My colleague Erika Fülöp (who is also a Research Affiliate of ELL) and I are giving a paper, entitled “Piloting Shared Born-Digital Archives between the US and Europe,” at the 3rd Summit on New Media Art Archiving taking place at ISEA 2023 in Paris this May. Our research is based on the project we developed for expanding the archives held in ELO’s The NEXT to locations outside of the U.S. in order to ensure its accessibility and collection foci. Below is the abstract for the paper:
Containing several thousand works from the 1980s to today, the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) The NEXT, created and managed by the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL, Washington State University Vancouver), is the largest repository of born-digital literature and net art on the web. It provides free online access to early hypertext fiction, animated poetry, literary games, and more, including many works otherwise now inaccessible due to obsolete software and hardware requirements. This paper presents a project to extend ELO’s The NEXT by setting up a new server in France to hold a copy of the collections, developing local curatorial and research activities to preserve European works, to be shared back with the US server, and growing a digital art and literature preservation network in Europe for practice sharing and collaboration. The project will include a participative Wikidata initiative on electronic literature to enhance the discoverability and searchability of the collections, which could be an opportunity to integrate this born-digital literature focused archive with the Connecting Archives project and feed the data into a shared database. The paper invites a discussion on the requirements of such alignment and the best way of working together towards a global new media archive.