Other Teaching Resource

An anthology of downloadable texts meant to provide some foundational readings to approaching electronic literature.

"This is not a complete overview of the state of the field, or an attempt to create a “canon.” If the image here is skewed or flawed, it’s only because it’s meant to be a launching pad for an independent investigation of the genre, either as a scholar or artist. Inspired by the New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, this selection is a mixture of theoretical texts, creative works, manifestos, critical readings, interviews, Wikipedia articles, encyclopedia entries, lists, blog posts, and other miscellany. It only includes work that can be included in a book (or a .pdf)."

(Source: Adapted from Stefan's description)

UbuWeb is a vast online archive documenting experimental writing practices from the 20th Century through the present. "Concrete poetry's utopian pan-internationalist bent was clearly articulated by Max Bense in 1965 when he stated, "…concrete poetry does not separate languages; it unites them; it combines them. It is this part of its linguistic intention that makes concrete poetry the first international poetical movement." Its ideogrammatic self-contained, exportable, universally accessible content mirrors the utopian pan-linguistic dreams of cross-platform efforts on today's Internet; Adobe's PDF (portable document format) and Sun System's Java programming language each strive for similarly universal comprehension. The pioneers of concrete poetry could only dream of the now-standard tools used to make language move and morph, stream and scream, distributed worldwide instantaneously at little cost. Essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally "be free": on UbuWeb, we give it away and have been doing so since 1996. We publish in full color for pennies. We receive submissions Monday morning and publish them Monday afternoon. UbuWeb's work never goes "out of print." UbuWeb is a never-ending work in progress: many hands are continually building it on many platforms." (Source: UbuWeb)

Online lectures delivered as part of the MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University from 2006-2010. Visiting lectures, delivered online by leading practitioners across the world, were an integral part of the course. Teaching via video, Skype, chatrooms, slideshows, websites and plain old-fashioned discussion boards, the speakers outline the realities of working in new media; detail the rigorous creative and theoretical challenges, and celebrate the sheer pleasure of breaking new artistic ground in this dynamic medium. Their legacy and influence still continues in the work of CWNM students as they graduate and begin their careers. (Source: Creative Writing and New Media Archive site)

A collection of URLs collected by the Electronic Literature Organization in partnership with the US LIbrary of Congress and the Archive-It project of the Internet Archive, the collection consists of important context websites, collections of works, and individual works which are crawled regularly and archived in the collection and in the Internet Archive.

Transcriptions is a NEH-funded curricular development and research initiative started in 1998 by the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to focus on literary study and information society. The goal of Transcriptions is to demonstrate a paradigm—at once theoretical, instructional, and technical—for integrating new information media and technology within the core work of a traditional humanities discipline. Transcriptions seeks to "transcribe" between past and present understandings of what it means to be a literate, educated, and humane person.

Put in the form of a question: what is the relation between being "well-read" and "well-informed"? How, in other words, can contemporary culture sensibly create a bridge between its past norms of cultural literacy and its present sense of the immense power of information culture?

To address this question, Transcriptions has developed an integrated combination of the following:

• curriculum 
• research agenda
• technology model
• supporting resources (pedagogical, research, and technical guides)
• special events

The idea is to build a working paradigm of a humanities department of the future that takes the information revolution to its heart as something to be seriously learned from, wrestled with, and otherwise placed in engagement with the lore of past or other societies with their own undergirding technologies and media. Transcriptions also collaborates with related digital humanities, arts, and society projects at UCSB and elsewhere. 

(Source: project webpage)

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Transcriptions, begun in 1998, focuses on work in digital humanities and new media.  Our overall goal is “to build a working paradigm of a humanities department of the future that takes the information revolution to its heart as something to be seriously learned from, wrestled with, and otherwise placed in engagement with the lore of past or other societies with their own undergirding technologies and media.” True to the initial vision, then, Transcriptions endeavors to be flexible, responsive, and creative.

Currently, three areas of inquiry structure our activities:

• Electronic literature beyond the screen (new reading formats; locative and mobile media; alternate reality games)
• Media ecologies (high-tech trash; media environments’ visualizations of climate and landscape; ALife; biomedia)
• IT and the so-called new economy (theorizations of the network society, information society, and digital capitalism)

Transcriptions will host lectures, conferences, and other events that will be of general interest to the English deparment and to colleagues across the university. Watch the Transcriptions blog for announcements and coverage of Center-related news. Please feel free to contact us with any ideas you have about our themes and activities.

(About Transcriptions webpage)

A short video documenting 51 responses to the question "What inspired you to get involved with Digital Literature?" filmed at the 2010 ELO conference at Brown University.

A collection of interlinked materials for studying digital culture assembled primarily from George P. Landow's courses on Hypertext and Literary Theory and Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, and Critical Theory at Brown University. Course syllabi are available, and because the majority of materials collected there were created students in these courses visitors can glean ideas about how to design and/or participate in long-running courses, led by a permanent faculty member, in which students play an active and essential role in developing effective course materials updated each time the class is offered.

Authoring Software is a collection of information about new media authoring tools; statements about their work by writers and software creators; and information about conferences, resources, and programs by and for the electronic literature community, Authoring Software is a website-based learning environment for: teachers and students of new media writing who want to explore various authoring environments; new media writers and poets, who are interested in how their peers approach their work; and readers, who want to understand how new media writers and poets create their work. The project currently contains documentation of work by new media writers, text artists, and story-tellers from all over the World, including New York, Chicago, Colorado, California, Oregon, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Washington State, Maryland, rural Ohio, rural Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Canada, Australia, England, Ireland, Spain, and Switzerland. From many countries, from rural and small town areas, as well as from urban and suburban areas, Featured software includes commercial applications such as Flash and Dreamweaver; applications created for the hypertext and educational community such as Storyspace and Literatronica; and artist-developed software, such as Fox Harrell's GRIOT System, Snapdragon, created in Caitlin Fisher's AR Lab at York University, and Eugenio Tisselli's MidiPoet.