with academic reading and writing in XR environments
April 19, 2024: 89 boxes of archives ELL has been holding in the Reading Room are moved into Archives Room
