Scholars dream of other scholars finding their life’s work interesting, valuable, or relevant. Most of us toil away at research for years hoping that what we do may benefit others in some way. It is always heartening to give a paper at a conference and notice that the room is full, or to check the analytics our research website and see that it received over a 100 hits in an afternoon. But probably the most exciting moment comes when another scholar wants to visit your lab and experience your work.
So, it was when James O’Sullivan visited ELL last week.
He spent the first day reading Diane Greco’s Cyborg, a work that I taught in the spring and summer 1999 in the Feminist Cyberculture course I developed for Texas Woman’s University Women’s Studies Program for its Feminist Theory series of courses. If you can think back to that time, you would know that the browser was still relatively new and computers in the classroom were a fairly unique experience for anything beyond first-year composition courses. The idea that a graduate course in feminism would be taught in a room full of G3 iMacs that incorporated electronic learning materials was an odd one. That we would read something called “electronic literature” was not common for a study of women’s studies. The canon that had developed thus far was just starting to open up to works like Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” but hypertexts theorizing the cyborg like Greco’s Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric? It took a bit of convincing that this important work was, well, important.
ELL is more than a research project, though. It is, as the title suggests, a lab. The computers are my own, collected for years in my home office until I had so many that I had no place to put anything else in the space. They were, at that time, shoved under the desk, stacked in the closet, and sitting atop papers on the floor. When I needed to access a work like Greco’s, I would fire up my Bondi Blue iMac and sit cross-legged on the floor and read Cyborg. My piles of hypertext floppies and my e-lit CDs and DVDs that constituted my collection of works were stored in my desk’s drawers. When the university gave me the space to move my collection, I could indeed finally begin collecting computers I needed more seriously. Jeff Grisso, who had been a student in my program, owned the most extensive collection of Macs I had ever seen in a private collection. And he was interested in selling most of them. To me.
People who visit ELL wonder why it is Macs that I have collected and not PCs. While those of us who have worked with electronic literature a long time know the answer to this question, perhaps it is worth mentioning to others who are new to the field or too young to remember. Put simply, Apple built its early following on the GUI interface and the educational and artistic markets. The GUI interface was adopted only later, and Apple and MicroSoft would duke it out in court about MS’s right to license it to other computer manufacturers. But before that turn of events, however, Macs provided software galore that allowed for the easy design and development of experimental artistic and literary works.
Since moving into ELL two years ago, I have managed to collect over 35 Macs, dating back to the Apple IIe. I have several backups to the most notable and useful ones for early e-lit. Jeff continues to fix ones that break and procure ones I need to flesh out the collection. Last Saturday, he met James and me at ELL with the Apple IIe that was broken en route to the MLA and he changed out the CD-ROM in the LC that had not been working properly. He says he has laptops he wants to sell. I am actually looking for a LCII to replace another computer smashed by UPS.
So, ELL is the site for studying, curating and preserving e-lit. One can visit it with the agenda to learn more about the computer platform, from circa 1983 to the present. One can conduct research about software since it contains examples of everything from MacDraw, to Hypercard, to the Beta version of Storyspace. One can research electronic literature by experiencing the works on the computers the works originally ran on. It is this last point that is the most salient. There are few places in the world where one can read a work of e-lit created for computer platforms now obsolete. ELL is one of those special places. And it is the reason why scholars want to visit it. And for this, I am proud and happy.
This week Dr. Jeneen Naji is visiting ELL from Brown University where she is researching CAVE environments. Jeneen hails from the National University of Ireland Maynooth and teaches in the digital studies program. Jeneen is a member of the Electronic Literature Organization and so is also interested in early e-lit. She is giving a talk about her research while she is here.