pre-web

Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 2 is an open-source, multimedia book that documents seven pre-web works of electronic literature held in the Electronic Literature Lab's (ELL) library at WSUV. Written and produced by the 2019 ELL Team—Dene Grigar, Nicholas Schiller, Holly Slocum, Mariah Gwin, Kathleen Zoller, Moneca Roath, and Andrew Nevue—the book features Traversals of Kathyrn Cramer's "In Small & Large Pieces," Deena Larsen's Samplers, Richard Holeton's Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, Tim McLaughlin's Notes Toward Absolute Zero, and Stephanie Strickland's True North. Released December 2019.

Source: Dene Grige's website nouspace.net

At the recent ELO conference in Montréal Leonardo Flores introduced the concept of “3rd Generation” electronic literature. I was at another session during his influential talk, but I heard about the concept from him beforehand and have read about it on Twitter (a 3rd generation context, I believe) and Flores’s blog (more of a 2nd generation context, I believe). One of the aspects of this concept is that the third generation of e-lit writers makes use of existing platforms (Twitter APIs, for instance) rather than developing their own interfaces. Blogging is a bit different from hand-rolled HTML, but one administers one’s own blog. When Flores & I spoke, I realized that I have what seems like a very similar idea of how to divide electronic literature work today. Not exactly the same, I’m sure, but pretty easily defined and I think with a strong correspondence to this three-generation concept. I describe it like this: * Pre-Web * Web * Post-Web (Source: Post Position)

From the ELL Website:

Written and produced by the Electronic Literature Lab Team––Dene Grigar, PhD; Nicholas Schiller, MLIS; Vanessa Rhodes, B.A.; Mariah Gwin, Veronica Whitney, B.A.; and Katie Bowen––Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Born Digital Pre-Web Media provides scholars with access to fragile, seminal works published on floppy disks and CD-ROMs between 1986-1996, including:

• Sarah Smith’s science fiction hypertext novel King of Space (1991)
• David Kolb’s hypertext essay “Socrates in the Labyrinth” (1994)
• J. Yellowlees Douglas’ hypertext narrative “I Have Said Nothing” (1994) 
• Thomas M. Disch’s text adventure AMNESIA (1986)
• Rob Kendall’s hypertext animated poem A Life Set for Two (1996)
• Judy Malloy’s generative hypertext narrative its name was Penelope (Version 3.0, 1993)
• Mary-Kim Arnold’s hypertext narrative poem “Lust” (1994)

The book features 85,000 words of artist biographies, descriptions of media, and critical essays; 350 photos of artists, works, and their original packaging; and 55 videos of artist readings and interviews and Live Stream Traversals.

Critical essays include:

• “Contextualizing Sarah Smith’s King of Space“
• “Untangling the Threads of the Labyrinth in David Kolb’s ‘Socrates in the Labyrinth'”
• “Saying Something about J. Yellowlees Douglas’ ‘I Have Said Nothing'”
• “Remembering the 1980s with Thomas M. Disch’s AMNESIA“
• “Love and Loss in Robert Kendall’s A Life Set for Two”
• “On Memory, the Muse, and Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope“
• “Repetition in Mary-Kim Arnold’s ‘Lust'” 

It also offers scholarly resources and versioning and publication information about each work.