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About the ELO Library of Congress/Archive-It Project
During the trial year 2008, the Electronic Literature Organization is collaborating with the Library of Congress in the selection, archiving, and preservation of several hundred web addresses featuring works of electronic literature (archive-it.org). The project, under the direction of ELO President Joseph Tabbi, is at once historical and developmental: each address is to be preserved 'in perpetuity' through periodic updates on the Internet Archive. At the same time, the descriptions, tags, and robust sample of works gathered by the ELO should provide, over time, a profile of the e-lit field.
The sites selected will be crawled and archived to the extent that the Archive-It technology allows. The ELO will enter metadata including a short description and keywords for each URL entered into the database. The ELO Board of Directors, Literary Advisory Board, membership, and community are encouraged to suggest sites here for three sets of links.
- Electronic Literature: Collections of Works: Sites that aggregate works of electronic literature by multiple authors, such as online journals and anthologies.
- Electronic Literature: Individual Works: Individual works of electronic literature and collections of works by a single author, as opposed to collections of works by multiple authors.
- Electronic Literature: Context: Sites related to the critical, theoretical, and institutional contexts of electronic literature.
Please note that works and collections of works entered here should be examples of imaginative writing or writing about imaginative writing that are readable on the web. Print-based works of writing that are simply published in PDF or a similar ebook format, web sites that publish traditional poetry or fiction as html, podcasts or other audio readings of print literature should not go in this database and will be removed. See some examples of the types of forms we are looking for here.
The ELO Board of Directors will select URLs from those suggested by the community and enter them in Archive-It, prioritizing depth, diversity, and relevance in the selections. It is our hope that this project will expose new audiences to electronic literature, and that if successful the project will continue in subsequent years. The records contributed here may also be utilized in the Electronic Literature Showcase and/or Directory. Simply log in and use the forms to create new entires or edit existing ones. Thanks for your contributions!
Note that the current records entered here have not yet been fully reviewed by the ELO. Some records entered by users may not be appropriate to the project and will be modified or deleted by the ELO.
Find answers to frequently asked questions on our FAQ, and Report Bugs.
The content implementation of the project is under the supervision of Joseph Tabbi, professor of literature at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Editor of [ebr] and technical development is under the supervision of Scott Rettberg, associate professor of literary, linguistic, and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen [huin.uib.no]. Specific queries may be sent to the project Research Assistant, Patricia Tomaszek, Media Upheavals, University of Siegen, Germany: <tomaszek@fk615.uni-siegen.de>.
Plans for Further Development of the Wiki and the Importance of Keywords
This is a test to see how well MediaWiki works for the purpose of gathering works of electronic literature. Selected works will be sent to the ELO Archive-It project. In the longer term, we plan to develop the Wiki to serve as a reimplementation of the Electronic Literature Directory, the range and inclusiveness of which will be somewhat wider, more open to forms and genres that are still un-named and that might shape the further evolution of the field.
This test project is making use of MediaWiki, the same platform used for Wikipedia, but repurposed toward literary ends. A successful outcome of our experiment will be the acquisition of a robust sample of electronic literature and the development of a descriptive language or metatag vocabulary for the works and sites we've gathered.
The Board of the ELO asks that, when submitting entries, you take notice of the list of keywords already under development. Your selection of keywords, or your addition of new keywords to describe specific works, will help to define the terms of a field that, in contrast with print literature, is still in an early stage of development.
To add keywords to an entry, select "edit" after the record has been created and use the category selection box at the bottom of the page. Separate tags with semicolons, or select tags from the cloud. See a list of recommended keywords from the Electronic Literature Collection.
How to Browse and Add Records
- Browse suggested Electronic Literature: Collections of Work.
- Use this form to Add a Collection of Works record to the list. Begin by naming the page after the name of the journal or collection you want to suggest. If you are only recommending a specific issue or volume of a journal, please specify that information under "Additional Notes."
- Browse suggested Electronic Literature: Individual Works.
- Use this form to Add an Individual Work record to the list. Begin by naming the page after the title of the work you want to suggest. For this purposes of this project, please also use this category for "artist portals" that include a multiple-work collection of a single artist's work.
- Browse suggested Electronic Literature: Context sites.
- Use this form to Add a Context Site record to the list. Begin by naming the page after the name of the site or journal you want to suggest. If you are only recommending a specific issue or volume of a journal, please specify that information under "Additional Notes."
A brief and substantial (1-3 sentence) description of the work should follow these guidelines:
- You might want to identify the site’s purpose, its content and its aesthetic.
- You should focus on the work itself and its mode of presentation (not the awards won or the influence exerted by the author or institution)
- Evaluative statements and self-evaluations ought to be avoided
- Avoid stating quotes (i.e. comments on a work) or reproductions of reviews and blurbs written for promotional purpose
- Information on technique, software and programming should not precede or obscure descriptions of what a work is about
- Important dates like the foundation of the site or journal should be added along with the ISSN number (if available) in the description. Provide information on how often a journal is published and what it is focusing on.
News: You can now add basic biographical information about authors by following the red link from an author's name in any record to the "Add Author" form. The resulting author page will automatically include links to the records for works written or edited by that person. You can also follow links from languages to find all records of works in that language, or links from a year to find a list of works published in that year.
About MediaWiki and Extensions
This test project is making use of MediaWiki, the same platform used for Wikipedia, repurposed for this project with the extensions SelectCategoryTagCloud (this will be removed in future development), Semantic MediaWiki (1.1.1), and Semantic Forms (1.2.2). SelectCategoryTagCloud enables the wiki to treat categories as tags. Semantic MediaWiki enables semantic markup of data, semantic searching, and the export of records in RDF. Semantic Forms enables the creation of user entry forms that can embed semantic markup in the pages produced.
