Electronic Literature Directory

In two essays, "Toward a Semantic Literary Web" (2006, ONLINE at http://eliterature.org/pad/slw.html) and "Electronic Literature as World Literature" (2010, Poetics Today), I set out a project for identifying literary qualities and marking literature's present transformations within new media. The idea in these essays was to discern aesthetic and communicative qualities that I felt could be carried over to the present (e.g., Goethe's and Marx's unrealized call for the formation of a world literature "transcending national limits"), and those that could easily go missing (e.g., the materially bounded object whose aesthetic can be recognized and repeated by a generation of authors in conversation with one another, and renewed, revised, or renounced by later generations).

Trying to hold onto both of these desirable literary qualities, the aesthetic as well as the communicative, I turn my attention in the present talk to the one place where such conversations are now being staged - not in stand-alone scholarly journals or social media (online or in print) but rather, in databases. Specifically, I consider the open source, open access literary database. I settle on database construction as a necessary scholarly and technical complement to the creation of works, not for wholly archival purposes, but as a condition or destination for present creativity. The electronic database, by granting authors (and their critics) access to present discourse networks and a means of identifying works,opens possibilities that appear unique to literary writing in new media.

One point of reference in my talk will be the Electronic Literature Organization's Electronic Literature Directory (ELD version 2.0). The ELMCIP Knowledge Base, developed in Scandinavia, the U.S., and Europe, offers another, complementary point of entry. Brief descriptions of other literary archives, developed or in development in Montreal, Providence, Siegen, Sydney, and elsewhere, will indicate how interoperability can work at the level of databases, and how literary collaboration might at last begin to work across disciplines and institutions. I argue that the current, wide-ranging database construction (already a trans-disciplinary collaboration among scholars and programmers), is the necessary precondition to the emergence of the electronic 'world literature' that I described some years previously.

Literary works by John Cayley, Jason Nelson, Simon Biggs and others (who turn, or detourne, informatic databases into literary works) will be accessed through the above databases and discussed during the course of the talk.

The Electronic Literature Directory has served over the years as an ongoing project of the ELO. The recently revamped directory will, by the time of ELO_AI meeting, have been formally launched and will be approximately six months old. The purpose of this proposed panel is to allow sitting editors to provide a face-to-face introduction of the evolving directory to ELO community. Participants will address issues of design, bibliography, editorial process, tagging, and pedagogical relevance of the project. Vincler, a special collections librarian, will address issues of cataloging and archiving. Branda, the site programmer, will address technical aspects of the site's development. Engberg and Heckman will address the potential use of the format in a variety of educational settings. Tabbi will address the general implications of the directory for the future of the field. Special attention will be given to the continued development of the site content, and active discussion will be encouraged.

Electronic Literature is not just a "thing" or a "medium" or even a body of "works" in various "genres." It is not poetry, fiction, hypertext, gaming, codework, or some new admixture of all these practices. E-Literature is, arguably, an emerging cultural form, as much a collective creation of new terms and keywords as it is the production of new literary objects. Both the "works" and their terms of description need to be tracked and referenced. Hence, a Directory of Electronic Literature needs to be, in the first place, a site where readers and (necessarily) authors are given the ability to identify, name, tag, describe, and legitimate works of literature written and circulating within electronic media. This essay grew out of practical debates among the ELO's Working Group on the Directory, established in the Spring of 2005 and active through the Winter of 2006. The essay offers a set of practical recommendations for development, links to potentially affiliated sites, and an overall vision of how literary form is created in a networked culture. The essay is intended to set a direction for the next phase of Directory development (Fall 2007), central to the ELO's mission of making a place for literary work (and works) in electronic environments. Finally, and as yet tentatively, the essay offers speculations on how this curatorial activity can be coordinated with similar initiatives in the arts and with stakeholders in the current development of a Semantic Web.

Source: author's article abstract

Electronic literature produced in programmable media – such as kinetic or randomly recombined and generated texts, interactive narratives, hyperfictions or poems that appear as moving letters – require a reconceptualization of the reading process and the development of new concepts for evaluating works of (electronic) literature. This accomplishment is essential for undertaking preservation and requires sustainable review mechanisms. What follows is not a transcription into electronic media of established work from the print canon; rather, the initiatives under way at the Electronic Literature Organization have to do with born-digital works, and works in many media that may have anticipated the full-blown emergence of a native, „electronic literature“, „net literature“, or „new media writing“ (to name just three designations for the emergent field), whose profile is coming into being even as the works are being created and designated as a part of the literary tradition. With this media-specific task in mind, in 2007 the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) was entrusted by the Library of Congress with archiving 300 URLs in collaboration with the web-based archiving service „Archive-It“.

This paper will first discuss the ELO’s review model in the light of the aesthetically complex composition of literary texts that mix media. It will then consider the complexity of works on a technical level by reporting on difficulties with harvesting electronic literature that have been produced with flash or JavaScript: technical concerns about archiving need to be considered when describing and tagging works. Finally, this paper will provide an example for reviewing, evaluating, and archiving variable media art works like electronic literature.