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Announcing the ELC4 Editorial Collective

The ELO is pleased to announce the editorial collective of the fourth volume of the Electronic Literature Collection (ELC4).  Board member Rui Torres will be joined by Kathi Inman Berens, Mia Zamora, and John Murray.  The collective was chosen from among 23 self-nominated volunteers, through an open call circulated this Summer.

The three previous volumes, published in 2006, 2011, and 2016, serve as excellent starting points for investigations into digital literature, and are available free online at http://collection.eliterature.org/

Stay tuned for more news about the call and the timeline for the ELC4, which is planned to be published in 2021.

Below are bios for ELC4 editorial collective:

  • Rui Torres is Associate Professor of Communication Sciences at University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal. He is the director of the book series Cibertextualidades (Ed. UFP) and one of the editors of the Electronic Literature Series (Bloomsbury Publishing). An author of electronic literature, he created and coordinates the Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Poetry (https://www.po-ex.net). His poems, essays, and critical writings are available at https://www.telepoesis.net
  • Kathi Inman Berens is Assistant Professor of Book Publishing and Digital Humanities at Portland State University English Department. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bergen’s Digital Culture Research Group, and she curates and researches electronic literature. More info @ https://kathiiberens.com/ and on Twitter @kathiiberens.
  • John Murray is Assistant Professor of Games and Interactive Media Department at the Nicholson School of Communication and Media of the University of Central Florida. He is a practitioner, researcher, and developer in the space of emerging media and electronic literature. He can be found on twitter as @lucidbard or at lucidbard.com.
  • Mia Zamora is Associate Professor of English at Kean University (NJ) where she directs the Masters of Arts in Writing Studies Program. She is a digital humanist and a #connectedlearning scholar who designs/facilitates learning networks for creative scholarship on the open web.  She was recently the Fulbright Scholar of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway.  Her work is described at her website: http://miazamoraphd.com/ and she can be found on twitter @miazamoraphd.
ELO President, Leo Flores, had this to say:
I am thrilled to see such a talented team in charge of this key publication for our organization and community. The perspectives, strengths, ideas, and sensibilities each editor brings to the table will undoubtedly result in a collection that will capture this moment in e-lit while doing justice to the growth and diversity of languages, backgrounds, and practices that we aspire to in our field. As with previous collections, the editorial collective has complete editorial control over their volume, and the ELO Board of Directors and community will help support them in their mission, by disseminating their calls, volunteering our expertise, and funding editorial retreats for the team to deliberate and assemble the ELC4. I can’t wait to see the results!
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Announcing the 2019 ELO Prizes

At the annual conference of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), held this year in Cork, Ireland, outgoing President Dene Grigar announced the 2019 ELO Prize winners, including:

The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature

1st Place: False Words 流/言 by IP Yuk-Yiu
Honorable Mention: Little Emperor Syndrome by David Thomas Henry Wright
Committee members: Erik Loyer, Gabriel Gaudette, Johannah Rodgers, Brian Greenspan

The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature honors the year’s best work of electronic literature, of any form or genre. It comes with a $1000 stipend.

Regarding “False Words,” one judge wrote, “I was impressed with the design and execution of this project as a visual, technical, and verbal object.” Erik commented, “I find this piece to be exceedingly elegant in both design and concept—it works on multiple visual, temporal, and signifying scales, and the emergent phenomenon of the character for ‘human’ becoming the last thing to be obscured is very effective.” Another judge added, “It is impressive in its visual design, and strikes me as important for its implicit critique of human rights offenses and censorship, all while conveying the fleeting powerlessness of words and of life.”

Of “Little Emperor Syndrome,” one judge wrote, “Beyond the strong writing, it’s the deep, sustained, and motivated engagement with combinatorics that wins me over with this one—I feel like my choices to reorder the text are clear, meaningful, illuminating, and expressive, and it’s rare to find all of those elements in a single work.”   Another judge added, “It is impressive for sustaining the coherence of such a complex narrative while cleverly encoding its polyphony.

The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature

1st Place: Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg
2nd Place (tie): Small Screen Fictions co-edited by Astrid Ensslin, Paweł Frelik, and Lisa Swanstrom ; The Digital Literary Sphere by Simone Murray.
Committee members: Monika Górska-Olesińska, Joellyn Rock

The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature honors the best work of criticism of electronic literature of any length. Endowed through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this annual prize recognizes excellence in the field. The Prize for 1st Place comes with a $1000 award.

Electronic Literature presents a wide-ranging survey of the field of electronic literature. According to the judges, “No other work addresses with such consistency the varied and extensive selection of born digital literary works over the past two decades.” They go on to say, “Also, one finds here a substantive (and varied) context in critical theory and creative practices. It is the first monograph I know of that articulates electronic literature as both a scholarly field and a viable creative practice with much, much room for development.”

Electronic Literature, written by ELO co-founder Scott Rettberg. Not only has Rettberg been pivotal in the formation of this field, but after moving to Norway, he expanded the field through spearheading the ELMCIP directory, an extensive database of digital works, many of which appear in this book.

In support of the anthology Small Screen Fictions, one judge wrote, “I loved that it began with works for young readers, establishing a lifelong readership for e-literature. I appreciated the interactive use of my own small screen to sample content  as embedded in the codex. The topics and perspectives were diverse and the collection casts a wide net.”

Of Digital Literary Sphere, the judges said, the work opens “the discussion about audience, readership, and authorship in electronic literature.” They added, “Murray tracks, more broadly, an emerging set of interactions between print publications and online author/reader conversations. Murray brings Habermas and Adorno, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to bear on the audience for literature in the digital media era. This seems to me a highly original and entirely necessary contribution to the e-lit discourse.”

The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award

Winner: Mez Breeze
Scholar Beneficiary: Kate Gwynne
Committee: Jeremy Douglass, Odile Farge, Mia Zamora, Soeren Pold

The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award honors a visionary artist and/or scholar who has brought excellence to the field of electronic literature and has inspired others to help create and build the field. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation, it comes with the following: a $1000 award that can go directly to the awardee or to a young scholar who would use the funds in support of developing content for online resources about the awardee’s achievements; a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement; and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.

The Artist or Scholar selected for this award should demonstrate excellence in four or more of the following categories:

  • Creation of opportunities for younger scholars
  • Publication of influential academic studies of electronic literature
  • Practice-based artistic research in the field, with significant presentations and exhibitions of creative work
  • Curatorial activities, particularly including editing and the organization of exhibitions, conferences, workshops, roundtables and research groups
  • Preservationist work, whether individual or institutional
  • Active participation in conferences and exhibitions, both national and international
  • Contribution to ELO as an organization, whether as a member of the Board of Directors or Literary Art Board or as informal advisor

We are delighted to announce this year’s winner of the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award, Australia-based Mez Breeze.

Mez Breeze, who has been working in electronic literature for decades, is known for “net.art, working primarily with code poetry, electronic literature, mezangelle, and digital games.” Mezangelle is a unique language that blends code and text in what previous winner, N. Katherine Hayles, classifies as a computer-age creole. Mez’s more recent work has led to her collaboration on an episode of “Inanimate Alice” as well as other explorations in Virtual Reality.

As previous winners have done, Mez will be passing the monetary award to a scholar who will be working on the artist’s oeuvre.

Scholar Beneficiary Kate Gwynne is a creative practice PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her current research explores character embodiment in Virtual Reality (VR) narratives, specifically works which allow for the self to be experienced as another, and how this transformation is achieved through the embodied possibilities inherent to VR. She holds a masters in prose fiction from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England and has written for the Guardian and The Conversation.

This year’s three committees were chaired by past-ELO President Joseph Tabbi, who was last year’s Hayles recipient.

ELO awards these prizes at its annual conference. The next conference will be held in Orlando, Florida. The call for next year’s awards will be issued months before via ELO’s Website.

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ELO Conference Survey

The ELO Board of Directors– and our conference organizers– are interested in offering the most rewarding conference experiences to its community. In order to continue improving in this mission, your feedback is essential. Please take a moment to provide feedback on the 2019 ELO Conference in Cork (if you attended) and/or on previous ELO conferences. This survey will also allow you to make suggestions for future ELO conferences and events.

This anonymous survey will allow you to be as brief or as thorough as you like. We appreciate and value your feedback!

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Call for Nominations for ELC 4 Editors

ELO has put out the call for self-nominations for editors for the fourth Electronic Literature Collection.  See the full call below and consider answering it, so you can help shape the next volume of this key resource of digital literature.

Qualifications

Nominees must have a PhD or terminal degree (such as an MFA) or a substantive body of elit work to be considered. To avoid conflicts of interest, Editorial Collective members cannot have any of their own work published in the volume they are editing.

Duties

  • working well in a team of 4 editors,
  • assembling and working with a team of international consultants,
  • providing progress reports to the ELO Board,
  • drafting and circulating a call for submissions,
  • developing and applying criteria for selection,
  • being available to travel to one (potentially two) editorial retreats at a location convenient to the editorial collective, funded by the ELO Board,
  • maintaining timely and collegial communications with authors,
  • working with the ELO technical team in publishing the ELC4 in the ELO servers,
  • designing, producing, & publishing the ELC4 on the Web (potentially a physical edition) by June 2021,
  • being available to fine-tune technical and editorial issues with the ELC4 for a year after publication,
  • helping launch and promote the ELC4 once published, and
  • participating in other activities needed to produce and promote the ELC4.

Proposed Timeline

  • September to December 2019: Develop work plan, assemble international consultant team, draft and launch Call for Submissions, receive and close Call for Submissions.
  • January to December 2020: Evaluate and select submissions, have editorial retreat, select and notify authors of decision, begin drafting editorial introductions and designing ELC4, communicate with authors to prepare works for publication and receive source files, prepare image and video documentation, begin production of ELC4.
  • January to June 2021: Editorial retreat (if budget allows), finalize production of ELC4, publish to the Web, produce physical edition, launch ELC4.

Budget

The ELO will provide funding for an Editorial Retreat (or two, if fundraising allows) and for production costs, as needed. The ELO Board of Directors will carry out fundraising activities to support the ELC4. ELC4 Editors will not receive any kind of financial remuneration for their work. The ELC4 Editorial Collective will consist of Dr. Rui Torres, who will lead the team, serve as editor and Board liaison, and three editors chosen by the Board.

Nomination Process

This call will be open until August 15, 2019. The Board of Directors will meet in September to discuss the pool of candidates and assemble a 4-member Editorial Collective charged with producing the ELC4. For nominations, please visit: https://eliterature.org/elc4/. 

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ELO Cork begins

The 2019 ELO conference has begun!  The conference, hosted at University College Cork, runs July 15-17.  This is the first international conference of digital literature held in Ireland and marks the 13th ELO Conference.

Conference website:  http://elo2019.ucc.ie/
Hashtag: #ELOcork (Twitter, Instagram)
Facebook Page

ELO President Dene Grigar welcomes us to ELO COrk
Conference chair James O’Sullivan at ELO Cork

 

 

 

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Call for ELO Research Fellows (April 1)

The ELO is currently expanding its scholarly activity and curatorial operations with the appointment of five graduate and early career Research Fellows, each of whom will be awarded a $500 stipend along with a one year ELO membership. Awards will be announced at the yearly banquet. In the coming months, we’ll be welcoming scholars who will draft entries for the Electronic Literature Directory, with a particular emphasis on works in the archives newly acquired by the ELO and also on works listed at our network of affiliated databases (www.cellproject.net). We are also open to descriptions of works that the Fellows have discovered in the course of their research, and in databases with which the Fellows themselves are affiliated. In particular, we look forward to filling out our new ELD category of “Glossary” entries, which will be gathered into a digital Thesaurus of Electronic Literary Terms.  Because entries are being gathered across our CELL member databases,  we are interested in appointing one Fellow who can help in implementing metadata standards and linked open data for the Thesaurus and Cell project.

One page letters of application, and short cv’s can be sent to the ELD project director, Joseph Tabbi (jtabbi@gmail.com).

Deadline: April 1

 

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Call for Submissions: ELO Prizes

Call for Submissions:
2019 ELO Prizes

To nominate or submit: http://dtc-wsuv.org/elo-prize/

The Electronic Literature Organization is proud to offer the following three prestigious awards, The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature, The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature, and The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award.

The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature is an award given for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from supporters and members of the ELO, this annual prize aims to recognize creative excellence. The Prize for 1st Place comes with a $1000 award, with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. One prize for Honorable Mention is awarded and consists of a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.  Go here to nominate or submit.

The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature is an award given for the best work of criticism, of any length, on the topic of electronic literature. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this annual prize recognizes excellence in the field. The Prize for 1st Place comes with a $1000 award, with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. One prize for Honorable Mention is awarded and consists of a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. Go here to nominate or submit.

The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award honors a visionary artist and/or scholar who has brought excellence to the field of electronic literature and has inspired others to help create and build the field. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation, it comes with a $1000 award that can go directly to the awardee or to a young scholar who would use the funds in support of developing content for online sources about the awardee’s achievements; a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement; and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. Go here to nominate or submit.

Deadlines:

Nomination Submissions Period: December 1, 2018-April 1, 2019
Jury Deliberations: April 15- June 1, 2019
Award Announcement: ELO Conference Banquet, Cork, Ireland

For more information about the Awards, contact Dene Grigar, The Electronic Literature Organization, dgrigar@wsu.edu. Guidelines for each of the awards can be found in the navigation menu above. Nominations for the Coover and Hayles are submitted through forms on the site, while those for the Luesebrink are sent via email. After nominating, you will receive a message verifying your submission.