This fall I submitted a LOI to the Lannan Foundation and a proposal to the Dreyfus Foundation for grants in support of our documentation and archival work in ELL.
The Lannan Foundation grant would go toward the larger effort, the Electronic Literature Archives (ELA), where documentation figures as one of five funded activities. The others include 1) CELL Project (Consortium for Electronic Literature, http://cellproject.net), 2) The Electronic Literature Collection (ELC, http://collection.eliterature.org), 3) The Electronic Literature Directory (ELD, http://directory.eliterature.org), and 4) The Electronic Literature Repository (ELR). I serve as the lead PI in a team consisting of Sandy Baldwin (RIT), Joseph Tabbi (UIC), Stuart Moulthrop (U of Wisconsin Milwaukee), and Leonardo Flores (UPR).
The Dreyfus Foundation grant would fund Pathfinders, Volume 2, which includes four seminal works of electronic literature, two of which––M. D. Coverley’s Calfia (2000) and Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991)––have already been completed with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Washington State University Vancouver. Left to document are Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story (1990) and Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling (1992). Three of four have already become unavailable or are in danger of becoming so because they were published on diskette and CD-ROMs for desktop computers no longer in use today or produced with software now abandoned by both hardware and browsers. The fourth, Joyce’s afternoon: a story (1990), re-released recently on a USB stick, has changed significantly from its original form. Like Volume 1, Volume 2 also features a balance of male and female writers who were active during the early development of digital literature, circa late 1980s to 2000, using with authoring software like Storyspace, HyperCard, Toolbook, and others. All works selected for both volumes have been identified by critics as important experimental works of the late 20th and early 21st century.
I also co-wrote a grant to the Bydale Foundation with Leonardo Flores (UPR) to fund the production of physical copies of the Electronic Literature Collection 3 and collaborated with Lori Emerson (U of Colorado Boulder) and Matthew Kirschenbaum (UMD) on a LOI to the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund three two-day national forum meetings to establish standard procedures and protocols for hands-on patron access, and also establish joint stewardship between each node and its home institution’s library/special collections, we will first require three meetings to establish procedures and workflow for these activities. If funded, we plan to host our first national forum meeting in July 2017, our second meeting in November 2017, and our third meeting in March 2018; we will complete our work by May 1, 2018.