Electronic Literature Lab

For Advanced Inquiry into Born Digital Media

  • Home
  • People
  • History
  • Research Output
  • Projects
    • ELO’s The NEXT
    • Restorations & Reconstructions
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 1
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 2
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 3
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 4
    • Live Stream Traversals
    • Podcasts
    • Published Games
  • Catalog
    • Beta Catalog
    • Expanded Catalog
  • CMDC Studios
  • Home
  • People
  • History
  • Research Output
  • Projects
    • ELO’s The NEXT
    • Restorations & Reconstructions
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 1
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 2
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 3
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 4
    • Live Stream Traversals
    • Podcasts
    • Published Games
  • Catalog
    • Beta Catalog
    • Expanded Catalog
  • CMDC Studios
ELL icon

About

Founded and directed by Dr. Dene Grigar, ELL contains over 80 vintage Macintosh & PC computers, dating back from 1977, vintage software, peripherals, and a library of over 300 works of electronic literature and other media. It is used for the advanced inquiry into the curation, documentation, preservation, conservation, and production of born-digital art, literature, and video games. The lab has created and continues to manage the ELO's The NEXT and supports video game R&D through CMDC Studios.

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

  • Updates

    Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms

    September 5, 2023 /

    “Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms” is part of the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Hypertext and Social Media 2023 Conference taking place in Rome at the Bibliotheca Hertziana –– Max Planck Institute for Art History in September 2023. For conference participants, the exhibition aims to expand the understanding of the various ways hypertext has been expressed by artists, world-wide, both in terms of the systems they used and genres with which they experimented. As an extension of the conference held in an important cultural icon, the exhibition aims to promote hypertext as a scientific field of study and artistic practice to new audiences. As such, the exhibition features…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Consider It Down

    September 22, 2019

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

    September 3, 2020

    11 FAQs about Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story

    June 29, 2020
  • News,  Updates

    Announcing Deena Larsen, ELL’s Artist in Residence

    August 20, 2023 /

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    Dene Grigar

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    Upcoming Visitors to ELL

    July 26, 2013

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

    October 13, 2020

    2018-19 Live Stream Traversals Schedule

    August 28, 2018
  • News

    Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms

    August 18, 2023 /

      What you are looking at is Sierra O’Neal’s 3D model of Lorenzo Miglioli’s 1993 RA-DIO, the first published Italian hypertext and the first in Italy created on the Storyspace platform. As you can see, RA-DIO consists of a print book and two 3.5-inch floppy disks packaged in a plastic sleeve. The floppy disks, formatted for Macintosh and PCs, contains Miglioni’s experimental hypertext and Walter Vannini’s Italian translation of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story. The book contains what Vannini called an “Inter/net/view” with Michael Joyce and the printout of RA-DIO’s contents.  A joint venture by Castelvecchi Editore and Human Systems, Castelvecchi oversaw the book component while Human Systems, which owned the…

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    Launch of The Digital Review

    June 9, 2020

    List of Hypertext Literature Published by Eastgate Systems, Inc., 1988-2016

    January 2, 2020

    Bill Bly, author of We Descend, Will Visit ELL

    September 3, 2018
  • Updates

    Society of American Archivist Funded Grant Underway

    July 16, 2023 /

    With our proposal to the Society of American Archivists funded, the lab has begun work to implement ELMS 3.0 to 30 works in The NEXT and test this extended schema for its efficacy. Our project, entitled “Improving Metadata for Better Accessibility to Scholarly Archives for Disabled and Sensory Sensitive People,” builds on our efforts, begun in 2021, to extend the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) so that the metadata for these archives consisting of born-digital works of electronic literature, video games, and net art better reflect their participatory, interactive, and experiential qualities. While ELMS 2.0 includes controlled vocabularies for software dependency(ies), authoring platform(s), hardware dependency(ies), peripheral dependency(ies), computer language(s), digital…

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    Dene Grigar

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    List of Hypertext Literature Published by Eastgate Systems, Inc., 1988-2016

    January 2, 2020

    Curatorial Statement for “Tear Down the Wall” Exhibition at ACM Hypertext ’19

    August 11, 2019

    Launch of The Digital Review

    June 9, 2020
  • Updates

    Beyond the Click: Breathing as Navigation

    June 15, 2023 /

    by Dene Grigar, Director, Electronic Literature Lab In 2004 I attended Incubation, a conference hosted by Sue Thomas, Director of the trAce Online Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent University (UK), from 12-14 July. While there I attended the world premier of Kate Pullinger, Stefan Schemat, and babel’s (pen name for Chris Joseph) experimental born-digital narrative, The Breathing Wall. What fascinated me about the work is that to navigate through the story, the reader breaths into a headset instead of clicking on links. Shortly after the conference, I interviewed Kate for an article for Computers and Composition about The Breathing Wall. Our conversation focused on the challenges of creating an immersive…

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    Visitors to ELL

    June 17, 2013

    Getting Ready for the Next Pathfinders Traversal

    July 27, 2013

    Data Collection, Final Results

    June 9, 2019
  • News,  Updates

    MIX 2023

    June 3, 2023 /

    We are preparing for “MIX 2023: Storytelling in Immersive Media,” taking place at the British Library on July 7, 2023. Dene is representing the lab on the panel entitled “Unlocking the Digital Archive: Archiving, Preservation, and Enhanced Curation,” otherwise known as Panel 4. She is both Chairing the panel and giving a presentation about the work the lab is doing with accessibility and metadata.  This will be the 7th MIX conference and one that brings together many of the luminaries in the field of interactive media. Kate Pullinger, Caitlin Fisher, Andy Campbell and Judi Alston, Deena Larsen, Judith Pintar, Giulia Carla Rossi, Lyle Skains, among so many others, are involved.…

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    Deena Larsen’s Donation to ELO

    December 1, 2018

    Project Update

    June 15, 2019

    2018-19 Live Stream Traversal Schedule

    October 12, 2018
  • Updates

    The Portal to Beyond

    May 9, 2023 /

    Archival Website: https://dtc-wsuv.org/projects/data-entry-portal/index.html Download from itch.io: https://electronicliteraturelab.itch.io/   In Rob Swigart’s Portal players take the role of the Traveler who return to Earth after a long journey through space only to find themselves alone on the planet. Stumbling on an old terminal, they access 12 databases, each revealing bits of information leading to the reasons why people left Earth. Players also encounter HOMER, an abandoned AI, who helps with uncovering the truth and discovers their own humanity. A mystery-puzzle game published by Activision in 1986 and released first for the Commodore 64 before being ported into other formats, Portal has been accessible only via emulation. The author also published a…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Visit with Claus Atzenbeck

    July 18, 2018

    Data Collection, Final Results

    June 9, 2019

    Why I Care about Early Interactive Media

    February 22, 2020
  • News

    In honor of Helen Thorington

    April 16, 2023 /

    Helen Thorington, founder of the influential Turbulence.org (1996-2016), died on April 13, 2023 after a long illness. The lab is grateful for her passion and vision to showcase born-digital art and nurture artists, so many of whom built their careers through their association with Turbulence.org. For us in ELL, it has been a joy to work on The Turbulence Collection at ELO’s The NEXT over the last five years and with both Helen and Jo-Anne to maintain it for  them. We are committed to this mission. Below is the obituary that her partner, Jo-Anne Green, posted on Facebook: “Helen Louise Thorington (nicknamed “Teedy”) was born in Philadelphia (1928), and grew…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Why a Lab Like ELL Is Needed for Digital Preservation and Archival Research

    November 12, 2018

    Project Update

    June 15, 2019

    Congrats to Nicholas Schiller

    July 30, 2018
  • News,  Updates

    The 3rd Summit on New Media Art Archiving

    March 9, 2023 /

    My colleague Erika Fülöp (who is also a Research Affiliate of ELL) and I are giving a paper, entitled “Piloting Shared Born-Digital Archives between the US and Europe,” at the 3rd Summit on New Media Art Archiving taking place at ISEA 2023 in Paris this May. Our research is based on the project we developed for expanding the archives held in ELO’s The NEXT to locations outside of the U.S. in order to ensure its accessibility and collection foci. Below is the abstract for the paper: Containing several thousand works from the 1980s to today, the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) The NEXT, created and managed by the Electronic Literature Lab…

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    Dene Grigar

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    2018-19 Live Stream Traversals Schedule

    August 28, 2018

    Working on The Alan Sondheim Collection

    October 4, 2020

    Traversal of Rob Kendall’s A Life Set for Two

    March 18, 2018
  • News

    ELL Is Referenced in Holeton’s Article

    February 25, 2023 /

    The Electronic Literature Lab’s work to reconstruct Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid is referenced in the recently re-released Re_Dis_Connection, the publication of the 14th International Conference on Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS). The article, penned by the author, details the work we did to re-conceive Figurski––originally produced on the Storyspace platform––for the Web and for a contemporary audience, many of whom had not been born when the hypertext novel was published in 2001. A free copy of the publication is available from Carnegie Mellon ETC Press at https://press.etc.cmu.edu/proceedings/redisconnection.

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    Ruffle Preservation Report #3

    February 20, 2021

    Article about ELL in Library of Congress Publication, The Signal

    November 13, 2013

    Deena Larsen Is Coming!

    October 28, 2018
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People

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

Associate Director: Dr. Richard Snyder, Assistant Professor, Northwest College

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

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

Affiliate Scholars: John Barber, PhD (US); Mariusz Pisarski, PhD (Poland); Erika Fulop, PhD, University of Toulouse (France); Agnieszka Przybyszewska, PhD, University of Łódź (Poland)

Post-Bacc Researchers: Kathleen Zoller, Ruth Woodcock, Andrew Thompson, Ariel Wallace, Sierra O'Neal, Ahria Nicholas

PhD & 2022 PostDoc Fellow: Madison McCartha, UC Santa Cruz

2022 ELO Fellow: Alexandra Martin, QUAM (Canada)

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. It is managed by Dene Grigar

Copyright © 2018