open access

This essay reflects on the shift of user interaction operated by online literary archives and databases. One can easily recognize a change of scenery happening in the current networked world, given the way authors and general public produce, catalog, tag, access, research, analyze, preserve and share knowledge.
In the field of electronic literature, the creation of several collaborative and open access databases attests this trend. For this purpose, I review two of them: the PO.EX Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature and the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. My aim is to contribute to an informed view on how these online literary databases are shaped and are shaping the field: What is their scope? How do they operate? What kind of navigation and user input exists? Why should they really matter?
Finally, I use these insights to develop some considerations concerning the relations between memory and archive, and different perspectives on electronic literature preservation.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

PO.EX (http://po-ex.net) is a digital archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature that began in 2005. This literary database is coordinated by Rui Torres, at the University Fernando Pessoa, in Oporto, Portugal, and was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia [Foundation for Science and Technology] (FCT) and the European Union, under two main research projects: “CD-ROM da PO.EX: Poesia Experimental Portuguesa, Cadernos e Catálogos” [The PO.EX CD-ROM: Portuguese Experimental Poetry, Notebooks and Catalogues] (2005-2008) and “PO.EX’70-80: Arquivo Digital da Literatura Experimental Portuguesa” [PO.EX’70-80: Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature] (2010-2013).

PO.EX (http://po-ex.net) is a digital archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature that began in 2005. This literary database is coordinated by Rui Torres, at the University Fernando Pessoa, in Oporto, Portugal, and was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia [Foundation for Science and Technology] (FCT) and the European Union, under two main research projects: “CD-ROM da PO.EX: Poesia Experimental Portuguesa, Cadernos e Catálogos” [The PO.EX CD-ROM: Portuguese Experimental Poetry, Notebooks and Catalogues] (2005-2008) and “PO.EX’70-80: Arquivo Digital da Literatura Experimental Portuguesa” [PO.EX’70-80: Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature] (2010-2013).

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) is a research project (2010-2013) that gathered several European academic partners from Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Scotland, England, Slovenia, and a non-academic institution, New Media Scotland. Funded by the HERA Joint Research Programme and by the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities Programme from the European Commission, the project is led by Scott Rettberg (University of Bergen, Norway). In addition to conferences, exhibitions, workshops, seminars, anthologies (e.g. European Electronic Literature), videos and numerous publication, the project’s main outcome was the development of the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (http://elmcip.net).

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 ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase) is an open-access research database for documenting information about authors, works of electronic literature, critical writing that references those works, publishers, organizations, events, and teaching resources about e-lit. We propose a hands-on workshop session, ideally two hours in length, to be held in a computer lab with a networked computer available for each participant. The workshop will include a presentation of how authors, scholars, and teachers can use the Knowledge Base for professional purposes, to bring readers to their work, to support their research, and to develop their courses. Contributor accounts will be created for all workshop attendees, and the bulk of the session will be devoted to documenting participant’s work in the Knowledge Base itself, actively creating new records. We will focus in particular on documenting works and papers which have been presented at the ELO conferences.

Participants are encouraged to bring a CV or other documentation of their work to the workshop, in order to have references at hand and easily accessible. The Knowledge Base is intended to document the field of electronic literature as a dynamic field of practice, one whose cultural import becomes more comprehensible when the activities of authors, scholars, publications, performances, and exhibitions can be related to each other, in multiple configurations. We’ve designed the Knowledge Base as a platform in which this complex web of relations is made visible. Users can begin to trace the activities generated or enhanced by a work as it circulates among different reading communities. When a record of a critical article is documented in the KB, all the creative works it references are noted, and cross-references then automatically appear on the record for the work itself. Similarly, cross-references are made to every other type of record it touches—when a work by a particular author is entered, a reference automatically appears on that author's page, likewise for works published by a publisher and so forth. The Knowledge Base is a contributory project, built collectively. It offers authors, critics, and teachers of electronic literature an opportunity to document and share their work, and in the process make it usable to others who are also building the field. Because the Knowledge Base is semantically structured and outputs records in RDF format, it also makes works entered it more visible in machine-readable and processable ways to search engines such as Google and to other scholarly databases. The Knowledge Base is further working with the Consortium for Electronic Literature (CELL) to share the records documented within it with other databases in the field, such as the ELO Directory, the NT2 database, and the Creative Nation database of Australian electronic literature. All records produced for the Knowledge Base are licensed with a Creative Commons share-alike license, increasing the utility and visibility of the information within it.

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"