Follow the Pathfinders
We were excited to see Hannah Ackermans’s essay published in Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures (Volume 24, 2021, doi:10.20415/hyp/024.e01). Below is the abstract of her essay. One of the most fascinating aspects about it is that she uses the Pathfinders methodology in its presentation, down to the exact publishing platform, Scalar, that Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop used for their project, Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature (2015). Pathfinders has shaped the way the lab has been documenting works, including the production of the video playthroughs of Flash works we cannot preserve with Ruffle or Conifer and other forms of interactive media that involve functionality no longer accessible today, like…
2021 Accomplishments & 2022 Plans
The year 2021 was yet another banner year for the Electronic Literature Lab. Working remotely during the pandemic via Slack, Basecamp, and Zoom, the ELL Team undertook and completed many projects. Here is the list: Led the creation of The NEXT, moving from the prototype built on the Samvera platform into Semantic Markup and ARIA, and enhancing the content by adding several new collections, hosting three exhibitions, and adding over 5000 images and 50 videos. Led the reconstruction of Richard Holeton’s hypertext novel Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, published originally in 2001 on the Storyspace platform, into open web languages. Led the reconstruction of Thomas M. Disch’s interactive novel Amnesia,…
From Pathfinders to The NEXT
Dene — I’m writing from Santa Cruz, where I’m at a workshop Noah’s organized for CS and digital humanities types. Anne Balsamo’s here, and has told me about the project you and she have discussed, to make video records of readings of early e-lit works. I’ve agreed to help Anne draft an NEH proposal. . . . —————- Those are the opening lines of the email message Stuart Moulthrop sent on August 27, 2012 inviting me to participate on a potential NEH project to document early electronic literature published on floppy disks and CD-ROMs. We did indeed move forward with a proposal, though Anne had dropped off the project. In…
Welcome 2022 ELO Fellows!
The Electronic Literature Lab is so happy to welcome the two scholars from the Electronic Literature Organization’s Fellows program. They will be working remotely with the ELL Team on various projects aimed at enhancing ELO’s The NEXT and intersect with their own research agendas. Alexandra L Martin (she/her) is a researcher and doctoral student specializing in digital literary arts, living and working in the unceded territory of Tiohtià:ke. Since 2019 she has worked at the Laboratoire NT2 at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she also collaborates as a curator, notably on the exhibition S’éclipser | Phases of Resilience (2020) for the HTMlles Festival as well as Trans[creation] (2021). Her research centers on digital…
Resurrecting Flash Workshop Report
On 27-28 October 2021 thirty-one artists and scholars from around the globe came together to learn about various methods for preserving Flash electronic literature and net art at the Resurrecting Flash Art workshop held by the lab via Zoom. The main methods we discussed were the ones the lab primarily uses for saving the Flash art for The NEXT: Ruffle and Conifer. We also invited prominent net artist Alan Bigelow to talk about the work he has done to migrate his early Flash art to open web languages and briefly discussed video documentation and Pale Moon browser as alternative methods for making the work available to the public and…
Horizon Insight: A Retrospective of the Art of M. D. Coverley
On Friday, November 5, 2021 we are launching the exhibition, Horizon Insight: A Retrospective of the Art of M. D. Coverley. Below is the schedule of the event and the curatorial statement that explains the works selected for the exhibition. To register, contact dgrigar@wsu.edu. Schedule 8:00-8:10 a.m. PST: Welcome, by Dene Grigar, Exhibition Curator 8:10-8:15 a.m. PST: Remarks of Appreciation, by N. Katherine Hayles 8:15-9:00 PST: Reading of Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day, by M. D. Coverley 9:00-9:15 PST: Curating this Retrospective: Comments about Design, Layout, and Restoration, by The Electronic Literature Lab Team 9:15-9:30 PST: Collection Highlights, by M. D. Coverley, Dene Grigar, & Richard Snyder…
Resurrecting Flash: Hands-On Workshop
Resurrecting Flash Art Hands-on workshop hosted via Zoom by the Electronic Literature Lab with guest speaker: Alan Bigelow 28-29 October 2021; 8:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. PST For more information, contact Dene Grigar dgrigar[at]wsu[dot]edu This 2-day, hands-on, workshop provides participants with experience for preserving Flash art using a variety of tools and methods. Participants are encouraged to bring in works of their own to save or choose from among those provided by the workshop organizers. Instruction will be provided over Zoom and Slack, with Basecamp serving as the archival space for docs and files. No previous experience with preservation is needed. At the end of the workshop, participants will have worked alone or in…
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,…
