2012 marks the 20^th anniversary of the first session at the MLA on electronic literature, and, fittingly, the ELO was a strong force at this year’s conference this past January.

A number of projects were showcased, making use of multiple platforms, including desktops (curated by Dene Grigar), mobile devices (curated by Kathi Inman Berens) and live performance (curated by Lori Emerson).

The stories told this year made an impact on all who came to see them. The exhibit was covered by electronic literature experts from around country—Laurie N. Taylor, Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Florida said “The E-Lit Exhibit is an excellent example of making scholarship count in terms of impact, return on investment, engagement, and all of the other work that scholarship ideally endeavors to achieve.”

The exhibit was featured in Digital Humanities Now, and got a shout-out in HASTAC’s article on the MLA conference, called “Once More with Feeling”: How the MLA Found Its Heart. References to the exhibit made their way into scholarly databases, and even new scholarship and creative output was generated by people involved with the exhibit.

You can find more on the MLA exhibit here, and can view videos of the performances here

According to Rettberg, the article attempts “to provide a relatively comprehensive history of our accomplishments from 1999 to date.” Recounting its development from its early days at Brown University to its current HQ at MIT, the article offers an important review of the evolution of the organization into its current international community of artists and critics.

The issue, co-edited by Rettberg and Patricia Tomaszek focuses on e-lit communities and is the first of a two-part series. Rettberg and Tomaszek work together on the research project Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP).

The international collection of authors include Simon Biggs and Penny Travlou, Philippe Bootz, Serge Bouchardon, Donna Leishman, ELO-President Nick Montfort and Emily Short, ELO Director Stuart Moulthrop, Jill Walker Rettberg, Hans Kristian Rustad, and Rob Witig.

The articles cover the histories of communities ranging from the print literary world to IF to works of Flash and beyond. This first part of the series offers a key collection of histories for any student of electronic literature.

Dene Grigar

532. Reading Writing Interfaces: Electronic Literature’s Past and Present
Saturday, 7 January, 1:45–3:00 p.m., 613, WSCC
“Early Authors of E-Literature, Platforms of the Past”

730. New Media Narratives and Old Prose Fiction
Sunday, January 8, 1:45-3:00 p.m. in 310, WSCC
“Contrasts and Convergences of Electronic Literature”

Carolyn Guertin

301. Reconfiguring Publishing
Saturday, January, 7, 1:45–3:00 p.m., Grand A, Sheraton
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Information Technology
Presiding: Carolyn Guertin, Univ. of Texas, Arlington; William Thompson, Western Illinois Univ.

Margie Luesebrink

532. Reading Writing Interfaces: Electronic Literature’s Past and Present
Saturday, 7 January, 1:45–3:00 p.m., 613, WSCC
“Seven Types of Interface in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two”

Nick Montfort

730. New Media Narratives and Old Prose Fiction
Sunday, January 8, 1:45-3:00 p.m. in 310, WSCC
“Computing Language and Poetry”

Rita Raley

301. Reconfiguring Publishing
Friday, January, 6, 1:45–3:00 p.m., Grand A, Sheraton
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Information Technology

410. Reconfiguring the Literary: Narratives, Methods, Theories
Saturday, January 7, 8:30–9:45 a.m., 608, Washington State Convention Center
Program arranged by the Association for Computers and the Humanities

Stephanie Strickland

532. Reading Writing Interfaces: Electronic Literature’s Past and Present
Saturday, 7 January, 1:45–3:00 p.m., 613, WSCC
“Seven Types of Interface in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two”

Joe Tabbi

730. New Media Narratives and Old Prose Fiction
Sunday, January 8, 1:45-3:00 p.m. in 310, WSCC
“New Media: Its Use and Abuse for Literature and for Life”

In conjunction with these collections, Lori Emerson has organized an evening performance of electronic literature at the Richard Hugo House. The readings will feature Jim Andrews, Kate Armstrong, Ian Bogost, John Cayley, Erin Costello, Aaron Angello, Marjorie Luesebrink, Mark Marino, Nick Montfort, Brian Kim Stefans, and Stephanie Strickland.

Exhibit Location and Time
“Electronic Literature” takes place in Seattle, WA, at the Washington State Convention Center in Room 609. Exhibit times are:

Thursday, 5 January, 12 noon to 7:00 p.m.
Friday, 6 January, 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, 7 January, 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

E-Lit Reading
Friday, 6 January, 8 p.m to 10.30 p.m.
Richard Hugo House 1634 11th Ave.
Seattle, WA 98122-2419

ELO is excited to announce the publication of its 2nd collection of electronic literature. With its wide ranging forms, Volume 2 picks up where ELC1 left off, offering a diverse anthology of works from an international group of authors in a variety of languages and forms.

The independent board of editors for the second collection included Laura Borràs, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley, and Brian Kim Stefans, key e-lit artists and critics in their own rights. Their deep knowledge of the field helped them gather works that represent the breadth and variety of e-lit. Also, the addition of Borràs allowed the team to review works in Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese.

The new collection includes 63 works drawn from (and extending beyond):

• Countries: Austria, Australia, Catalonia, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Israel, The Netherlands, Portugal, Peru, Spain, UK, US
• Languages: Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish
• Formats: Flash, Processing, Java, JavaScript, Inform, HTML, C++

Like ELC1, the collection can be browsed by author, title, or keyword.

ELC2 speaks to both the continuity as well as the bright future of electronic literature. The works include many of the emerging categories of e-lit: mash-ups, geolocative, codework, as well as “traditional” and evolving forms such as hypertext, chatbots, and interactive fiction. The authors list presents readers with both veterans and newcomers to the field.

As with Volume 1, the editors have published a hard copy of the collection, though this time on a DVD rather than a CD. However, they have also added works that can only be viewed on computers with Internet access, such as Senghor on the Rocks, which uses geodata from Google Maps.

ELC2 is published under a Creative Commons license, which means the collection can be freely shared, non-commercially, between individuals, libraries, and schools, provided that appropriate attribution is maintained and the works are unmodified.

ELC2 is ready for your syllabi and reading list. As a complement to our Electronic Literature Directory, and a continuation from Volume 1, this collection offers an anthology of works that pushes through the boundaries of literary forms, creating new kinds of experiences for interacting readers.

The posts mention ELO and ELO co-founder Robert Coover along with works by Jay Bushman and others. There’s even a mention of ELO-President Nick Montfort, alluding to his work on his IF platform Curveship.

Check out the posts and join the conversation as New Scientist readers discover e-lit.

The posts:

• Storytelling 2.0: The digital death of the author
• Storytelling 2.0: Exploring the news game
• Storytelling 2.0: Open your books to augmented reality
• Storytelling 2.0: Adventures in a virtual reality cave
• Storytelling 2.0: The epic poet of Twitter
• Storytelling 2.0: When new narratives meet old brains
• Storytelling 2.0: Read e-lit for yourself
• Storytelling 2.0: Metamorphosis of the storybook

Taking over the reins from Joseph Tabbi will be incoming President Nick Montfort and Vice President Dene Grigar. Also, ELO announces 3 new members to the ELO Board of Directors: Fox Harrell, Carolyn Guertin, and Jason Nelson. Sandy Baldwin will take over as Treasurer and Mark Marino will continue as Director of Communication.

The term of the ELO President is three years.

Below you will find bios:

Nick Montfort, President

Nick Montfort writes computational and constrained poetry, develops computer games, and is a critic, theorist, and scholar of computational art and media. He is associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Montfort’s digital media writing projects include the group blog Grand Text Auto, the ppg256 series of 256-character poetry generators; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative “occupation” of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; and several works of interactive fiction: Book and Volume, Ad Verbum, and Winchester’s Nightmare.

Montfort, with Ian Bogost, wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009), the first book in the Platform Studies series. He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), and, with William Gillespie, 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which the Oulipo acknowledged as the world’s longest literary palindrome. He also edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Scott Rettberg, ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2003). His current work is on narrative variation in interactive fiction and the role of platforms in creative computing.

Dene Grigar, Vice President:

Dene Grigar is an Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Technology and Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver who works in the area of electronic literature, emergent technology and cognition, and ephemera. She is the author of “Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts” and “The Jungfrau Tapes: A Conversation with Diana Slattery about The Glide Project“, both of which have appeared in the Iowa Review Web, and When Ghosts Will Die (with Canadian multimedia artist Steve Gibson), a piece that experiments with motion tracking technology to produce networked narratives. Her most recent project is the “Fort Vancouver Mobile Project,” a locative / mixed media effort that brings together a core team of 20 scholars, digital storytellers, new media producers, historians, and archaeologists to create location-aware nonfiction content for mobile phones to be used at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. She serves as Associate Editor for Leonardo Reviews

New Board Members

Fox Harrell:

Fox Harrell is a researcher, author, and artist exploring the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. He and his laboratory, the Imagination, Computation, and Expression [ICE] Lab/Studio develop new forms of computational narrative, gaming, and related digital infrastructures and technical-cultural media with a basis in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the department of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Carolyn Guertin:

Carolyn Guertin has a dual appointment in new media. She is Director of the eCreate Lab and Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also a faculty member at Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany and Linz, Austria, an international low residency MFA program in new media at Danube University Krems. She is curator of the celebrated collection Assemblage: The Online Women’s New Media Gallery out of the U.K., and was Senior McLuhan Fellow at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, where she was SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow from 2004-06. She has been a Literary Adviser to the Electronic Literature Organization since its inception, is a member of the MLA Committee on Information Technology, and is an editorial board member of Convergence.

She earned her PhD with a study of cyberfeminist digital narrative and the technologies of memory in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has taught, exhibited and published internationally, and does theoretical work in: cyberfeminism, hacktivism, born-digital arts and literatures, (global) film futures, information aesthetics, postliteracy and the social practices surrounding technology (especially social networking and participatory culture). She is working on a new book on new media art, authorship and the politics of creation in our digital world.

Jason Nelson:

Born from the computerless land of farmers and spring thunderstorms, Jason Nelson somehow stumbled into creating awkward and wondrous digital poems and interactive stories of odd lives. Currently he teaches Net Art and Electronic Literature at Griffith University in the Gold Coast’s contradictory lands. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around globe in New York, Mexico, Taiwan, Spain, Singapore and Brazil, at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, ACM, ELO and dozens of other acronyms. But in the web based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the millions of visitors his artwork/digital poetry portal http://www.secrettechnology.com attracts each year.

The workshop, attended by approximately 150 electronic literary scholars and artists, marks a look back at the foundational work of Robert Coover and the continuation of the ELO PAD project (ARCHIVE) and an the group’s visionary glimpse at the future of electronic literature.

Conference details can be found here.

Twitter stream is tagged: #ELOAI streaming from @eliterature

Among with readings, performances, screenings, and critical panels, the conference will also announce the Electronic Literature Directory 2.0 and the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2.

The conference features a number of tributes to Robert Coover, including artwork and panels that re-explore the work that continues to fascinate and drive this digital avant-garde.

Two opportunities are now available at the University of Bergen’s Digital Culture program (http://www.uib.no/rg/digitalculture) for scholars of electronic literature.

FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR/LECTURER IN DIGITAL CULTURE http://catalog.cies.org/

POSTDOC IN ELECTRONIC LITERATURE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Details:

FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR/LECTURER IN DIGITAL CULTURE http://catalog.cies.org/

For the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 years (or any single semester within that time frame), a Fulbright scholar position will be available at the University of Bergen. The scholar will take part in the teaching and research activities of the Digital Culture program and Digital Culture research group in the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen. The scholar will be expected to teach three courses in digital culture and digital media aestheics over the course of the year (1.5 courses if a single semester) and to evaluate student work. This is equivalent to a 2/1 teaching load in the American system. Courses will run 13 teaching weeks, with two two-hour meetings per week. Courses will be lecture and seminar. Depending on needs and expertise, courses the scholar might teach include DIKULT103: Digital Genres: Digital Art, Electronic Literature and Computer Games; DIKULT105: Web Design; DIKULT203: Electronic Literature; DIKULT251: Critical Perspectives on Information Technologies and Society; DIKULT303: Digital Media Aesthetics; or DIKULT304: Graduate Seminar: Topics in Digital Culture. The scholar will also be expected to participate in and contribute to the biweekly meetings of the Digital Culture research group and to give one public lecture on a central topic of his/her research.

Fulbright scholarships are available to USA citizens residing in the USA. The position is open to a PhD with at least two years teaching experience, though candidates with another terminal degree in a relevant field, such an MFA in digital writing or an MLIS with a concentration in digital humanities, might also be considered.

Contact Scott Rettberg via the address on the catalog listing for further information. The application deadline for 2011-2012 August 1, 2010. A letter of invitation is recommended.

POSTDOC IN ELECTRONIC LITERATURE BIBLIOGRAPHY

At the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic studies there is a vacant position as postdoctoral fellow in digital culture, for a period of 20 months. The position is financed by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), as part of the project “Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” (ELMCIP – http://elmcip.net).

A postdoctoral  position is a temporary appointment.  The term of employment for this position is 20 months, beginning in Fall 2010. It is not possible for any person to work under more than one temporary appointment for the same institution.

The position entails 75% work on the ELMCIP project and 25% independent research related to the indexing, archiving, and dissemination of born-digital literature. Work on ELMCIP will include the development of an online bibliography of works and contextual information about twentieth century and contemporary electronic literature. Working with researchers in the digital culture group, the postdoctoral fellow will have primary responsibility for developing the standards and information architecture of the knowledge base, for writing and contributing records to the database,and for editing and preparing materials contributed by other researchers.

Applicants must have achieved a Norwegian doctorate or equivalent education abroad, or have presented the dissertation for assessment by the closing date for applications.  It is a prerequisite that the dissertation has been approved before appointment is granted.

Additional information about the position is available by contacting: