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…
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…
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…
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…
