Electronic Literature Organization

Software Studies Gets Underway at UC San Diego!

Wednesday, May 21st, from 12:30-5:00pm, ELO board member Noah Wardrip-Fruin and the Software Studies Initiative at UC San Diego invite you to attend a public event:

Software studies is a research field that examines software and cyberinfrastructure using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social sciences. Following on the first Software Studies Workshop organized by Matthew Fuller (Rotterdam, 2006 http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/Seminars2/softstudworkshop), the SoftWhere @ University of California, San Diego is a foundational event bringing together key figures in this emerging area to inaugurate the field. The event aims to coalesce a high-level conversation about what it means to study software cultures, and the direction and goals of Software Studies as an emerging movement. It will take place at Calit2, a pre-eminant research center for future computing and telecommunication (http://www.calit2.net/), where the Software Studies Initiative @ UCSD is located and currently collaborating with researchers on several exciting projects. SoftWhere has has also been timed to precede (and co-ordinate with) the the HASTAC II conference (http://www.hastac.org/) which will begin in nearby U. California Irvine on Thursday evening.
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A new book by N. Katherine Hayles: Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary was released today from the University of Notre Dame Press. The publication of the book is a major event for the field of electronic literature. In addition to the printed book, each copy comes with a CD-ROM of The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. In addition, there is a great website accompanying the book hosted here on the ELO site at newhorizons.eliterature.org that includes syllabi for electronic literature courses, a blog/forum, and an additional online anthology of essays by students and scholars of e-lit. (more…)

Following their game plan (or walkthrough) for First Person, Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have brought their anthology Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media to the electronic book review (ebr) to bring the threads of discussion to life. Section One, Computational Fictions, has arrived at ebr and the subsequent sections will soon follow.

Together with Third Person, these two anthologies will form a trilogy of works from scholars, artists, and industry professionals on interactive narrative and drama forms. According to ebr,

The material in these volumes and on ebr represents a new level of dialogue between creators and critics about emerging forms of fictional and playable experience.

The ebr publication of the texts will not only open the book to readers across the Internet, but will also offer a site for continued conversation as readers respond to the texts through ripostes.

The essays previously published in the ebr “First Person” thread evoked (and provoked) responses from such central figures as N. Katherine Hayles, Henry Jenkins, and Stephanie Strickland.

The publication continues ebr’s long-standing relationship with MIT press, and that press’ continued work toward public online discussion of its texts, as seen in the recent and ongoing vetting of Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive Processing.

The Table of Contents of the Second Person release follows. (more…)

The Electronic Literature Organization is happy to announce the addition of three new board members, Stuart Moulthrop, John Cayley, and Mark Marino.

Full bios follow:

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In the latest selection from the Electronic Book Review, Associate Editor Lori Emerson brings together both critics and creators of electronic poetry, some of whom established themselves at the very start and many more who are recent entrants in the field of electronic literature. Essays on print poetry as well as born digital poetry help to situate the field in both a trans-disciplinary and trans-national context.

The collection (more than twenty essays in all) includes three review-essays on the Electronic Literature Collection (volume 1), published by the ELO: “How to Think (with) Thinkertoys” by Adalaide Morris; “Letters That Matter” by John Zuern; and “Electronic Literature circa WWW (and Before)” by Chris Funkhouser. New essays on and by Douglas Barbour, Michael Barrett, Greg Betts, Christof Bruno, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Cain, Robert Creeley, Clayton Eshleman, Alan Fisher, Eduardo Kac, Hugh Kenner, Walter Benn Michaels, Jay Murphy, Janet Neigh, Soren Pold, Christopher Nolan, Jaishree Odin, Tom Raworth, Maggie O’Sullivan, Stephanie Strickland, Angela Szczepaniak, Steve Tomasula, and Eugene Thacker.

In The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in Programmable Media editors Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer have put together a broad table of contents — including contributions from Jean-Pierre Balpe, Philippe Bootz, Laura Borrà s Castanyer (a member of ELO’s Literary Advisory Board), Markku Eskelinen, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Marie-Laure Ryan, Roberto Simanowski, and ELO Vice-President Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The volume is now available in the U.S.

MIT Press has just published Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Edited by Pat Harrigan and ELO VP Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the book includes contributions by ELO board members Helen Thorington, Talan Memmott, and Nick Montfort — as well as a diverse collection of writers, game designers, computer scientists, improv actors, media artists, and more. The book’s introduction and table of contents are available online.

The frAme: Online Journal of Culture & Technology which published new media writing, art, interviews and essays from 1995-2004, has stopped actively publishing new work, but it’s going out with a bang rather than a whimper. Simon Mills is editing a project, framed including retrospective interviews with many of the writers and artists whose works were published in frAme. The first installment of framed includes provacative interviews with Mark Amerika, Matthew Fuller, Christy Sheffield Sanford, and Alan Sondheim. More interviews are coming soon.

In this issue of ebr, the “waves” thread features essays on “Feminisms: Post, Past, and Present,” introduced by Elizabeth Joyce.

The “critical ecologies” thread includes a review of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and Our Public Needs.

In “end construction,” another response to Lori Emerson’s November 2005 review of Walter Benn Michaels.

“electropoetics” offers Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck on “Marie Laure-Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality”.

Plus reviews of new electronic fictions “Man in the Stretcher,” by Kenneth Bernard, and “Charlie P” by Dick Kalich.

Although the Banff New Media Institute’s journal horizon zero: digital art + culture in canada ceased publication in December 2004, its 18 back issues are very much available in its web archive. horizon zero was a multimedia and bilingual “virtual space dedicated to creativity and critical ideas in the new media canon.” Its 18 issues include web-based interactives, essays and journalistic writings, fiction and poetry, video, animation, games, and other digital artworks.

ebr: Electronic Book Review, has been redesigned. The rebuilt site promises greater “power to gather text, gloss and cross-reference, spool threads” and “fly high and see the weave.

The current issue features Brian Kim Stefans on “Privileging Language: The Text in Electronic Writing,” Scott Rettberg on “First Person, Games, and the Place of Electronic Literature,” John Cayley on “Bass Resonance,” and Lori Emerson’s review of Walter Benn Michaels’ The Shape of the Signifier, “On Materialities, Meanings, and the Shape of Things.”

Watch the archived video of UCLA Department of English Professor N. Katherine Hayles speaking about her new book, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, at a recent event at the University of Umea, Sweden’s HUMlab. The talk is also available via podcast.