An international organization dedicated to the investigation of literature produced for the digital medium.

Founded in Chicago, Illinois in 1999, the ELO now has a presence across North America and in South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. Our members hail from a wide array of disciplines and areas of study, including Art, Literature, Communication, Computer Science, Humanities, Digital Humanities, Media Studies, Women Studies, and Comparative Media.

Each year we host a conference and media art festival as well as readings and performances of our work. We partner with Bloomsbury Press on a book series, entitled Electronic Literature and publish open source anthologies of electronic literature called the Electronic Literature Collection, an open source knowledge base called the Electronic Literature Directory, and books and reports, including State of the Arts (2003), Acid-Free Bits (2004), Born-Again Bits (2005), Toward a Semantic Literary Web (2007), and Electronic Literature: What Is It? (2007). We oversee digital archives of prominent digital communities, Turbulence.org (US) and the trAce Online Writing Centre (UK) through the ELO’s Electronic Literature Archives project.

While most of our funding is derived from memberships, support has also come from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Additionally we have partnerships with Washington State University Vancouver, where administrative activities take place; York University, which serves as our host institution; Digital Humanities Summer Institute; the New Media Consortium; and Compute Canada.