Dene Grigar’s “The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project” (2009) and Annie Grosshan’s The World Is Not Done Yet V2.0 (2020) were both accepted for the Electronic Literature Organization’s Electronic Literature Collection (ELC) Volume 4, forthcoming in December 2021. The ELC is an anthology of works published every five years by the organization. As such, it provides “a mirror of a specific moment in time occurring across continents, languages, and platforms during the second decade of the twenty-first century” (“About,” ELC 3). The former was authored by the Director of the lab, while the latter is one recently preserved by members of the ELL Team.
Grigar’s work is a collection of 24 works of micro-fiction she published on Twitter each hour (starting at 12:01 a.m.) on August 21, 2009. It experiments with microfiction, a genre of literature that generally entails narratives of only 300-1000 words. Grigar was inspired to undertake the project by Richard Brautigan’s pithy “The Scarlatti Tilt,” a story of only 34 words that captures the stresses of life in California in the early 1970s; hers, however, centers around the hectic and fast lifestyle of Dallas, TX in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Each of her stories tweeted on Twitter is limited to the 140-characters as allowed by that social network in 2009. The stories were collected on an archival site and exhibited at the ELO’s 2010 Media Art Show sponsored by Brown University at the ELO-AI Gallery in Providence, RI. The site can be found at http://www.nouspace.net/dene/24hr/24-Hr._Micro-Elit_Project/Home.html.
Grosshan’s The World Is Not Done Yet (TWINDY), subtitled “A Weblication of Theoretical Poetics,” was originally produced on the Adobe Muse platform and published by the author in 2014. Because Adobe stopped supporting Muse in March 2020, the work was migrated by members of the Electronic Literature Lab––Kathleen Zoller, Holly Slocum, and Greg Philbrook––under the guidance of the author, to HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. TWINDY is an elegiac work that pays homage to the author’s father and conveys their mutual love of books. At the same time, it argues for the acceptance of the possibilities of the digital medium for human expression, making it an essential essay to read against works like Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies. The work experiments with animated text and sound to pace readers through the prose and layer its many stories and themes. When migrating it to a more durable platform, the lab explored various preservation strategies, including capturing the work via Rhizome’s Conifer and reworking the existing code. However, Muse produced code that did not consider responsive mobile screens, global styling, ADA compliance or SEO, and used proprietary MuCow (Muse Configurable Options Widget) for audio delivery and text animations. After close to two months of wrangling the very inelegant code behind the Muse program, the final decision to rebuild the work from the ground up in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript was made. It was featured in the inaugural issue of The Digital Review in June 2020 and can be found at https://theworldisnotdoneyet.com.