Report about the Lab’s Update to ELO’s The NEXT
The Electronic Literature Lab has been busy during its planned Winter Refinement period: 1) enhancing the metadata for many collections held in The NEXT, 2) preserving works produced with Flash and other outmoded software, such MIDI and Java Applets, and 3) completing the “Cite” feature that allows visitors to cite all the works in The NEXT. Metadata, Preservation, and Citation Feature To date, the lab has updated the metadata for and preserved works in The frAme Collection, The Word Circuits Collection, and close to 50% of the 369 works in The Turbulence Collection. These efforts bring those collections donated early in the development of the ELO’s Repository to the level of…
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…
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…
Congratulations, Dr. Snyder!
We are very excited to announce that Richard Snyder, our Assistant Director and Metadata Specialist, successfully defended his dissertation yesterday (March 10) and so completed his PhD at Washington State University. His dissertation, “Word and Image in Early Modern Literature: A Digital Approach to Reading in Context,” is a hybrid one where he built a tool called the Early Modern Visual Reader (EMVR) that allows readers of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander to visualize concepts found in each work. Ultimately EMVR will be enhanced so that it can be used for a variety of texts and aid in the ability to produce scholarly digital editions of works…
2021 Accomplishments & 2022 Plans
The year 2021 was yet another banner year for the Electronic Literature Lab. Working remotely during the pandemic via Slack, Basecamp, and Zoom, the ELL Team undertook and completed many projects. Here is the list: Led the creation of The NEXT, moving from the prototype built on the Samvera platform into Semantic Markup and ARIA, and enhancing the content by adding several new collections, hosting three exhibitions, and adding over 5000 images and 50 videos. Led the reconstruction of Richard Holeton’s hypertext novel Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, published originally in 2001 on the Storyspace platform, into open web languages. Led the reconstruction of Thomas M. Disch’s interactive novel Amnesia,…
Resurrecting Flash: Hands-On Workshop
Resurrecting Flash Art Hands-on workshop hosted via Zoom by the Electronic Literature Lab with guest speaker: Alan Bigelow 28-29 October 2021; 8:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. PST For more information, contact Dene Grigar dgrigar[at]wsu[dot]edu This 2-day, hands-on, workshop provides participants with experience for preserving Flash art using a variety of tools and methods. Participants are encouraged to bring in works of their own to save or choose from among those provided by the workshop organizers. Instruction will be provided over Zoom and Slack, with Basecamp serving as the archival space for docs and files. No previous experience with preservation is needed. At the end of the workshop, participants will have worked alone or in…
Remembering Amnesia
The lab will be leading the re-development of Thomas M. Disch’s interactive fiction game, Amnesia, published by Electronic Arts in 1986. The lab became interested in the game in 2017 when artist Sarah Smith sent us a copy of it while we were in the midst of documenting her interactive game, King of Space for Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 1 and decided to devote a chapter to Amnesia in the book. Fast forward three and a half years later. We are in the throes of planning a version of it for contemporary computing devices. Originally released for the Apple II computer, it was later released for the Commodore 64 and PC,…
Welcome Richard Snyder
Richard Snyder joins the Electronic Literature Lab as its new Assistant Director on July 1, 2021. He began working with us in March 2021 specifically to fine tune the metadata for the 2500+ works held in The NEXT. His duties expanded into writing descriptions for those works missing that information and serving as a liaison between the lab and artists with collections in The NEXT. He is a PhD Candidate at Washington State University Vancouver’s English Department where his research focuses on intersections of word and images in literary media. As part of his dissertation research, he is currently developing Early Modern Visual Reader (EMVR), a digital platform that remediates…
Ruffle Preservation Report #2
This is second report about the work the lab is doing to preserve born-digital literature created with Adobe Flash. Today the team (CMDC juniors Andrew Thompson and Arlo Ptolemy) finished implementing Ruffle on the works published in the Electronic Literature Collections, Volumes 1, 2 and 3. This week we will begin adding scholarly commentary to their intro pages to alert visitors about their accessibility. Sadly, of the 235 works published in the three anthologies, only 16 could be preserved with Ruffle. Some others appear to function, but when compared to their original files (using the Pale Moon browser on a Windows computer) actually showed problems. The sound files in Maria Mencia’s “Birds…
