ELMCIP Knowledge Base

This paper investigates how the theoretical concept of embodiment and related keywords such as touch, movement, gesture and haptic appears within the current practice of tagging creative works in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. It further suggests how this practice can be extended within the Knowledge Base platform both in terms of providing more precise tags, and through the forthcoming Platform content type which will give users the possibility connect specific hardware and software with a creative work. Finally, it presents the outline for a research collection that explores the notion of embodiment. The collection gives an introduction to relevant researchers, artists, creative works and scholarly works exploring the concept of embodiment and technology, in the hopes that such a framework can inspire the further investigation of works related to the field of electronic literature.

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.

A presentation and discussion of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, an open-access contributory database to document the international field of electronic literature, eight years after its launch. A session from the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base symposium at the University of Bergen, April 26, 2018.

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)

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)

More than 60 dissertations in the field of electronic literature have been documented in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, including tags, abstracts and in most cases links to full texts of the dissertations.

As of July 2013, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base includes documentation of more than 2,000 creative works and more than 2,000 articles of critical writing. Many of the records of critical writing include cross-references to the creative works they address. This article presents a preliminary analysis of all of the critical writing-to-creative work cross- references currently documented in the Knowledge Base in the aggregate. By developing static and interactive visualizations of this data, we might begin to see the outlines of an emerging “canon” of electronic literature.

A slightly revised version of this paper was published in 2014 in ebr.

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.