Dene Grigar begins by detailing the challenges that current archival practices pose for preserving electronic literature. Examples from various library collections and experiences with preparing works for archives in her own lab help to foreground the problems needed to be solved.
Attention à la marche! Mind the Gap! questions the place of electronic literature in a digital culture. Present since the 1980s, electronic literary practices must now adapt and renew themselves in light of the proliferation and massive use of digital devices in our lives. How do they make us think about literature in its broadest sense and its current occurrences? What forms do they take in public and urban spaces? How do they articulate our relationships to the body, to culture, to our representations of ourselves and the world?
Attention à la marche! Mind the Gap! exploits the multiple gaps that can arise between technologies, practices and their contexts. Bringing together some fifty works produced by pioneers and emerging artists, the exhibition offers a diversified panorama of electronic literature practices, at the crossroads of literature and computer science. In these works, the text is protean: it becomes matter, it is animated, spatialized, declaimed, intertwined with images and gives itself, in its more classical expression, in the form of statements, translated into different human and computer languages.
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)
Serge Bouchardon's paper concludes with the observation that the field of digital literature "is based on each country's own conception of literariness, of the digital medium, as well as on the relation between the two" and completes his article with a question to be considered in future research on communities, asking if digital literature is a coherent international field or a mere collection of cultural specificities. Giving an account of how digital literature in France evolved theoretically and historically through the creation of creative works and their traditional filiations, within a study of two socio-technical devices, he also analyzes how a particular mailing list, "a reflexive device" of a community possibly contributes to the construction of the field. His contribution comes along with a rich collection of links to various French actors in the field.
(Source: Article abstract.)
Digital literature is based on each country’s own conception of literariness, of the digital medium, as well as on the relation between the two. So the following question remains open: is digital literature a coherent international field or a mere collection of cultural specificities?
In France (but this might of course be true for other countries), the domain of digital literature first built itself in a phase of hybridization on the margins of the traditional literary field, then it tended to find its own autonomy by constituting a field with its own institutions and networks of legitimization