Electronic Literature Organization

The ELO’s Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 has been a great success for the electronic literature community. Over the past year, it has been widely distributed, read, and reviewed, and has been utilized in classrooms all over the Americas and Europe. It is the only collection of its kind — a free and freely distributed, Creative Commons-licensed, edited selection of sixty diverse exemplary works of electronic literature.

We are pleased to announce sponsorship opportunities for the second volume of the Collection, to be produced over the course of the next year. The publication of the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection was made possible by the support of institutional sponsors, academic programs and organizations, who each contributed about $1,000.

The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 will be a web and DVD publication of approximately fifty works of electronic literature including hypertext fiction and poetry, interactive fiction, digital poetry, and other forms that use the capabilities of the computer to provide compelling literary experiences. Works are selected from an open international call for works and by invitation from the editorial board, with a goal to collect, preserve, and make widely available exemplary works of e-lit from the past and present. The project is also distinguished by the fact that the works published in the Collection are distributed under a Creative Commons license, which enables students, library patrons, and other individual users to recopy and distribute the works. The scholarly outcome of the project is the publication of 3,000 copies of the DVD and web publication of the same content. The DVD will be widely distributed, particularly to students at institutions where new media is studied. Three leading writers in the field of literary new media, Talan Memmott, Brian Kim Stefans, and Rita Raley, will serve as the editorial board of the second volume of the Collection. The call for works for the ELC2 will be announced at the ELO’s upcoming Visionary Landscapes Conference this May.

Benefits for Institutional Partners: If you choose to participate, your institution’s name will be listed as a project partner on the published DVD package, and your institution’s name and logo will be displayed on the project web site. The project will thus serve to enhance your institution’s reputation as an active stakeholder in the development of the field of electronic literature. More importantly, your students and curriculum will benefit. Each institutional partner will receive 50 copies of the DVD for your institution and students’ use. The Collection can serve as a curriculum base for a course in contemporary electronic literature. As a project partner, you will also have the opportunity to host a launch event for the Collection that the ELO would help you to plan and organize, including readings of works of electronic literature and free distribution of the DVD. We can also make internship opportunities available to your undergraduates in the ELO, as well as writing opportunities for graduate students interested in contributing to our presentation of works on the ELO Directory and Showcase.

Contributions will be used for the material costs involved in the design, publication, and distribution of the Collection.

To make sponsorship arrangements and to process a contribution, please contact our Managing Director at MITH, helen DeVinney (hdevinney@gmail.com). You can also contact Joseph Tabbi (jtabbi@gmail.com) or Scott Rettberg (scott@retts.net) with any questions about this opportunity or other ELO programs.

Individual donations in support of the publication of the ELC2 are also welcome. To support this program, make a donation via Network for Good or Paypal.

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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ELO Meetup at the MLA

As we have for the past several years, we are planning an informal meet-up for people affiliated with or interested in the Electronic Literature Organization at this year’s MLA conference. This year, we are planning on meeting at the “Big Bar” at the conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency, after the “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating” panel, from 5-6 PM on Friday, December 28th. We plan to converge on the bar and have a drink or two. Afterwards, for those who would like to continue the conversation and take advantage of the world’s best deep-dish pizza, we’re reserving some tables at a nearby restaurant. If you’re only planning on joining us for a drink, just show up at the Big Bar at 5PM. If you want in on the pizza, please send an email to Stefanie Boese (sboese2 at uic dot edu), indicating how many people plan to attend and your preference for sausage, spinach, or mixed vegetarian pizza. We’ll put the order in ahead, so we won’t have to wait long in the restaurant to eat. We will “go dutch,” splitting the bill evenly and paying in cash.

Electronic Literature & Related Panels at the MLA 2007

This year’s convention features several panels (”New Reading Interfaces,” “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, and Navigating,” and “Electronic Literature: After Afternoon”) that are explicitly focused on electronic literature, and several that are more tangentially related to the subject. Below is a mini conference guide focused on e-lit. (more…)

The deadline for Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference has been extended to December 16, 2007.

The conference takes place from May 29-June 1, 2008 at Washington State University Vancouver in lovely Vancouver, WA. It is sponsored by both the Electronic Literature Organization and WSUV. Speakers include Mark Amerika, Sue Thomas, and John Cayley. A Media Arts Show will be held in conjunction with the conference and will feature art such as digital sculpture, net art, multimedia installations and performances, electronic music, and the like. Workshops in audio production and reading elit are also scheduled.

According to conference co-chair, Dene Grigar,

It should prove to be an interesting weekend for anyone involved in digital media projection, scholarship, and teaching.

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference

Thursday, May 29-Sunday, June 1, 2008
Vancouver, Washington

Sponsored by Washington State University Vancouver & the Electronic Literature Organization

Dene Grigar & John Barber, Co-Chairs

http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/programs/dtc/elo08.html
Producing a work of electronic literature entails not only practice in the literary arts but sometimes also the visual, sonic, and the performative arts; knowledge of computing devices and software programs; and experience in collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and hybridity. In short, electronic literature requires its artists to see beyond traditional approaches and sensibilities into what best can be described as visionary landscapes where, as Mark Amerika puts it, artists “celebrate an interdisciplinary practice from a literary and writerly perspective that allows for other kinds of practice-based art-research and knowledge sharing.”

To forward the thinking about new approaches and sensibilities in the media arts, The Electronic Literature Organization and Washington State University Vancouver’s Digital Technology and Culture program are inviting submissions to the Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference to be held from May 29 to June 1, 2008 in Vancouver, Washington.

“Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference” is interested in papers that explore forms of digital media that utilize images, sound, movement, and user interaction as well as––or in lieu of––words and that explore how we read, curate, and critique such works. Topics may include:

• New, non-screen, environments for presenting multimedia writing and/or electronic literature
• Research labs and new media projects
• Strategies for reading electronic literary works
• Curating digital art
• Innovative approaches to critiquing electronic literature
• Emerging technologies for the production of multimedia writing and/or electronic literature
• Building audience for new media literary works and writing
• Digital, literary performances
• Publishing for print or electronic media connecting literature and the arts through common archiving and metatag strategies
• Artistic methods of composition used in intermedia storytelling(improvisation, collaboration, sample and remix, postproduction art, codework, hactivism, etc.

In conjunction with the three-day conference, there will be a juried Media Arts Show. Along with prizes for the most notable work, selected artists will be awarded bursaries to attend the conference featured at the show. Submission guidelines will be posted beginning August 15, 2007 on the conference website.

The keynote speaker is internationally renowned new media artist and writer, Mark Amerika, named a “Time Magazine 100 Innovator.” His artwork has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the ICA in London, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum and has been the topic of four retrospectives. Amerika is also the author of many books, including his recently published collection of artist writings entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press), founder of the Alt-X Network, and publisher of the electronic book review. He currently holds the position of Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Deadline for Submissions for Presentations: November, 30, 2007
Notification of Acceptance: December 30, 2007

Vancouver, Washington, located in the Pacific Northwest just across the Columbia River from Portland, OR, is about a six hour drive south of Vancouver, Canada and three hours south of Seattle, Washington. The conference day events will take place at Washington State University Vancouver, a Tier One research Institution built in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains with views of Mt. Hood and Mt. Saint Helens. The official conference hotel is the Hilton Vancouver located in downtown Vancouver, Washington with easy access to restaurants, bars, and evening conference events. Special rates have been negotiated for conference attendees. A conference shuttle will take attendees to and from the campus daily. The recommended airport is PDX at Portland, which is about a seven minute drive to downtown Vancouver, WA.

The cost of the conference is $150; graduate students and non-affiliated artists pay only $100. Conference registration covers access to all events, the reception, some meals, and shuttle transportation.

For more information, contact Dene Grigar at Grigar@vancouver.wsu.edu.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has devoted three pieces to the ELO/MITH Open Mic & Mouse event that was held as a kick-off to the Electronic Literature Symposium that was held at the University of Maryland in early May.

Click here for an article covering the event. Below the lead picture, you’ll find a link to the video story. And, on the right-hand side of the screen, under “Related Material,” you’ll see a link for an audio interview with N. Katherine Hayles.

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is pleased to announce two new additions to its series of publications. N. Katherine Hayles’s primer, “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” and Joseph Tabbi’s “Setting a Direction for the Directory: Toward a Semantic Literary Web” are now available on the Electronic Literature Organization’s website.

N. Katherine Hayles’s “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” establishes a foundation for understanding e-lit in its various forms and differentiates creative e-lit from other types of digital materials. This primer serves the twin purposes of reaching general readers and serving students and institutional audiences by providing descriptions of major characteristics of electronic literature and reflections on the nature of the field. This piece will also appear as the introductory chapter of Hayles’s book Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, and Teaching (coming from Notre Dame Press in fall 2007). The book will also include the CD-ROM of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One — a compendium of 60 digital works of poetry and prose, published by the ELO in October 2006.

Joseph Tabbi’s “Toward a Semantic Literary Web: Setting a Direction for the Directory” outlines and analyzes the critical issues relating to the description and classification of e-lit. Tabbi describes an approach that will allow the ELO Directory and other digital resources to be more useful, maintainable, transparent, and integrated with evolving technologies. The work organizes the terms of the problem into a call for an overall strategy of editorial and community-driven discourse about e-lit that will also be dependent on metadata solutions that are convergent with those described and implemented in other ELO publications.
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The Electronic Literature Collection, volume one is the topic of Katie Haegele’s column in the Philadelphia Inquirer this week. She writes:

But wouldn’t it be nice to get our arms around this thing, to get a sense of the full breadth and scope of what’s called digital literature?

The 60 works in the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection (ELC) (http://collection.eliterature.org) - edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland - show the wide range of forms that exist within the genre.

The column describes the keyword index and discusses four of the pieces included in volume one of the Collection in detail.

We’re writing to invite you to a meetup and happy hour at this year’s MLA for those with interests in electronic literature, new media arts, digital humanities, text-encoding, and related areas. We will have CD-ROMs to offer you of the Electronic Literature Organization’s latest free publication, the Electronic Literature Collection volume one. We’ll be meeting at the lobby bar of the Marriott Convention Center (the rotunda bar) at 5pm on Friday Dec. 29.

–Alan Liu, Nick Montfort

Neil Fraistat recently reported this news about Matt Kirschenbaum, a member of the ELO Board of Directors:

“I am delighted to share the good news that Matt Kirschenbaum, Assistant Professor of English and Acting Associate Director of MITH, has accepted the position of Associate Director of MITH. By now everyone in the MITH Community knows Matt as one of the leading theorists in the field of digital studies, as one of the most interesting practitioners of applied work in the digital humanities, as a blogger extraordinaire, and as one of our most compelling and thought-provoking colleagues. Matt brings to the think tank of MITH a deep and wide-ranging expertise on new media, visual culture, and the digital humanities.”

MITH becomes the new headquarters of the Electronic Literature Organization on July 1.