Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

The keynote speaker for the day was N. Katherine Hayles from UCLA. Jill Walker also has notes up. Here are my notes:

• A simple proposition: “literature” requires words, “the literary” is literature plus artwork which interrogate context, history, and production of literature

• “the literary” is how we talk to coworkers

• Three institutional paradigms

• Department Of Media Arts including film, computers, literature

• Interdisciplinary studio spaces for dissertation writing and student research

• Schools adding faculty lines for E-Lit

• What does it mean to write literature?

• Most assume print is what is meant by literature

• Why is E-Lit considered literature?

• Some examples shown:

• Slipping Glimpse-Would count as literature, but much more is going on. “What it means to read and what it means to be read”

• The Possession Of Christian Shaw

• Code Movie-Legibility of screen under threat…”denumant” is return to structure on screen

• Others mentioned-Birds Singing Other Bird Songs, Text Rain, Shaping Things

• Is ballet literary? Where is the line drawn?

The Future Of Electronic Literature conference in May looks very promising. I am hoping to make an attempt at attending at least the second day. Via Grand Text Auto, here is more information:

MITH and the Electronic Literature Organization are pleased to announce a public symposium on the Future of Electronic Literature, May 2 and 3 at the University of Maryland, College Park, with co-sponsorship from the University Libraries and Department of English. The keynote speakers will be Kate Hayles (John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature at UCLA) and Kenneth Thibodeau (Director of Electronic Records Archives Program, National Archives and Records Administration).

I am very excited about the new Electronic Literature Collection that the ELO recently released. Among those involved in the editing of it are Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland.

The 60 works included in the Electronic Literature Collection present a broad overview of the field of electronic literature, including selected works in new media forms such as hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, and narrative animations. Contributors include authors and artists from the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. Each work is framed with brief editorial and author descriptions, and tagged with descriptive keywords. The CD-ROM of the Collection runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms and is published in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. Free copies of the CD-ROM can be requested from The Electronic Literature Organization.

You can request a copy of the CD from the ELO website. Grand Text Auto also has a Q&A up about the collection.

Update-Here, via Scott Rettberg, is a review from a newspaper in Sweden.

New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories looks like it will be an interesting anthology. Among those contributing to this are one of my favorite New Media writers, Stephanie Strickland. Via Grand Text Auto, here is some of the description from the dust jacket:

New media poetry “poetry composed, disseminated, and read on computers” exists in various configurations, from electronic documents that can be navigated and/or rearranged by their “users” to kinetic, visual, and sound materials through online journals and archives like UbuWeb, PennSound, and the Electronic Poetry Center. Unlike mainstream print poetry, which assumes a bounded, coherent, and self-conscious speaker, new media poetry assumes a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. The essays and artist statements in this volume explore this synergy’s continuities and breaks with past poetic practices, and its profound implications for the future.

Imaginary Year looks like a promising piece of digital literature. It is a serialized narrative that recently ended after a five year run. Amazingly this has been going on since 2000! They have PDF’s to collect older issues. This weekend, if I have some time, I am going to sit down with the first month and check this out!

I just wanted to announce to you all that the first 60-second digital camera story contest is now under way. A few friends are involved in the judging so I figured I’d pass the word on.

We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course.

We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second stories are works of fiction recorded by their authors as digital videos, less than one minute in duration. Files size must be 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005.

There will one grand-prize winner, who will receive a one-minute supply of exotic chocolate, a one inch by one inch book of the winning work published by Spineless Books, and other one minute pleasures. The winner and fourteen runners-up will be published in the “Fifteen Minutes of Fame,” a permanent web shrine to the 60 second story form. The judges of the competition include internet writers William Gillespie, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton, Jill Walker and Rob Wittig.

See 60secondstory.contagiousmedia.org for the details, to watch some 60-second stories, and to submit your own.

Some people are turning email spam into poetry.