databases

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.

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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)

A presentation of the CELL consortium's work with interoperability between databases about electronic literature.

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 first experiments in digital literary forms started as early asthe 1960s. From then, up to the mid-90’s, was a period that,according to Chris Funkhouser (2007), can be considered asa ‘laboratory’ phase. The rise of the Internet has resulted in theproliferation of creative proposals. The first involves indexingcreative works in the form of databases, sometimes giving accessto hundreds of works without any hierarchical order. Since 2000,digital literature has been experiencing a new phase, marked bythe creation of anthologies. Over the years, the evaluation andselection criteria have proved to be as problematic as they arenecessary for these projects. The main issue of this paper is toprovide a critical discussion of these criteria.

I will first compare the corpus of two founding initiatives, i.e. collections1 and 2 edited by the Electronic Literature Association(ELO)1 and the ‘improved sheets’ published online by theCanadian nt2 laboratory2, in order to bring out a list of workscommonly considered as ‘worthy’ by these communities. I willthen put the positions of four important players of this field intoperspective: Bertrand Gervais (director of the nt2 lab), ScottRettberg (co-editor of the first ELO collection and leader of theEuropean ELMCIP project devoted to digital literature3), LauraBorràs (co-editor of the second ELO collection and director ofthe Hermeneia research group4) and Brian Kim Stefans (co-editor of the second ELO collection, and author of various workspresented in the ELO collections and nt2 ‘improved sheets’).In spring 2011, I questioned them about their initiatives and theirselection criteria. In the ‘crossed corpus’ of ELO and nt2 works,I will finally identify these selection criteria through a semiopragmaticmethodology.

Source: author's introduction to article

Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) is a collaborative research project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation. Focusing on the electronic literature community in Europe as a model of networked creativity and innovation in practice, ELMCIP is intended both to study the formation and interactions of that community and also to further electronic literature research and practice in Europe. The ELMCIP Knowledge Base is a publicly accessible online database that focuses on capturing core bibliographic data and archival materials about authors, creative works, critical writing, events, organizations, publishers, and teaching resources and on making visible the connections between creative and scholarly activities in the field.

This presentation will focus on three aspects of the ELMCIP Knowledge Base in particular:

1) Cross-referencing to make visible the emergence of creative and scholarly communities of practice

In developing the ELMCIP Knowledge Base platform, we put a particular emphasis on showing the connections between different forms of practice in scholarly and artistic communities, and making cross-references apparent and accessible. So for instance, records documenting creative works are automatically linked to critical writing that reference them, and vice versa, records of events and exhibition link to works that were presented, author records link to materials written, edited and taught. This capacity to show the web of connections on which a creative community is based is a distinguishing feature of the project.

2) Open access and international collaboration

The ELMCIP project is working with other international projects in the US, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Australia and elsewhere to establish open-access content sharing between the most active database projects and organizations in the field, to facilitate international cooperation and growth of the creative communities in which it is engaged.

3) Documenting and the path to Archiving electronic literature

The ELMCIP project includes both metadata-level documentation and some archival materials, such as .PDF files, source code of some works, audio and video documentation of presentations and so forth. This presentation will consider ways in which this might lead to the future development of an electronic literature repository, in which works of electronic literature are not only documented, but also in some fashion preserved for archival reference and future appreciation.

(Source: author's abstract)

Note: This presentation is based on the previously published essay "The ELMCIP Knowledge Base and the Formation of an International Field of Literary Scholarship and Practice"