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…
Victory Garden, Version 5.0
“Experiencing the Garden, Again” By Dene Grigar Since January 2022 the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) has been busy doing many reconstruction projects aimed at preserving early interactive media. One of them is Stuart Moulthrop’s hypertext novel Victory Garden, published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1991. Over its 30 year history the work has gone through numerous updates of its software and packaging, the last one in 2002––what I call “Version 4.0 CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows Computers.” Unfortunately, that version was rendered inaccessible to Macintosh computers in 2007 when Apple upgraded to MacOS x 10.5 (Leopard). And of course, today a CD-ROM drive is no longer a common…
PowerBook 520 Drive Transfer
Greg Philbrook is the Technical and Instructional Specialist for the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program. Fortunately for ELL, he also serves as our Tech Guru. In that role, he designed of database for and programmed The NEXT, which has been one of our major outputs this year, one that keeps all of us (especially him) very busy. But he also helps out colleagues at the university when they are in need. Below is a blog post Greg has written that explains the most recent task he undertook for a colleague in Environment Science. It suggests why having a media archaeology lab on the WSUV campus is useful. ——————————————————————- Transferring…
Guiding Principles for The NEXT
The Guiding Principles for The NEXT by Dene Grigar One of the lab’s main activities has been creating and managing the Electronic Literature Organization’s The NEXT. Two of the The NEXT’s founders are ELL staff members, and all of the production has been done by the lab’s faculty, staff, and students. The evolution of The NEXT from a simple repository for born-digital literature to what is now a very complex virtual museum/library/preservation space for born-digital art and expressive writing occurred over a four-year period, 2018-2022. Most of the “Aha moments” took place during many sleepless nights of the pandemic when I found myself locked down and unable to travel (and…
ELL Wins the 2022 Open Scholarship Award
The lab received the 2022 Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI) for its work on ELO’s The NEXT (See https://the-next.eliterature.org). The award is given to projects that address “open access, open data, open education, and other related movements that have the potential to make scholarly work more efficient, more accessible, and more usable by those within and beyond the academy.” In doing so, it “acknowledge and celebrate exemplary open scholarship, nominated via an open process.” Those projects given the award “demonstrate exemplary open scholarship via research, projects, or initiatives.” Here are the list of 2022 winners: Open Scholarship Awards (2022), for open scholarship carried out by…
Follow the Pathfinders
We were excited to see Hannah Ackermans’s essay published in Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures (Volume 24, 2021, doi:10.20415/hyp/024.e01). Below is the abstract of her essay. One of the most fascinating aspects about it is that she uses the Pathfinders methodology in its presentation, down to the exact publishing platform, Scalar, that Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop used for their project, Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature (2015). Pathfinders has shaped the way the lab has been documenting works, including the production of the video playthroughs of Flash works we cannot preserve with Ruffle or Conifer and other forms of interactive media that involve functionality no longer accessible today, like…
Welcome 2022 ELO Fellows!
The Electronic Literature Lab is so happy to welcome the two scholars from the Electronic Literature Organization’s Fellows program. They will be working remotely with the ELL Team on various projects aimed at enhancing ELO’s The NEXT and intersect with their own research agendas. Alexandra L Martin (she/her) is a researcher and doctoral student specializing in digital literary arts, living and working in the unceded territory of Tiohtià:ke. Since 2019 she has worked at the Laboratoire NT2 at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she also collaborates as a curator, notably on the exhibition S’éclipser | Phases of Resilience (2020) for the HTMlles Festival as well as Trans[creation] (2021). Her research centers on digital…
Resurrecting Flash Workshop Report
On 27-28 October 2021 thirty-one artists and scholars from around the globe came together to learn about various methods for preserving Flash electronic literature and net art at the Resurrecting Flash Art workshop held by the lab via Zoom. The main methods we discussed were the ones the lab primarily uses for saving the Flash art for The NEXT: Ruffle and Conifer. We also invited prominent net artist Alan Bigelow to talk about the work he has done to migrate his early Flash art to open web languages and briefly discussed video documentation and Pale Moon browser as alternative methods for making the work available to the public and…
Horizon Insight: A Retrospective of the Art of M. D. Coverley
On Friday, November 5, 2021 we are launching the exhibition, Horizon Insight: A Retrospective of the Art of M. D. Coverley. Below is the schedule of the event and the curatorial statement that explains the works selected for the exhibition. To register, contact dgrigar@wsu.edu. Schedule 8:00-8:10 a.m. PST: Welcome, by Dene Grigar, Exhibition Curator 8:10-8:15 a.m. PST: Remarks of Appreciation, by N. Katherine Hayles 8:15-9:00 PST: Reading of Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day, by M. D. Coverley 9:00-9:15 PST: Curating this Retrospective: Comments about Design, Layout, and Restoration, by The Electronic Literature Lab Team 9:15-9:30 PST: Collection Highlights, by M. D. Coverley, Dene Grigar, & Richard Snyder…