Victory Garden 2022 in The Digital Review
The lab’s efforts to reconstruct Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden is featured in The Digital Review (TDR), Issue 02 in the “Rediscoveries” section of the journal in an essay appropriately titled, “Reconstructing Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden.” As the editors of TDR write, “Rediscoveries of electronic literature are no different than rediscoveries of print literature. Without structured acts of rediscovery, the works that shape a given era can easily be lost – and this is even more the case for a digital canon whose platforms are changing all the time. . . . The Digital Review and the Electronic Literature Lab will be doing the same, over the current decade, for at…
Panel Accepted for the AWP
The panel I was invited to join, entitled “Cripping & Digitizing: (Re)Imagining the Poetry eBook,” that was organized by poet C. R. Grinner for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2023 conference was accepted. Grinner teaches at the UW in Seattle and author of The Lyme Letters (Texas Tech University Press). Other panelists besides Grinner and me include Molly E. Ubbesen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Director of Writing at University of Minnesota Rochester; and Dr. Katherine “Kate” Deibel, the systems librarian at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and advocate for usable and accessible technologies. Our Panel Description: “The emergence of eBook formats creates an opportunity to accessibly digitize and archive poetry.…
Madison McCartha, PhD Fellow at the Electronic Literature Lab
We are pleased to welcome the Electronic Literature Lab’s first PhD Fellow––poet, critic, and multimedia artist, Madison McCartha. Their debut book of poetry and visual art, FREAKOPHONE WORLD, was published by Inside the Castle, in 2021. Their second book, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean. McCartha holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their Fellowship is funded by N. Katherine Hayles, the Luesebrink Family, and the WSU College of Arts & Sciences. Madison’s interest in kinetic poetry has led them to work directly this summer on the metadata for The New River Journal Collection,…
Principles that Guide Restoration and Reconstruction of Born-Digital Literature
The restoration and reconstruction projects the lab has produced, in varying degrees, required approaches like migration, emulation, and collection as part of the digital preservation process. In some cases, text and are were migrated while code is completely rebuilt. Other cases see a bit of code added to a HTML page that result in the emulation of the Adobe Flash Player so that the work can be displayed on a contemporary browser. Still in other cases, no migration nor emulation is required but a slight change in the code predicates the need to check the new version against the original on legacy computers. What this means, then, is that preservation…
Victory Garden 2022 Builds & Changes
Compiled by Arlo Ptolemy, Project Manager, Victory Garden 2022 Below are the various builds associated with the reconstruction of Stuart Moulthrop’s 1991 hypertext novel Victory Garden, published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. The new edition, Victory Garden 2022, was created by Stuart Moulthrop, Arlo Ptolemy, Andrew Thompson, with support from Holly Slocum, Dene Grigar, Sierra O’Neal, Greg Philbrook, and Austin Gohl. The information is drawn from the Github site on which the builds are retained (https://github.com/AndrewThompson1998/ell-victory-garden-reconstruction) and the archival Basecamp site where the files are permanently hosted. X Builds The X Builds signify the beginning of the project of rebuilding Victory Garden, as well as the start of the Lab joining the project.…
CMDC Studios: Video Games R&D
Announcing CMDC Studios! CMDC Studios is a team of multi-talented game developers, sponsored by the Electronic Literature Lab, who are passionate about creating narrative-rich games through immersive gameplay and thoughtful design. The team is proud to support developers that are interested in entering the games industry through structured opportunities to make games, polish their skills, and work in teams of all sizes. With an ever-growing game library of heartfelt, adventurous, and sometimes mysterious titles, CMDC Studios invites players to explore a wide range of digital experience.
Restorations & Reconstructions
For the last seven years the lab has rebooted numerous work of born-digital media by documenting them via Grigar and Moulthrop’s Pathfinders methodology, which has culminated in a series of electronic open-source books entitled Rebooting Electronic Literature, and by conserving them through various restoration and reconstruction initiatives. The former, documentation, involves no direct intervention into a work, but the latter, restoration and reconstruction, requires interventions to the code and other aspects of the work that may involve emulation, migration, and/or collection in varying degrees and, so, always results in new versions and, thus, editions of a work. We call the intervention into portions of the code (including changing linking structure) and/or aspects of…
Reconstruction of Sarah Smith’s “King of Space”
The Electronic Literature Lab and the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program are proud to announce the launch of the reconstruction of Sarah Smith’s King of Space. In production since January 12, 2022, the work is now widely accessible via the Web at https://kingofspace.org/. Reconstruction was undertaken by 23 spring graduates of the program who were guided by staff from the lab and the author herself. King of Space (KOS) Version 1.0 was begun in 1987 and published in 1991 by Eastgate Systems, Inc. on two 3.5-inch floppy disks for Macintosh computers. Rapid technological developments relating to hardware and software caused it to be inaccessible to the public by the late…
Collection Selected for the Recovery Hub of American Women Writers
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…
Welcome Erika Fulop to ELL!
Erika Fulop, a Senior Lecturer in French at Lancaster University (UK), is a Hungarian scholar whose research focuses on “the impact of digitization and the internet on culture . . . and the modern and contemporary novel, especially metafiction and self-reflexive phenomena.” She is also a specialist in French e-lit and is working in the lab for three weeks to develop a range of projects, including a potential “The Alire Collection” at The NEXT. This journal, whose subtitle is A Relentless Literary Investigation, was begun in 1989 by Philippe Bootz, Frédéric Develay, Jean-Marie Dutey, Claude Maillard, and Tibor Papp of the Parisian group, L.A.I.R.E. (Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture). As Bootz reminds…
