So often scholars toil under the radar on their projects, unacknowledged for their contributions.
But not yesterday: The five Undergraduate Researchers who have been steadily preserving Electronic Literature together since last fall––Holly Slocum, Mariah, Gwin, Kathleen Zoller, Andrew Nevue, and Moneca Roath––were awarded 1st Place at WSUV’s 2019 Research Showcase. They competed against 35 other undergraduates or teams of them from disciples like Biological Sciences, School of the Environment, Human Development, Fine Arts, and Psychology. Their project? “Reconstituting Electronic Literature.” Specifically they showed the work they had completed for two projects. The first was the one that saw them translate Deena Larsen’s “Kanji-Kus,” rendered obsolete on contemporary browsers, from Java Applets to Javascript and moved out of frames so that they can be accessed by the public today. The second was reworking the trAce Online Writing Centre’s frAme journal so that the six issues of Electronic Literature would be available again after having been lost for the past several years.
This was a good week for the students. On Tuesday we learned that Kathleen was awarded one of the prized Summer Mini-Grants from the College of Arts and Sciences at WSU Pullman. The $2000 she will receive will go toward her project to re-publish The Progressive Dinner Party, a special collection of 39 works of Electronic Literature by some of the most prominent women authors of the late 1990s-early 2000s. This work was originally published in Riding the Meridian, edited by Jennifer Ley, and curated by Marjorie C. Luesebrink and Carolyn Guertin.
Congrats, Undergraduate Researchers! You deserve the kudos you have received.