archiving

This paper outlines public archives of electronic literature authoring tools and technologies via git version control as a platform for decentralized organization, with a specific focus on current and proposed future uses of the GitHub platforms. How are the source code and tooling for creating electronic literature maintained currently preserved through public open source, and how might ELO initiatives and community best practices engage with them in the future?Throughout its history electronic literature has been been widely varied and proliferated in many ways: varied in forms or artifacts that are experimental or avant-garde in themselves, varied in modes of distribution across various platforms (including popular and experimental forms), and varied in the authoring tools and techniques used to create it. This proliferation and continual engagement with the *now* of rapid technological change is by its nature usually attached to relatively ephemeral software and hardware forms, whether StorySpace, Flash, the Nintendo DS, et cetera. As most electronic literary works are therefor by default ephemera, a long-held core mission of electronic literature communities of practice has been the preservation, archiving, and dissemination of electronic literature works. A survey briefly considers the context of many existing initiatives to catalog and archive such works -- in particular, the examples of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (https://elmcip.net/), the CELL Search Engine (https://cellproject.net/), and IFDB: the Interactive Fiction Database (https://ifdb.tads.org/). As the CELL project describes it: "To the degree that inclusion in a database is now the publishing event and the life of a literary work is defined through a trail of linked commentaries and active responses, the gathering and identification of works becomes itself a creative and scholarly activity." Currently these database catalogs tend to be primarily artifact-centric -- focused primarily on preserving a "work" -- rather than tool-centric or platform-centric, focused on preserving a practice, craft, or creative mode.By contrast, several electronic literature authoring communities of practice are organized around particular genres or platforms -- for example, hypertext authors using Twine, IF authors using Inform, or bot authors using Tracery -- make extensive use of open source repositories and hosts such as GitHub in order to develop and disseminate authoring tools, platforms, libraries, and plugins et cetera for electronic literature authoring. These tend to be decentralized, supported by small numbers of self-hosting developers who are addressing to specific active communities of practice in their own terms. One practical consequence of this is tagging: umbrella terms such as "electronic literature" or "elit" are almost unknown in GitHub repository tags.The paper concludes by putting forward a model for a public open source archive for electronic literature tool and platform source code, based on cataloging and mirroring a collection of forks of existing code bases drawn from across multiple electronic literature authoring communities. It is modeled on a related project in the area of creative computing, the Archive for Processing initiative (https://github.com/archive-for-processing/archive-for-processing).

An interview with Scott Rettberg at the 2019 CLARIN conference, concerning the field of electronic literature. The wide-ranging interview delves into the history of field, aspects of archiving, documenting and preserving electronic literature, its implications for literary study, some individual projects such as Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project, and more. The interview took place on October 1, 2019 at the 2019 CLARIN Conference in Leipzig, after Rettberg's keynote talk.

The field of Electronic Literature comprises new forms of literary creation that merge writing, computation, interactivity, and design in the creation of writing that is specific to the context of the computer and the global network. While electronic literature is a field of experimental writing with a history that stretches back to the 1950s, it has grown most expansively in the late two decades. Forms of electronic literature such as combinatory poetics, hypertext fiction, kinetic and interactive poetry, and network writing bridge the 20th century avant-garde and practices specific to the 21st century networked society. Yet electronic literature has faced significant hurdles as it has developed as a field of study, related to the comparative instability of complex computational objects, which because of their formal diversity are often not easily accommodated by standardized methods of digital archiving, and are subject to cycles of technological obsolescence. Rettberg's presentation will address efforts to disseminate, document, and archive the field of electronic literature. After providing some examples of genres of electronic literature, Rettberg will discuss projects such as the Electronic Literature Collections, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, and the Electronic Literature Repository that seek to preserve a corpus of work and criticism for the future.

The aim of PO.EX: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature (http://po-ex.net/) is to represent the intermedia and performative textuality of a large corpus of experimental works and practices in an electronic database, including some early instances of digital literature. This article describes the multimodal editing of experimental works in terms of a hypertext rationale, and then demonstrates the performative nature of the remediation, emulation, and recreation involved in digital transcoding and archiving. Preservation, classification, and networked distribution of artifacts are discussed as representational problems within the current algorithmic and database aesthetics in knowledge production.

(source: abstract DHQ)

How reliable are archives and databases of born-digital works of electronic literature when their digitally driven platforms are endangered by digital obsolescence and technological challenges, hacks, and by a lack of long-term maintenance after a funding period’s end?

Some of the databases within the field of electronic literature are no longer accessible due to one of the reasons mentioned above: the Cyberfiction Database (directed by Beat Suter) that featured German works that were published between 1996-2003 is down after a move from one server to another; ELINOR: Electronic Literature in the Nordic Region (directed by Jill Walker Rettberg, 2004-06) was terminated after the project’s funding ended, and the ELO’s wiki-based archive-it database that was set up in 2007 for allocating works for archiving was hacked. The risks are also there for the (still accessible) Drupal-based Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, no longer funded as part of the ELMCIP project (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, 2010-2013).

On January 4th 2015, Matthew Kirschenbaum tweets “Seems The Iowa Review Web has gone away“ (@mkirschenbaum). After a round of speculations and discontentment (the archive was not valued to be preserved (Grigar)), there is certainty that the archive of the e-lit journal that was founded at the turn of the millennium will be resurrected by moving it to a new server (see https://twitter.com/mkirschenbaum/status/551852928265646081). In the meantime, the archive remains inaccessible for an undefined period of time.

Thus, on the list of seemingly archived, but inaccessible resources are not only databases and archives; web journals and their archives of published works, too, are at risk of appearing as objects no longer found on the Web. This is even true for resources that were – in collaboration with the Electronic Literature Organization – crawled and captured by using the web-archiving service Archive-It.

Seeking to provide a secure location for archiving and maintaining works of electronic literature, the department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies and the University of Bergen Library are collaborating to provide an “Archive of Nordic Electronic Literature”. In this presentation, UiB’s subject librarian Aud Gjersdal and PhD candidate Patricia Tomaszek (UiB) propose how academic libraries can serve to secure access to works of electronic literature on an institutional basis, and discuss the challenges they are facing in their work in progress.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

For the ELO 2015 conference, we propose a roundtable discussion about the CELL Project. The Consortium for Electronic Literature (CELL) is a partnership founded by the Electronic Literature Organization that joins together nine research centers worldwide, all developing online database projects devoted to research in electronic literature (e-lit). The project is currently funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, enabling development of an online index, search engine, and other tools for researching bibliographical and critical material on e-lit. (source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Listed as one of the main themes of the Bergen 2015 ELO conference is the following question: is “electronic literature” a transitional term that will become obsolete as literary uses of computational media and devices become ubiquitous? If so, what comes after electronic literature?

The notion of obsolescence has been a recurring issue in electronic literature since at least 2002, the date of the ELO Conference at UCLA. At that time, archiving became a general concern in the field. ELO responded with documents such as Born-Again Bits, Acid-Free Bits, and the ELC 1 and 2 Collections. Since that time, with the continual evolution of computational media and devices, the problems of archiving have continued to grow more complicated. The panel proposes to address issues of Archiving based on this re-wording of the conference theme: is electronic literature a transitional practice that will become obsolete as the multiplication of forms of both computational media and devices make literary artifacts more and more difficult to preserve?

The panel will include Leonardo Flores and the ELC 3 Collective, Marjorie C. Luesebrink (M.D. Coverley), Rui Torres, and Stephanie Strickland. Topics to be addressed by the panel will include the following: Stephanie Strickland, “Six Questions for Born-Digital Archivists”; Rui Torres, “Interfacing the Archive: (Ab)Using the PO.EX Digital Archive”; Leonardo Flores/Stephanie Boluk/Jacob Garbe/ Anastasia Salter, “The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3 (ELC3) Editorial Collective presentation”; Marjorie C. Luesebrink, “The creation of Women Innovate: Contributions to Electronic Literature (1990-2010) by Marjorie Luesebrink and Stephanie Strickland”.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

This half-day workshop will be focused on the preservation and archiving of Electronic Literature Organization events and conferences. Scott Rettberg has been asked by the ELO board to establish a standing committee of ELO members that will be focused on documenting and archiving current and past ELO events. This workshop will be focused both on the future scope and projects of that committee and on the hands-on documentation of ELO conferences in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. We will consider questions including:

What are the best practices related to archiving for ELO conference organizers?
Should relationships be established with one or more libraries or archives to preserve data and ephemera from ELO conferences?
How should we best go about gathering ELO archives materials and preserving them?
How can we archive events using the platform of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base?

The session will include a discussion of these issues followed by hands-on work in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. Participants will learn how to document their presentations, papers, creative works, and events in order to preserve them and make them available to other international researchers.

(Source: ELO 2015 catalog)