Curatorial Statement for The NEXT
We are presenting The NEXT to the Electronic Literature Organization’s Board of Directors on Wednesday, May 8, 2021. The space goes live nine days later on Monday, May 17. Below is the curatorial statement I created for it that explains the vision underlying The NEXT as well as the process it took to build it. As I prepared it for inclusion at the space, I thought of all of the people and organizations that supported us over the three years of The NEXT’s development: the three other Co-PIs involved in Phase 1; Washington State University Vancouver; Electronic Literature Organization and its Board of Directors; my lab (Electronic Literature Lab) and…
Congrats to The NEXT Production Team
The 39 students from the spring 2021 graduating class working on Phase 3 of The NEXT were represented by three members of their team at Washington State University Vancouver’s Research Showcase. Competing in the Podium division, Kathleen Zoller, the Project Manager; Barysh Agaliyev, Social Media Specialist; and Megan Bina, Videographer, won 2nd Place at the event. Judges remarked that the team was team “very well prepared” and their presentation, “clear.” Their “[e]nthusiasm really helped to engage the audience.” The project itself was “well thought out” and that the students answers questions “thoroughly.” It was particularly heartening to hear that the judges thought that “the group presentation style worked well (given a…
Ruffle Implementation Report #5
The team has completed implementing ruffle.js to all of the 231 Flash works in the anthologies and online journals held in the Electronic Literature Organization’s repository. The last journal, The Iowa Review Web (TIRW), was completed over the weekend by Andrew and Arlo. 8 of 33 works from the journal could be preserved, amounting to a 28% success rate. This number is in keeping with our efforts with the other publications we have tried to preserve with this approach. We have not yet tackled the two Showcases, Turbulence and The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That or the many works in the Individual Artists and Scholars collections. We need to turn our attention…
Ruffle Preservation Report #4
We are making progress with the Ruffle implementation. Thus far, the Undergraduate Researchers who are undertaking the project have applied ruffle.js and the accompanying note to the Flash works found in the Electronic Literature Collections 1, 2, and 3; Cauldron & Net, frAme, Poems That Go, Riding the Meridian, Word Circuits, and BeeHive. Left to do of the seven online journals is The Iowa Review Web, which they plan to complete by next weekend. All total, the team has been able to preserve 58 of the 198 Flash works published in six of the seven online journals. Below are screenshots of the spreadsheet containing the works we have managed to save. You…
Woman E-Lit Event & Initiatives
Welcome to Woman E-Lit, a very special symposium that took place on March 30, 2021 during Women’s History Month celebrating women who have contributed to the field of electronic literature. It also celebrated the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL). The two events intersect in that it was important to the ELL Team to celebrate the lab’s anniversary in a way that speaks to it mission––that is, to curate, document, preserve, and produce born digital literary works and other media. Hosting a symposium where women could come together to amplify achievements, provide a space of free and welcomed expression, and celebrate you, us, all of…
Celebrating 10 Years of the Electronic Literature Lab, Part 1
As I mention in the History section of this website, the idea for the Electronic Literature Lab was born out of the successful “Early Authors of Electronic Literature: The Eastgate School, Voyager Artists, and Independent Productions—Special Collection on loan from N. Katherine Hayles,” exhibition that I curated at ELO’s Visionary Landscapes conference held at WSUV in the summer 2008. Using legacy computers that I had collected and those lent to me by a former student in my program, Jeff Grisso, I was able to provide conference participants with the opportunity to experience, first-hand, hypertext literature and other forms of e-lit published on floppy disks on computers for which they had…
Women’s History Month 2021
Join us in celebrating Women’s History Month 2021. This year we are highlighting the output by women working in the area of born-digital literature from all over the world. Each day we will post, on Twitter, one work by one woman artist or scholar. All works will be accessible on the web and all posts will be archived at the Electronic Literature Lab’s (ELL) website for future study. Additionally, you are welcome to nominate works to be featured. Each Sunday during the month of March, we will post links to works by women you wish to honor. To nominate, contact ELL’s Project Manager. Posts Monday, March 1 Join us today…
Ruffle Preservation Report #3
This third report continues with our updates about the lab’s efforts to save Flash e-lit. What Has Been Preserved Thus Far We finished preserving the Flash works published in the Electronic Literature Collections (ELC) 1, 2 & 3, Cauldron & Net, Word Circuits, and frAme. Yesterday Andrew Thompson and Arlo Ptolemy (the Ruff Rangers, as we now call them) began implementing Ruffle to the 37 works published in the 14 volumes of Poems That Go from 2001 to 2003. Ruffle Success Rate Here is the number of Flash works we have been able to save from each of the six publications: ELC 1: 12 of 26 ELC 2: 1 of…
The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction: Editions, Translations, and Emulations
Mariusz Pisarski and I signed a contract with Cambridge University Press this week for a book entitled, The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction: Editions, Translations, and Emulations, for its Digital Literary Studies Element Series, edited by Gabriel Hankins, Adam Hammond, and Katherine Bode. It will be delivered in June 2022. The book will address the growing concern about how best to maintain and extend the accessibility of early interactive novels and hypertext fiction or narratives. These forms of born-digital literature were produced before or shortly after the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web with proprietary software and on formats now obsolete. Preserving and extending them for a broad study by scholars of…
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…
