Electronic Literature Organization

Scott Rettberg writes: My lovely gravid wife has been stretching out my tattered ELO t-shirts and sweatshirt from back in the day, and it occurred to me that it has been a while since I was able to lay my hands on a new one. Until now, that is. This afternoon, I set up some ELO designs at the ELO Store at Cafe Press. Now available are the classic ELO sweatshirt ($29.99 in ash grey or white — ELO guy on the front/eliterature.org on the back), and t-shirt ($21.99 — ELO guy on the front/eliterature.org on the back), plus hats ($17.99 — khaki or white), coffee mug ($14.99), tote bag ($15.99), and last but not least, the ELO onesie for our youngest members ($13.99). A few bucks of every purchase come back to the ELO home office to support things like mailing out copies of the ELC. So show up at the Visionary Landscapes conference in style — get your ELO on.

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 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.

Check out The Chronicle of Higher Education’s coverage of ELO board member Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s latest project.

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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?

That’s the question being posed by an unusual experiment that begins today. It involves a scholar studying video games, a popular academic blog with the playful name Grand Text Auto, a nonprofit group designing blog tools for scholars, and MIT Press.

The idea took shape when Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, was talking with his editor at the press about peer reviewers for the book he was finishing, The book, with the not-so-playful title Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, examines the importance of using both software design and traditional media-studies methods in the study of video games.

One group of reviewers jumped to his mind: “I immediately thought, you know it’s the people on Grand Text Auto.” The blog, which takes its moniker from the controversial video game Grand Theft Auto, is run by Mr. Wardrip-Fruin and five colleagues. It offers an academic take on interactive fiction and video games.

Inviting More Critics

The blog is read by many of the same scholars he sees at academic conferences, and also attracts readers from the video-game industry and teenagers who are hard-core video-game players. At its peak, the blog has had more than 200,000 visitors per month, he says.

“This is the community whose response I want, not just the small circle of academics,” Mr. Wardrip-Fruin says.

So he called up the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book, who developed CommentPress, a tool for adding digital margin notes to blogs (The Chronicle, September 28, 2007). Would they help out? He wondered if he could post sections of his book on Grand Text Auto and allow readers, using CommentPress, to add critiques right in the margins.

The idea was to tap the wisdom of his crowd. Visitors to the blog might not read the whole manuscript, as traditional reviewers do, but they might weigh in on a section in which they have some expertise.

The institute, an unusual academic center run by the University of Southern California but based in Brooklyn, N.Y., was game. So was Mr. Wardrip-Fruin’s editor at MIT Press, Doug Sery, but with one important caveat. He insisted on running the manuscript through the traditional peer-review process as well. “We are a peer-review press—we’re always going to want to have an honest peer review,” says Mr. Sery, senior editor for new media and game studies. “The reputation of MIT Press, or any good academic press, is based on a peer-review model.”

So the experiment will provide a side-by-side comparison of reviewing—old school versus new blog. Mr. Wardrip-Fruin calls the new method “blog-based peer review.”

Each day he will post a new chunk of his draft to the blog, and readers will be invited to comment. That should open the floodgates of input, possibly generating thousands of responses by the time all 300-plus pages of the book are posted. “My plan is to respond to everything that seems substantial,” says the author.

The institute is modifying its CommentPress software for the project, with the help of a $10,000 grant from San Diego’s Academic Senate, to create a version that bloggers can more easily add to their existing academic blogs.

A Cautious Look Forward

Mr. Wardrip-Fruin’s friends have warned him that sorting through all those comments will take over his life, or at least take far more time than he expects. “It’s been said to me enough times by people who are not just naysayers that it is in the back of my mind,” he acknowledges. Still, the book’s review process “will pale in comparison to the work of writing it.”

He expects the blog-based review to be more helpful than the traditional peer review because of the variety of voices contributing. “I am dead certain it will make the book better,” he says.

Mr. Sery isn’t so sure. “I don’t know how this general peer review is going to help,” the editor says, except maybe to catch small errors that have slipped through the cracks. Traditional peer review involves carefully chosen experts in the same subject area, who can point to big-picture issues as well as nitpick details. He bets that the blog reviews might merely spark flame wars or other unhelpful arguments about minor points. “I’m curious to see what kind of comments we get back,” he says.

That probably “depends on what you’re writing about,” says Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, a group that supports the use of technology in scholarly communication. “If, God help you, you’re writing about current religious or political issues, you’re going to get a lot of people with agendas who aren’t interested in having a rational discussion. Some of them are just psychos.”

Even without flame wars, Mr. Sery equates the blog review with the kind of informal sharing of drafts that many academics do with close friends. It’s useful, but it’s still not formal peer review, he argues. Carefully choosing reviewers “really allows for the expression of their ideas on the book,” he says. Scholars can say with authority, for instance, that a book just isn’t worth publishing.

Ben Vershbow, editorial director at the Institute for the Future of the Book, concedes that comments on blogs are unlikely to fully replace peer review. But he says academic blogging can play a role in the publishing process.

“The conversational modes of reading and writing on the Web in things like blogs and wikis really chime well with the essential idea of peer review, which is putting out work in development to a peer group and refining the work,” he says. But he hopes that Mr. Wardrip-Fruin’s project demonstrates that the scholarly communities that have formed around many academic blogs “can to a large extent take care of their own review processes.”

Whether it does or does not, Mr. Wardrip-Fruin expects the experience will be interesting enough to write up in an academic essay, or maybe in the preface to the book, when it finally comes out in the old-fashioned printed form.

Copyright (c) 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The newest edition of Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures is now online. This issue, which focuses on electronic literature, features work from

• Thom Swiss
• Mark Marino
• Braxton Soderman
• Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
• Jaka Zeleznikar
• Michael Peters
• Jeanne Hamming

Also starting this month, the journal introduces { Literal1.Text }, the online forum for teachers of electronic literature, convened by Davin Heckman.  Please consider joining up and sharing your expertise as teachers.

Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures is an online, peer-reviewed publication specializing in new media and net art.  We welcome submission of net-ready art projects, electronic literature works and review essays; contact submissions [at] hyperrhiz.net.

Announcing “Seeking,” new fiction by Rob Swigart, innovator, elit author, and former Secretary of the ELO Board. “Seeking” appears as part of the Fictions Present thread in the electronic book review.

*** From ebr:

Rob Swigart’s “Seeking” is a clever and funny story whose roots lie in the materialization of internet interdating connections. Moving through the technological and media reductions of desire, Swigart parallels the overarching theme of “seeking” with a form that is itself punctuated with questions.

(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:

(more…)

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.

John Cayley reminds interested potential candidates that Brown’s prestigious Graduate Program in Literary Arts - two years (usually all-found) leading to an MFA - is currently accepting one applicant per year as an Electronic Writer (one of c. 14 per annum; the others apply for 5 fiction, 5 poetry and 3 play-writing places; past ‘electronic’ incumbents are: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Talan Memmott, William Gillespie, Brian Kim Stefans, Daniel Howe; Aya Karpinska is in her second year, and Justin Katko started this Fall). This is a great opportunity for a practitioner to develop and to achieve a widely-recognised academic qualification (a ‘terminal degree’ they sometimes call it here: taken to be a Good Thing). The application deadline for next Fall’s intake is December 15. Full details on the Literary Arts Programs web site: