research infrastructure

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. Looking at the combination of practices and methodologies that come about through e-lit’s production, study, and dissemination, these articles explore the disruptive potential of electronic literature to decenter and complement the DH field. Creativity is central and found at all levels and spheres of e-lit, but as the articles in this gathering show, there is a need to redeploy creative practice critically to address the increasing instrumentalization of the digital humanities and to turn the digital humanities towards the digital cultures of the present.

Conceived as an ongoing conversation, rolling out 2-3 articles each month until the end of the year, all contributions are tackling at least one of the four following areas: Building Research Infrastructures and Environments, Exploring Creative Research Practice, Proposing Critical Reading Methodologies, and Applying Digital Pedagogy.

(Source: editors)

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 panel debate / discussion of the future of Digital Humanities at the Universtiy of Bergen, moderated by Jill Walker Rettberg, including Mylonas, UiB Humanities Dean Jørgen Sejersted, UiB Library Director Maria-Carme Torras Calvo, Infomedia Professor 2 Anders Fagerjord, and Digital Culture Professor and ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base project leader Scott Rettberg.

The debate followed a presentation by Elli Mylonas on Digital Humanities centers in university libraries. The panel discussion begins at 32:30 in the video documentation.

A presentation by Elli Mylonas, Director of Brown University's Center for Digital Scholarship on CDS and on other models of DH centers based in university libraries. 

A roundtable discussion featuring seven experts from large digital humanities projects. Panelists were given three minutes to explain, briefly, their current digital humanities project before the moderator asked a series of questions that included variations of the following: How did you move "to the next level" in DH? What challenges have you faced doing DH work? How have you funded your work? The bulk of the discussion was devoted to questions from the audience. 

• Neil Fraistat (centerNet, Romantic Circles)
• Laura Mandell (18th Connect)
• Bethany Nowviskie (DH Answers & Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations)
• Ken Price (Walt Whitman Archive)
• Eric Dean Rasmussen (ELMCIP: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, Electronic Book Review)
• Dave Shephard (HyperCities)
• Ethan Watrall (MSU Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative, Red Land/Black Land)

Rasmussen's presentation began by unpacking the ELMCIP acronymn as a way of explaining how the project, a study of creative communities around the roughly two-decade-old field of electronic liteature, framed itself in a way that would draw upon and be of interest to researchers and students from multiple disciplines across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. 

The paper provides an introduction to the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) collaborative research project ELMCIP: Developing a network-based creative community: Electronic Literature as a model of creativity and innovation in practice, and in particular details the Knowledge Base component of the project. The Knowledge Base is a new platform for developing and sharing bibliographic records about works, critical writing, events, publishers, organizations, and authors in the field of electronic literature, with a particular emphasis on the European context. The paper further introduces the collaborative activity of CELL: an international Consortium for Electronic Literature organized by the Electronic Literature Organization.