Electronic Literature Lab

For Advanced Inquiry into Born Digital Media

  • Home
  • People
  • History
  • Research Output
  • Projects
    • ELO’s The NEXT
    • Restorations & Reconstructions
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 1
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 2
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 3
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 4
    • Live Stream Traversals
    • Podcasts
    • Published Games
  • Catalog
    • Beta Catalog
    • Expanded Catalog
  • CMDC Studios
  • Home
  • People
  • History
  • Research Output
  • Projects
    • ELO’s The NEXT
    • Restorations & Reconstructions
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 1
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 2
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 3
    • Rebooting Electronic Literature 4
    • Live Stream Traversals
    • Podcasts
    • Published Games
  • Catalog
    • Beta Catalog
    • Expanded Catalog
  • CMDC Studios
ELL icon

About

Founded and directed by Dr. Dene Grigar, ELL contains 61 vintage Macintosh & PC computers, dating back from 1977, vintage software, peripherals, and a library of over 300 works of electronic literature and other media. It is used for the advanced inquiry into the curation, documentation, preservation, conservation, and production of born-digital art, literature, and video games. The lab has created and continues to manage the ELO's The NEXT and supports video game R&D through CMDC Studios.

For more information about the lab or for help with preserving or recovering born-digital work, contact Dr. Dene Grigar at dgrigar[at]wsu[dot]edu.

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CATALOG

Visit the online catalog of computers and media works; designed and coded by the CMDC technical assistant Greg Philbrook. The new version of the catalog with expanded entries is now on preview.

other labs icon

Other Media Archaeology Labs or Working Archives in the U.S.

Obsolete Computing & Media at the University of Victoria, directed by John Durno

Media Archaeology Lab at U of Colorado-Boulder, directed by Dr. Lori Emerson

The Trope Tank at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, directed by Dr. Nick Montfort

The Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, directed by Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum, with Amanda Visconti

The Bill Bly Collection at the Maryland Institute in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, directed by Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum, with Amanda Visconti, and Porter Olson

  • Updates

    Triangle SCI Begins

    October 9, 2022 /

    Triangle SCI began today in Durham today. Dene and Richard are here developing the metadata fields for visitors to The NEXT with disabilities for better access.  We kicked off the event with an opening event at The Rickhouse where we met with the other teams invited to the week-long retreat. This year’s theme is Reckoning, Care, and Repair, and we are one of five teams invited to participate. Besides ours, entitled A Post-Pandemic Reckoning: Improving Metadata for Better Accessibility to Scholarly Archives for People with Disabilities, there are: *Joshua Neds-Fox, Matt Ruen, Teresa Schultz, Brianne Selman, Leila Sterman, Stephanie Towery’s Building a contextual alternative to scholarly journal un/safelists *Karen Stoll Farrell, Kimberly…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Researching E-Lit and Its Printed Materials

    March 14, 2018

    Live Stream Traversal of Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn on Acid

    February 16, 2019

    Congrats to Nicholas Schiller

    July 30, 2018
  • News,  Updates

    Victory Garden 2022 in The Digital Review

    September 16, 2022 /

    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…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Live Stream Traversal of Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope

    April 22, 2018

    Planet Electronic Literature

    November 29, 2020

    Linking Literature & Games

    August 21, 2019
  • Updates

    Panel Accepted for the AWP

    August 16, 2022 /

    The panel I was invited to join, entitled “Cripping & Digitizing: (Re)Imagining the Poetry eBook,” that was organized by poet C. R. Grinner for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2023 conference was accepted.  Grinner teaches at the UW in Seattle and author of The Lyme Letters (Texas Tech University Press). Other panelists besides Grinner and me include Molly E. Ubbesen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Director of Writing at University of Minnesota Rochester; and Dr. Katherine “Kate” Deibel, the systems librarian at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and advocate for usable and accessible technologies. Our Panel Description: “The emergence of eBook formats creates an opportunity to accessibly digitize and archive poetry.…

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    Traversal of Eric Steinhardt’s Fragment of the Dionysian Body

    October 13, 2019

    Victory Garden 2022 in The Digital Review

    September 16, 2022

    Resetting the Table

    August 16, 2019
  • Updates

    Madison McCartha, PhD Fellow at the Electronic Literature Lab

    July 21, 2022 /

    We are pleased to welcome the Electronic Literature Lab’s first PhD Fellow––poet, critic, and multimedia artist, Madison McCartha. Their debut book of poetry and visual art, FREAKOPHONE WORLD, was published by Inside the Castle, in 2021. Their second book, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean. McCartha holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their Fellowship is funded by N. Katherine Hayles, the Luesebrink Family, and the WSU College of Arts & Sciences. Madison’s interest in kinetic poetry has led them to work directly this summer on the metadata for The New River Journal Collection,…

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    Congrats to Holly, Kathleen, Mariah, and Moneca

    April 26, 2020

    Bill Bly, author of We Descend, Will Visit ELL

    September 3, 2018

    Live Stream Traversal of Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope

    April 22, 2018
  • Updates

    Principles that Guide Restoration and Reconstruction of Born-Digital Literature

    June 28, 2022 /

    The restoration and reconstruction projects the lab has produced, in varying degrees, required approaches like migration, emulation, and collection as part of the digital preservation process. In some cases, text and are were migrated while code is completely rebuilt. Other cases see a bit of code added to a HTML page that result in the emulation of the Adobe Flash Player so that the work can be displayed on a contemporary browser. Still in other cases, no migration nor emulation is required but a slight change in the code predicates the need to check the new version against the original on legacy computers. What this means, then, is that preservation…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Coping with Bits Project Meeting

    December 20, 2018

    Love and Loss in Kendall’s A Life Set for Two

    April 5, 2018

    2018-19 Live Stream Traversal Schedule

    October 12, 2018
  • Updates

    Victory Garden 2022 Builds & Changes

    June 21, 2022 /

    Compiled by Arlo Ptolemy, Project Manager, Victory Garden 2022 Below are the various builds associated with the reconstruction of Stuart Moulthrop’s 1991 hypertext novel Victory Garden, published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. The new edition, Victory Garden 2022, was created by Stuart Moulthrop, Arlo Ptolemy, Andrew Thompson, with support from Holly Slocum, Dene Grigar, Sierra O’Neal, Greg Philbrook, and Austin Gohl. The information is drawn from the Github site on which the builds are retained (https://github.com/AndrewThompson1998/ell-victory-garden-reconstruction) and the archival Basecamp site where the files are permanently hosted.  X Builds The X Builds signify the beginning of the project of rebuilding Victory Garden, as well as the start of the Lab joining the project.…

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    Resurrecting Flash: Hands-On Workshop

    September 23, 2021

    Traversal of Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling

    November 7, 2020

    Donation of Educational Media

    June 28, 2018
  • Updates

    CMDC Studios: Video Games R&D

    June 9, 2022 /

    Announcing CMDC Studios! CMDC Studios is a team of multi-talented game developers, sponsored by the Electronic Literature Lab, who are passionate about creating narrative-rich games through immersive gameplay and thoughtful design. The team is proud to support developers that are interested in entering the games industry through structured opportunities to make games, polish their skills, and work in teams of all sizes. With an ever-growing game library of heartfelt, adventurous, and sometimes mysterious titles, CMDC Studios invites players to explore a wide range of digital experience.

    Read More
    Dene Grigar

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    The Ethics of Digital Preservation: Obligation to Future Generations

    September 6, 2021

    Bill Bly, author of We Descend, Will Visit ELL

    September 3, 2018

    2020-2021 Traversal Schedule

    August 12, 2020
  • Updates

    Restorations & Reconstructions

    June 4, 2022 /

    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…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Congratulating Our Graduating UG Researchers

    December 8, 2018

    ELL Undergraduate Researchers Reconstitute Deena Larsen’s Kanji-Kus

    April 6, 2019

    Provenance & Collecting E-Lit: A Case for Human-Centered Archiving

    March 25, 2018
  • News,  Updates

    Reconstruction of Sarah Smith’s “King of Space”

    May 21, 2022 /

    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…

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    Dene Grigar

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    Prof. Élika Ortega Speaks in ELL on March 9

    March 4, 2018

    Working on The Alan Sondheim Collection

    October 4, 2020

    The Impact of Undergraduate Research on a Field

    December 31, 2018
  • News,  Updates

    Collection Selected for the Recovery Hub of American Women Writers

    May 11, 2022 /

    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…

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    Dene Grigar

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    The Art and Science of Hypertext

    August 8, 2018

    A Successful Presentation at the MLA 2020

    January 12, 2020

    Celebrating Endangered Data Week with Tim McLaughlin’s Notes Toward Absolute Zero

    February 23, 2019
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People

Director: Dr. Dene Grigar, Professor, The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Associate Director: Dr. Richard Snyder, Blackburn Fellow, The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Technical and Instructional Assistant: Greg Philbrook, B.A., The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Project Manager & Senior Designer: Holly Slocum, B.A., The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program

Post-Bacc Researchers: Kathleen Zoller, Joel Clapp, Ruth Woodcock, Andrew Thompson, Arlo Ptolemy, Ariel Wallace, Sierra O'Neal, Ahria Nicholas, Stratton Slater, Danny Blanchard

PhD & 2022 PostDoc Fellow: Madison McCartha, UC Santa Cruz

2022 ELO Fellow: Alexandra Martin, QUAM (Canada)

Research Affiliates: Mariusz Pisarski, PhD (Poland); Erika Fulop, Phd, Lancaster University (UK; Agnieszka Przybyszewska, PhD, University of Łódź (Poland)

This website was created by Katie Bowen, Mariah Gwin, Holly Slocum and Austin Fields. Madeleine Brookman produced the ELL logo. All custom icons were designed by Holly Slocum. It is managed by Dene Grigar

Copyright © 2018