Metadata for VR Narratives
Richard Snyder and I submitted our essay, “Metadata for Access: VR and Beyond,” to forthcoming volume of The Future of Text, edited by Frode Hegland. As we write in our abstract Interacting with virtual reality (VR) environments requires multiple sensory modalities associated with time, sight, sound, touch, haptic feedback, gesture, kinesthetic involvement, motion, proprioception, and interoception––yet metadata schemas used for repositories and databases do not offer controlled vocabularies that describe VR works to visitors. This essay outlines the controlled vocabularies devised for the Electronic Literature Organization’s museum/library The NEXT. Called ELMS (Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema), this framework makes it possible for physically disabled visitors and those with sensory sensitivities to know…
Treasures from the Rubenstein
by Dene Grigar After Triangle SCI 2022 ended on Thursday, I stay an additional day in Durham so that I could visit the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University again. This was my third visit to the library to do archival research into the Stephanie Strickland, Rob Kendall, and Judy Malloy Papers that the library holds. No matter how many times, though, I visit, I discover new treasures that I somehow overlooked before. Yesterday was no different. After researching information about Kendall’s hypertext poem, “Penetration,” which along with “Dispossession” is part of his The Seasons collection (and that we are adding to the Rob Kendall Collection at The…
Triangle SCI Begins
Triangle SCI began today in Durham today. Dene and Richard are here developing the metadata fields for visitors to The NEXT with disabilities for better access. We kicked off the event with an opening event at The Rickhouse where we met with the other teams invited to the week-long retreat. This year’s theme is Reckoning, Care, and Repair, and we are one of five teams invited to participate. Besides ours, entitled A Post-Pandemic Reckoning: Improving Metadata for Better Accessibility to Scholarly Archives for People with Disabilities, there are: *Joshua Neds-Fox, Matt Ruen, Teresa Schultz, Brianne Selman, Leila Sterman, Stephanie Towery’s Building a contextual alternative to scholarly journal un/safelists *Karen Stoll Farrell, Kimberly…
Victory Garden 2022 in The Digital Review
The lab’s efforts to reconstruct Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden is featured in The Digital Review (TDR), Issue 02 in the “Rediscoveries” section of the journal in an essay appropriately titled, “Reconstructing Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden.” As the editors of TDR write, “Rediscoveries of electronic literature are no different than rediscoveries of print literature. Without structured acts of rediscovery, the works that shape a given era can easily be lost – and this is even more the case for a digital canon whose platforms are changing all the time. . . . The Digital Review and the Electronic Literature Lab will be doing the same, over the current decade, for at…
Panel Accepted for the AWP
The panel I was invited to join, entitled “Cripping & Digitizing: (Re)Imagining the Poetry eBook,” that was organized by poet C. R. Grinner for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2023 conference was accepted. Grinner teaches at the UW in Seattle and author of The Lyme Letters (Texas Tech University Press). Other panelists besides Grinner and me include Molly E. Ubbesen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Director of Writing at University of Minnesota Rochester; and Dr. Katherine “Kate” Deibel, the systems librarian at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and advocate for usable and accessible technologies. Our Panel Description: “The emergence of eBook formats creates an opportunity to accessibly digitize and archive poetry.…
Madison McCartha, PhD Fellow at the Electronic Literature Lab
We are pleased to welcome the Electronic Literature Lab’s first PhD Fellow––poet, critic, and multimedia artist, Madison McCartha. Their debut book of poetry and visual art, FREAKOPHONE WORLD, was published by Inside the Castle, in 2021. Their second book, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean. McCartha holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their Fellowship is funded by N. Katherine Hayles, the Luesebrink Family, and the WSU College of Arts & Sciences. Madison’s interest in kinetic poetry has led them to work directly this summer on the metadata for The New River Journal Collection,…
Principles that Guide Restoration and Reconstruction of Born-Digital Literature
The restoration and reconstruction projects the lab has produced, in varying degrees, required approaches like migration, emulation, and collection as part of the digital preservation process. In some cases, text and are were migrated while code is completely rebuilt. Other cases see a bit of code added to a HTML page that result in the emulation of the Adobe Flash Player so that the work can be displayed on a contemporary browser. Still in other cases, no migration nor emulation is required but a slight change in the code predicates the need to check the new version against the original on legacy computers. What this means, then, is that preservation…
Victory Garden 2022 Builds & Changes
Compiled by Arlo Ptolemy, Project Manager, Victory Garden 2022 Below are the various builds associated with the reconstruction of Stuart Moulthrop’s 1991 hypertext novel Victory Garden, published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. The new edition, Victory Garden 2022, was created by Stuart Moulthrop, Arlo Ptolemy, Andrew Thompson, with support from Holly Slocum, Dene Grigar, Sierra O’Neal, Greg Philbrook, and Austin Gohl. The information is drawn from the Github site on which the builds are retained (https://github.com/AndrewThompson1998/ell-victory-garden-reconstruction) and the archival Basecamp site where the files are permanently hosted. X Builds The X Builds signify the beginning of the project of rebuilding Victory Garden, as well as the start of the Lab joining the project.…
CMDC Studios: Video Games R&D
Announcing CMDC Studios! CMDC Studios is a team of multi-talented game developers, sponsored by the Electronic Literature Lab, who are passionate about creating narrative-rich games through immersive gameplay and thoughtful design. The team is proud to support developers that are interested in entering the games industry through structured opportunities to make games, polish their skills, and work in teams of all sizes. With an ever-growing game library of heartfelt, adventurous, and sometimes mysterious titles, CMDC Studios invites players to explore a wide range of digital experience.
Restorations & Reconstructions
For the last seven years the lab has rebooted numerous work of born-digital media by documenting them via Grigar and Moulthrop’s Pathfinders methodology, which has culminated in a series of electronic open-source books entitled Rebooting Electronic Literature, and by conserving them through various restoration and reconstruction initiatives. The former, documentation, involves no direct intervention into a work, but the latter, restoration and reconstruction, requires interventions to the code and other aspects of the work that may involve emulation, migration, and/or collection in varying degrees and, so, always results in new versions and, thus, editions of a work. We call the intervention into portions of the code (including changing linking structure) and/or aspects of…
