Photopia is described in Baf’s Guide as “Sweet and sad, and complex enough that you may need to go through it twice in order to fully understand how all the fragments fit together.” It is one of the most widely admired pieces by genre-bending interactive fiction author Cadre. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.
CFP: M/C Special Issue: “Scan”
The journal M/C Media/Culture invites submissions on the topic of “scanning“–the activities of watching, surveiling, reporting, and recording. Guest editors Joshua Green and Adam Swift encourage creative interpretations of the act of scanning, and contributions from a wide variety of fields, “to explore its practices, limitations, and potentials.” Read the full call here. Send inquiries to scan@journal.media-culture.org.au Deadline for articles is July 1, 2005, for an August 24, 2005 issue release date.
CFP: JCMC Special Issue on Search Engines
The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication invites submissions to a special issue on the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of search engines. Guest editor Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern University’s Web Use Project seeks to bring together a wide range of disciplinary views to consider what is known about the present and future of the use, design, and meanings of search engines. Some possible topics:
–Who uses search engines and for what purposes?
–What are the effects of search engine use on mass- and interpersonal communication?
–How do search engines shape online identity management and representation?
–Are there any potential alternatives to commercial search engines?
Abstracts are due on June 1, 2005, with full papers of 7,000-10,000 words due October 1, 2005. Read the full call here. Send inquiries to Eszter Hargittai.
Computers and Writing Online 2005, May 31st-June 14, 2005
Computers and Writing Online 2005, hosted by kairosnews, May 31-June 14, 2005, will feature a different online presentation each day on such topics as Wikipedia, networked archives, the future of MOOs, the web and student learning, weblogs as deictic systems, and “Feedback, Motivation, and Collectivity on del.icio.us”.
Computers and Writing 2005, June 16-19 2005
It’s not too late to register to attend Computers and Writing 2005 at Stanford University, June 16-19. This year’s conference features a keynote address by Stanford University Professor of English and Director of the Stanford Program on Writing and Rhetoric, Andrea Lunsford, who will speak on “Writing, Technologies, and the Fifth Canon”. In addition to workshops and town hall discussions, presenters from around the world will discuss a wide range of topics, from computer gaming and its use in the classroom to the use of technology as a rhetorical choice.
Hypertext ‘05 Short Papers, Demos, Posters
There is still a chance to submit work for Hypertext ‘05, which will take place September 6-9 in Salzburg, although the deadline for full papers has passed. Short papers and demo proposals are due on June 9. Poster proposals are due on June 19. Update: Short paper and demo deadline extended to June 16.
Transliteracies Project at UCSB: Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading
ELO board member Alan Liu is organizing a gathering – and launching a larger project – that will bring together theorists and practitioners from the humanities, arts, social sciences, computer science, and industry to talk about the fate of reading in the new media age. The “UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading” Conference will serve to launch the Transliteracies Project. It all takes place June 17-18, 2005, in the University of California, Santa Barbara’s McCune Room (6020 HSSB). Read more Transliteracies Project at UCSB: Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading
8th Annual Digital Storytelling Festival, October 7-9, 2005
Plans are underway for the 8th Annual Digital Storytelling Festival, to be held for the first time in its home town, San Francisco, California. The festival is an annual event where the digital storytelling community gathers to examine compelling projects, share new and useful information and ideas, and inspire, invigorate and create a thoughtful dialogue about current issues in digital narrative.
Two Digital Storytelling Bootcamp Workshops are planned, one before the festival, October 5-7, and one after the festival, October 10-12. These three-day courses are project-based introductions to creating and publishing a digital narrative.
To learn about the festival schedule and register for the festival and workshops, visit the Digital Storytelling Festival website.
Turbulence Comp_05 Winners
The five winners of Comp_05 (the juried international net art competition of New Radio and Performing Arts | Turbulence) are quite interesting from the perspective of electronic literature.
Gothamberg (by Marek Walczak, et al.) “is a place to read, interact and exchange stories of lives in apartment buildings” that will enable “travel using various strategies to different parts of the structure, the stories unfolding between public, private and personal spaces.” Meanwhile Peripheral n°2 KEYBOARD (by Marika Dermineur, Khalil Bennis, et al.) “will explore writing and language by reflecting anew on the keyboard” and SWM05 (by Troy Innocent, Ollie Olson, et al) will create a “distributed embodiment” of a fictional(?) group “as musical-visual forms performed on mobile phones and other wireless communication devices.”
Finally, meme.garden (by Mary Flanagan and Daniel C. Howe) will use textual analysis to “introduce the concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a computer-based search tool” while mimoSa (by Ricardo Ruiz, Alexandre Freire, Etienne Delacroix, et al.) will “record public stories (audio and film) using mobile phones and microphones and store them in a database, broadcast them in FM, and record them to CD; print telephone numbers and instructions on the streets and walls so that people passing by will be able to access the stories via their mobile phones; and make a web portal … to access both audio and video.”
New ELO Website
The ELO’s new site, designed and engineered by Nick Montfort, is now in place. Thanks go to Scott Rettberg for his help, which included migrating much of the content from the old site, and to Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who prepared many items that will appear in coming weeks in the new showcase.
The showcase is designed to feature exemplary electronic literature. The five most recent items are visible at the top of the main page, and everything featured to date is accessible via the “Showcased E-Lit” link just below the search field. An RSS feed of the showcase is available so that readers can automatically keep bookmarks to the current entry or syndicate the showcase on their own pages.
News entries and other pages on the site are now easily searchable. The news is also accessible by category and by date. We have tried to redirect as many previous URLs as possible to current resources, to avoid leaving anyone with page not found errors. The new site is also designed to be easier to maintain and manage into the future, allowing the ELO to communicate with members and the reading public more effectively.
The new ELO website is powered by WordPress and uses a theme based on Joni Mueller’s Zen Minimalist.
We hope you enjoy the new site. Please let us know what you think of it, and if you encounter any problems. The email you should use to contact the ELO can be found, along with our phone number and postal address, on the “contact” page.