The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Collection that the lab developed and curated for ELO’s The NEXT was selected for inclusion in the July 2022 showcase of the “Recovery Hub of American Women Writers.” The Collection––consisting of 66 works the artists donated to The NEXT, 32 of which were created by the artist and preserved in various methods by the lab––was peer-reviewed in a process that involved “private, actionable feedback, and a public-facing showcase” (“Email,” 2 May 2022).
It is an honor for Margie’s collection to be showcased by The Hub, an organization that “supports projects recovering the work of women writers by providing digital access to forgotten or neglected texts and/or extending them with network mapping, spatial analysis, multimedia storytelling, innovative contextualization, and the distant reading of massive datasets” (“Mission”). We are particularly pleased to see this pioneering artist, who experimented broadly with the affordances of digital media, included in the showcase. Margie is noted for many innovations, but one that stands out to us (her digital preservationists) is her ability to harness features of the browser to relay metanarratives in her work. “Endless Suburbs” remains one of our favorite examples.
Margie also served as the second president of the Electronic Literature Organization and was instrumental in seeing the organization move to UCLA after the dot.com crash of the early 2000s. Thus, along with her status as a pioneer of born-digital writing, Margie’s vision and leadership in promoting and safeguarding the field fit so well with The Hub’s mission to “foster collaboration, mentorship, and community-building among women working in the digital humanities while seeking feminist and decolonial approaches to the creation, curation, design, sharing, and archiving of digital content” (“Mission”).
We’ll post the link to The Hub’s showcase when it goes live later this summer.