The Ethics of Digital Preservation: Obligation to Future Generations
This essay below is an expanded version of the one currently running in The Digital Review, Issue 2: “Critical Making, Critical Design,” a journal edited by Will Luers. Grigar’s essay lays out the ethics underlying the work we do in the Electronic Literature Lab. ———— The Ethics of Digital Preservation: Obligation to Future Generations By Dene Grigar In When We Are No More, Abby Smith Rumsey argues that culture is a “a collective form of memory” and that memory impacts not only the survival of a species but of that species’ culture (my emphasis, 13). Preserving the memory of digital culture, particularly the artistic output of that culture, involves a…
Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 4 Goes Live!
Announcing the release of Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 4 ! This fourth volume of Rebooting Electronic Literature (REL) continues with the Electronic Literature Lab’s mission to document born-digital literary works published on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other media formats held among the 300 in Dene Grigar’s personal collection in the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver. Since the publication of the Volume 1 in 2019, this annual publication has provided in-depth scholarly information that includes images of the physical media, videos of performances by and interviews with the authors for and critical essays about hypertext literary works no longer accessible to the public. The methodology used to document this art follows the Pathfinders…
Remembering Amnesia
The lab will be leading the re-development of Thomas M. Disch’s interactive fiction game, Amnesia, published by Electronic Arts in 1986. The lab became interested in the game in 2017 when artist Sarah Smith sent us a copy of it while we were in the midst of documenting her interactive game, King of Space for Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 1 and decided to devote a chapter to Amnesia in the book. Fast forward three and a half years later. We are in the throes of planning a version of it for contemporary computing devices. Originally released for the Apple II computer, it was later released for the Commodore 64 and PC,…
The new Figurski… – blueprints for media translation
On July 9, the lab celebrated two major events relating to Richard Holeton’s hypertext novel, Figurski at Findhorn on Acid: the 20th anniversary of its publication on the Storyspace platform in 2001 on CD-ROM by Eastgate Systems, Inc. and the launch of the archival version Holeton commissioned the lab to produce. Speaking at the launch was prominent hypertext scholar Mariusz Pisarski. Below is the paper he read at the event. The Archival version of Figurski can be accessed at https://figurskiatfindhornonacid.com. To watch the videoclips recorded via Zoom and edited by Joel Clapp, go here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8664367. “The new Figurski…– blueprints for media translation” by Mariusz Pisarski, PhD Electronic Literature Lab Research Affiliate There is never…
Welcome Richard Snyder
Richard Snyder joins the Electronic Literature Lab as its new Assistant Director on July 1, 2021. He began working with us in March 2021 specifically to fine tune the metadata for the 2500+ works held in The NEXT. His duties expanded into writing descriptions for those works missing that information and serving as a liaison between the lab and artists with collections in The NEXT. He is a PhD Candidate at Washington State University Vancouver’s English Department where his research focuses on intersections of word and images in literary media. As part of his dissertation research, he is currently developing Early Modern Visual Reader (EMVR), a digital platform that remediates…
Launch Party for Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid
Join us for a celebration of the release of the archival version of Richard Holeton’s zany hypertext Figurski at Findhorn on Acid taking place on Friday, July 9 via Zoom, from 10-11:30 am PDT. To RSVP, contact Dene Grigar, at dgrigar @ wsu (dot) edu.
Trans[Creation] Video Documentation Is Now Accessible
The video recordings from the colloquium, Trans[Creation], are now ready for viewing in Vimeo. These video clips, edited by ELL’s Joel Clapp, captures the two days of presentations and events that honored the Brazilian artist Augusto de Campos. Hosted by McGill University’s Digital Humanities program, University of Quebec à Montréal, NT2, AAREA.CO, ELL, and others, the colloquium took place from Thursday, June 10-Friday, June 11, 2021. Besides presentations by Nancy Perloff, Curator, Modern & Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute (GRI); Marcela Vieira, French translator, researcher, and cofounder of the art website aarea.co; Eduardo Ledesma, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at…
Two E-Lit Works Accepted for the ELC4
Dene Grigar’s “The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project” (2009) and Annie Grosshan’s The World Is Not Done Yet V2.0 (2020) were both accepted for the Electronic Literature Organization’s Electronic Literature Collection (ELC) Volume 4, forthcoming in December 2021. The ELC is an anthology of works published every five years by the organization. As such, it provides “a mirror of a specific moment in time occurring across continents, languages, and platforms during the second decade of the twenty-first century” (“About,” ELC 3). The former was authored by the Director of the lab, while the latter is one recently preserved by members of the ELL Team. Grigar’s work is a collection of 24 works of micro-fiction she…
DHSI 2021 Starts
Today John Durno’s and my DHSI 2021 course, “Retro Machines and Media,” began with a Flash preservation workshop, led by Arlo Ptolemy, Andrew Thompson, and me. We used Alan Bigelow’s “This Is Not a Poem,” which the lab has not yet preserved for The NEXT, for a live demo of implementing Ruffle and Conifer to preserve it. Interestingly Ruffle did not resurrect it because, I surmise, the sound, video, and effects are just too complex for a simple solution. Conifer, however, did work. So, we were able to aptly show our process of moving from one method to another until something worked. Tomorrow Greg Philbrook and I will take the…
Welcome Dan Walker to ELL
We are pleased to introduce Dan Walker, a recent graduate of Reed College in Portland, OR, who is joining us in the lab this summer as a Post Baccalaureate Fellow to work on our annual publication, Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 4. Dan is funded by two grants from Reed, Summer Opportunity Fellowship Award, geared to students looking for mentors to work with at other institutions; and the Eddings Opportunity Grant, offered to English majors at the college. He will spend his time learning how to create content and code in the Scalar platform, writing descriptions of the videos and images from our various Traversals, and working with with lab members to…
