A special issue of the journal SPIEL.
Electronic literature and E-Poetry is updated, interactive, subjective and well networked. But how durable is it? How long do texts published on web pages remain readable? What happens to the old issues if one visits a literature magazine “via the web”? How is a blog archived? Should texts that are deliberately published on the fleeting medium internet be conserved at all for the future?
It seems ironic that the transient character of the internet is attached to a medium that seems to be very suitable for documentation and archiving. And still each website only remains available on the internet at its original address for less than 100 days on average. Afterwards it moves or is erased completely. This is of course also the case for Net literature.
However, different genres turn the tables. These conceptions don’t even have the problems of archiving and musealization, but explicitly excluded them. The temporary and transience becomes the topic of literature.
In this special issue of the magazine SPIEL: “Siegener periodical for International Empirical Literature Study” new methods and objects of the archiving of Net Literature are presented with very different points of view being represented. In addition to theoretical articles on this topic’s specific problems, Net authors, Electronic literature authors, E-poets and institutes engaged in or familiar with archiving comment on this.
Please find more information at: http://archivierung.hartling.org/. The special issue can be ordered from: http://bit.ly/ax2GBH.