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ELO Board Welcomes Astrid Ensslin

The ELO Board is proud to welcome its newest member, Astrid Ensslin.  Astrid has distinguished herself with her scholarship on electronic literature, including video games and children’s e-lit.  She is a professor of Digital Humanities and Game Studies at the University of Alberta and has published extensively in our field.  Among her many contributions to ELO, she co-curated the e-lit for kids exhibit in Porto. We are grateful to have her experience and talents.
 Below is her bio:
Astrid Ensslin is Professor in Digital Humanities and Game Studies at the University of Alberta. She has a PhD (s.c.l.) from Heidelberg University, and previously held academic and managerial faculty, research, and teaching positions at the Universities of Wales (Bangor), Manchester, and Leeds. Her main publications include Literary Gaming (MIT Press 2014), Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2013),The Language of Gaming (Palgrave, 2011), Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (Routledge, 2011), Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (Bloomsbury, 2007), and Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies (Bloomsbury, 2007). She is Principal Editor of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and has led various government and charity funded projects, for example on researching and teaching videogames across cultures; empirical digital fiction reader-response research and curating digital fictions for broad audiences (AHRC “Reading Digital Fiction” project), analyzing digital fictions (Leverhulme Digital Fiction International Network), specialized language corpora, and training graduate students in digital humanities tools and methods.
ELO has a volunteer Board who serve for renewable three-year terms.  See members and bios here: https://eliterature.org/people/
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CALL FOR PAPERS – ELO 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS – ELO 2018
Mind the Gap!
Thinking Electronic Literature in a Digital Culture:
Explorations and Interventions
http://elo2018.org/

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is pleased to announce its 2018 Conference and Festival, hosted by the Université du Québec à Montréal. The Conference, the Festival and Exhibits will be held August 13th to 17th in downtown Montréal, Québec, Canada. Mind the Gap! will be bilingual, with both English and French tracks, showcasing Montreal’s important and dynamic local Québécois e-lit/digital arts community and extending a special welcome to e-lit’s global francophonie.

The aim of this conference is to think about e-lit in a digital culture. What is its relationship to current cultural practices and trends? Two directions are proposed: explorations and interventions. The first direction features e-lit’s exploratory nature, its formal aspects, its use of technology, its renewal of narrative conventions, and at the same time its impact on literary theories and methodologies to renew themselves. The second direction considers e-lit’s place in the public sphere, its relationship to digital and urban culture, to forms of conservation and presentation, and also to performance.

TOPICS

Possible topics for presentations, performances and exhibits are:

Gaps in the field
Translation gaps: code, natural language, media
Narrative theory, temporal gaps and the imaginative space of the in-between
Understanding e-lit: towards digital methodologies and/or pedagogies
Mobile technologies’ effect on writing and reading habits
Perceptual gaps: AR, VR, and Linking Structures
Politics of e-lit: gaps between reception communities
Gaps and Bridges between e-lit and digital humanities
Gender gaps in e-lit
Spoken screens: the gap between performance and presence
Linguistic and cultural specificities to E-lit
Electronic literature and urban culture
Mind the gap! E-lit and humour
Gaps between datasets and interfaces
Archiving differences between libraries and museums
Exhibition differences: ephemeral and permanent installations
What is different about e-lit for children?

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

For the Conference (peer-reviewed):

Paper (15 min – a presentation of a single paper by one or more authors – 500 word abstract).
Lightning talk (5 min – a short paper for a focused presentation – 250 word abstract).
Poster (1 page poster). n.b. A poster can be combined with a lightning talk.
Panel (90 min – a proposal for a complete panel including 3 or 4 separate papers on the same general topic – 250 word overview plus 500 word individual abstracts).
Pre-conference Workshop (Action sessions, focused on hands-on group work on a given project or topic – 500 word abstract).
For the Festival (peer-reviewed):

Performance and screening (10 min – readings, actions, interventions – 250 word abstract; provide links to images, videos, etc.)
Gallery exhibit (provide description of installation, as well as technical needs)

Submissions open: October 16th, 2017 to December 15th, 2017.

Acceptances sent out: January 30th, 2018.

You must attend the conference to appear on the program. You may submit as many proposals as you want, but participants may present a maximum of two pieces/papers.

Registration: Early registration will close April 30st, 2018. There will be a registration fee for the Conference (to be determined), which will include ELO Membership, invitations to all sessions of the Conference, the Festival, and the Exhibits. Lunch and coffee-breaks will be served. Conference banquet requires an additional fee.

The conference will be hosted by the University du Québec à Montréal, at the Berri-UQAM subway station. The campus is fully wheelchair accessible. ELO 2018 is committed to making its conference accessible and will provide a simple accessibility guide to all venues.

Some of the sessions will be streamed via the Conference website.

For more information, contact Bertrand Gervais, ELO 2018 Chair, elo2018mtl (at) gmail.com