Electronic Literature Organization

The pandemic has enhanced awareness and reliance on digital platforms. Brick and mortar museums and libraries that are having difficulties pivoting to such platforms are presently unable to share works with the public for safety reasons. Consequently, special attention is being paid to platforms that produce, protect, and promote electronic literature, such as Electronic Literature Organization’s Repository. Housing 30 collections of 2500 digital-born works, the site must be maintained, the works thoroughly and accurately described, and digital art preserved and shared with scholars, artists, and the public. In light of the pandemic, it was realized that the Repository could fill more roles than storing digital artwork and the accompanying information. It had the untapped potential of becoming a space where digital art could be studied, experienced, preserved, and shared from anywhere. In short, it would become the next generation museum, library, and preservation site for born digital literature collected by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), the site now known as The NEXT. This panel showcases the newly designed Repository implemented by 39 students at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV). 

In 2021, ELO in conjunction with the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) partnered with students at WSUV to implement this new vision for The NEXT. The new site makes digital artwork easily accessible to the public from a single digital space, enhanced by SEO and ADA compliance. From here, visitors have the ability to download permitted works and view any associated media, including images, videos, visualizations, and recorded interviews with the donor. They have also developed a search function for easily finding records. To further increase accessibility, students conducted usability testing on pages within the site, which includes an About page, Donations page, documentation regarding metadata schema, and more. With these components, The NEXT has transformed from an informational space into a multimedial site that is participatory, interactive, and experiential.

The architecture of the site is built to be scalable, allowing it to grow as new donations are offered to ELO. The NEXT sets a precedent for future museums and databases to follow. Blending information with human interaction stimulates The NEXT’s use as a virtual interactive museum and library, while increasing awareness of artists and their artwork. The site will continue to be maintained by ELL for ELO, and sustained by donations to ELO and ELL. Scholars volunteering their time and labor will further refine the metadata.

The NEXT will be presented at the conference by five of the 39 students involved in the implementation stage of the project. Kathleen Zoller will act as moderator, discussing the aim of the project and the components that made it come together; Katya Farinsky will share her process regarding copyediting; Betsy Hanrahan and Sarah West will demonstrate the site’s architecture and layout; Mallory Hobson will share design decisions made for The NEXT; Preston Reed will discuss the filming and interview process.

This is the second interview of Rui Torres for the ELR. He answered some questions about the event that he chaired.

An interview with Stuart Moulthrop, a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (USA) and an early author of works of electronic literature.

In the golden age of electronic books (or e-books), the phones, pads, tablets, and screens with which we read have become ubiquitous. In hand around the house or emerging from pockets on trains and planes, propped up on tables at restaurants or on desks alongside work computers, electronic books always seem to be within arms reach in public and private spaces alike. As their name suggests, however, the most prevalent e-books often attempt to remediate the print codex. Rather than explore the affordances and constraints of computational processes, multimodal interfaces, network access, global positioning, or augmented reality, electronic books instead attempt to simulate longstanding assumptions about reading and writing. Nevertheless, the form and content of literature are continually expanding through those experimental practices digital-born writing and electronic literature. Electronic literature (or e-lit) occurs at the intersection between technology and textuality. Whereas writing is a five thousand year old technology and the novel has had hundreds of years to mature, we do not yet fully know what computational and programmable media can do and do not yet fully understand the expressive capacities of electronic literature. In this respect, e-lit does not operate as a fixed ontological category, but marks a historical moment in which diverse communities of practitioners are exploring experimental modes of poetic and creative practice within our contemporary media ecology. If we define literature as an artistic engagement of language, then electronic literature is the artistic engagement of digital media and language. Such works represent an opportunity to consider both the nature of text as a form of digital media--as a grammatization or digitization of otherwise unbroken linguistic gestures--as well as the algorithmic, procedural, generative, recombinatorial, and computational possibilities of language. The history of e-lit includes projects that may not be labeled by their authors as part of this literary tradition and, in fact, some of the most compelling engagements are found in animation, videogames, social media, mobile applications, and other projects emerging from diverse cultural contexts and technical platforms. The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), founded in 1999, has released two volumes collecting works of significance to the field: the ELC1 (http://collection.eliterature.org/1/) in 2006 and the ELC2 (http://collection.eliterature.org/2/) in 2011. Following this five-year tradition, the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 3 (ELC3) continues the legacy of curating and archiving e-lit. Since the second volume was published, the rise of social media and increased communication between international communities has brought attention to authors and traditions not previously represented, while authors outside traditional academic and literary institutions are using new accessible platforms (such as Twitter and Twine) to reach broad audiences with experimental forms of both human and nonhuman interaction. As such, the editors of the ELC3 seek to expand the perceived boundaries of electronic literature. In 2015, we disseminated an open call inviting communities from across the web and across the globe to submit their work to this this collection. And although many of the submitted works were produced very recently, we also looked backward and included a number of historical selections reflecting work that was not yet part of the discussion of electronic literature when the previous volumes were curated. The ELC3 features 114 entries from 26 countries,13 languages, and including a wide range of platforms from physical interfaces and iPhone apps to Twitter bots and Twine games to concrete Flash poetry and alternate reality games to newly performed netprov and classic hypertext fiction. By pulling projects from these different spaces and times into the same collection, the ELC3 aims not only to preserve a diverse set of media artifacts but to produce a genealogy that interleaves differing historical traditions, technical platforms, and aesthetic practices. Many of the works in this collection are already endangered bits. Some of the platforms that supported them, such as Adobe Flash and the Unity 3D web player, are quickly becoming outmoded by new standards while material platforms like mobile phones and touch-screen tablets, are always on the cusp of new upgrades and models. This archive attempts to capture and preserve ephemeral objects by including textual descriptions and video documentation along with the source materials that offer a glimpse into the underlying structures of each work. Although metadata and paratexts cannot substitute for the original experience of a work, supplementary media delays the inevitable. Both the greatest threats to the field of electronic literature and its pharmacological raison d'etre is the rapid progression and newness of new media itself. As editors, curators, archivists, and creators ourselves, we hope to preserve some of this history and provide new generations of scholars, authors, and readers with insight into the ongoing experiments in the electronic literature. The Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 3 is not the end of e-lit. Nor is it necessarily the beginning of a new chapter of its history. The ELC3 is a mirror of a specific moment in time occurring across continents, languages, and platforms during the second decade of the twenty-first century. This collection parallels the works collected, operating in symbiotic relation with programs and processes, images and texts, readers and writers—and you. —Stephanie Boluk, Leonardo Flores, Jacob Garbe and Anastasia Salter (Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/about.html)

An article about The Electronic Literature Organization, including history, past publications, and ongoing activities and publications.

Entry on electronic literature providing a history of the term and exploring its contended usage.

Electronic literature is a generalized term used to describe a wide variety of computational literary practices beneath one broad umbrella, defined by the Electronic Literature Organization as “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.”

The term is somewhat fraught, and often challenged as not sufficiently or accurately descriptive to suit the more taxonomically minded of its scholars and practitioners. By way of reduction and assemblage, one might patch together definitions of “electronic” and “literature” in a way that makes some sense: “electronic literature is the result or product of literary activity carried or performed using the computer.” But of course, that would leave us with most literary activity that takes place in the contemporary era.  What is really meant by “electronic literature” is that the computer (or the network context) is in some way essential to the performance or carrying-out of the literary activity in question.

(Source: Author's introduction)