The Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) at Washington State University Vancouver announces the publication of their open source, multimedia book, Rebooting Electronic Literature, on June 1, 2018.
Written and produced by the ELL Team––Dene Grigar, PhD; Nicholas Schiller, MLIS; Vanessa Rhodes, B.A.; Mariah Gwin, Veronica Whitney, B.A.; and Katie Bowen––the book provides scholars with access to fragile, seminal works published on floppy disks and CD-ROMs between 1986-1996, including:
- Sarah Smith’s science fiction hypertext novel King of Space (1991)
- David Kolb’s hypertext essay “Socrates in the Labyrinth” (1994)
- Yellowlees Douglas’ hypertext narrative “I Have Said Nothing” (1994)
- Thomas M. Disch’s text adventure “AMNESIA” (1986)
- Rob Kendall’s hypertext animated poem “A Life Set for Two” (1996)
- Judy Malloy’s generative hypertext narrative its name was Penelope (Version 3.0, 1993)
- Mary-Kim Arnold’s hypertext narrative poem “Lust” (1994)
The book features 85,000 words of artist biographies, descriptions of media, and critical essays; 350 photos of artists, works, and their original packaging; and 55 videos of artist readings and interviews and Live Stream Traversals.
Critical essays include:
- “Contextualizing Sarah Smith’s King of Space“
- “Untangling the Threads of the Labyrinth in David Kolb’s ‘Socrates in the Labyrinth'”
- “Saying Something about J. Yellowlees Douglas’ ‘I Have Said Nothing'”
- “Remembering the 1980s with Thomas M. Disch’s AMNESIA“
- “Love and Loss in Robert Kendall’s ‘A Life Set for Two'”
- “On Memory, the Muse, and Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope“
- “Repetition in Mary-Kim Arnold’s ‘Lust'”
It also offers scholarly resources and versioning and publication information about each work. Built on the Scalar platform, the book can easily be accessed at: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/rebooting-electronic-literature/index.
For more information, contact Dene Grigar, dgrigar[at]wsu[dot]edu.