MIX 2023
We are preparing for “MIX 2023: Storytelling in Immersive Media,” taking place at the British Library on July 7, 2023. Dene is representing the lab on the panel entitled “Unlocking the Digital Archive: Archiving, Preservation, and Enhanced Curation,” otherwise known as Panel 4. She is both Chairing the panel and giving a presentation about the work the lab is doing with accessibility and metadata. This will be the 7th MIX conference and one that brings together many of the luminaries in the field of interactive media. Kate Pullinger, Caitlin Fisher, Andy Campbell and Judi Alston, Deena Larsen, Judith Pintar, Giulia Carla Rossi, Lyle Skains, among so many others, are involved.…
In honor of Helen Thorington
Helen Thorington, founder of the influential Turbulence.org (1996-2016), died on April 13, 2023 after a long illness. The lab is grateful for her passion and vision to showcase born-digital art and nurture artists, so many of whom built their careers through their association with Turbulence.org. For us in ELL, it has been a joy to work on The Turbulence Collection at ELO’s The NEXT over the last five years and with both Helen and Jo-Anne to maintain it for them. We are committed to this mission. Below is the obituary that her partner, Jo-Anne Green, posted on Facebook: “Helen Louise Thorington (nicknamed “Teedy”) was born in Philadelphia (1928), and grew…
The 3rd Summit on New Media Art Archiving
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 Is Referenced in Holeton’s Article
The Electronic Literature Lab’s work to reconstruct Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid is referenced in the recently re-released Re_Dis_Connection, the publication of the 14th International Conference on Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS). The article, penned by the author, details the work we did to re-conceive Figurski––originally produced on the Storyspace platform––for the Web and for a contemporary audience, many of whom had not been born when the hypertext novel was published in 2001. A free copy of the publication is available from Carnegie Mellon ETC Press at https://press.etc.cmu.edu/proceedings/redisconnection.
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,…
