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…
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,…
From Pathfinders to The NEXT
Dene — I’m writing from Santa Cruz, where I’m at a workshop Noah’s organized for CS and digital humanities types. Anne Balsamo’s here, and has told me about the project you and she have discussed, to make video records of readings of early e-lit works. I’ve agreed to help Anne draft an NEH proposal. . . . —————- Those are the opening lines of the email message Stuart Moulthrop sent on August 27, 2012 inviting me to participate on a potential NEH project to document early electronic literature published on floppy disks and CD-ROMs. We did indeed move forward with a proposal, though Anne had dropped off the project. In…
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…
