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

Speaking of Grand Text Auto, they linked to a newly published French language history of Electronic Literature. Now I don’t speak French, I dropped it in college after a month, so I will trust GTxA’s description:

A quick browse based on sketchy French language skills suggests that the extensively hyperlinked 15 chapter document provides a very good historical introduction to some forms of electronic writing, with a particular focus on francophone work, from the prehistory of electronic writing in avant-garde traditions, through hypertext, combinatory forms, and animated interactive poetry.

As Scott points out, this looks like a great companion to N. Katherine Hayles’ Electronic Literature: What Is It?. I love the international, multilingual, nature of electronic literature. In May, at the ELO’s symposium, this was discussed extensively during the international panel.

Via Scott Rettberg, GTxA, and the Electronic Literature Organization itself, I am happy and very proud to pass along word that there are two new publications available from the ELO. I will let the ELO’s own descriptions speak for themselves:

N. Katherine Hayles’ “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” establishes a foundation for understanding e-lit in its various forms and differentiates creative e-lit from other types of digital materials. This primer serves the twin purposes of reaching general readers and serving students and institutional audiences by providing descriptions of major characteristics of electronic literature and reflections on the nature of the field. This piece will also appear as the introductory chapter of Hayles’ book Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, and Teaching (coming from Notre Dame Press in fall 2007). The book will also include the CD-ROM of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One,  a compendium of 60 digital works of poetry and prose, published by the ELO in October 2006.

Joseph Tabbi’s Setting a Direction for the Directory: Toward a Semantic Literary Web outlines and analyzes the critical issues relating to the description and classification of e-lit. Tabbi describes an approach that will allow the ELO Directory and other digital resources to be more useful, maintainable, transparent, and integrated with evolving technologies. The work organizes the terms of the problem into a call for an overall strategy of editorial and community-driven discourse about e-lit that will also be dependent on metadata solutions that are convergent with those described and implemented in other ELO publications.

I was very impressed by Hayles’ keynote address last month at the ELO’s symposium. I look forward to reading both of these new publications.

The final panel of the day was about electronic literature in the 21^st century. Participating were Thom Swiss, Emily Warren, Josh Weiner, Kate Hayles, and surprise addition Stuart Moulthrop. Here are my notes:

Thom Swiss

• How do we think about E-Lit in terms of pedagogy?

• Electronic Book Review has a bunch of interesting new features. I still wish they had some sort of RSS feed however.

Emily Warren

• Works for www.poetryfoundation.org

• They received a few hundred million dollars

• Site is going web2.0

• Mentioned the work of Jim Berhle, a satirist.

• Compared Berhle to the jester in Shakespeare

Josh Weiner

• Who is the audience for E-Lit?

• Are they seeking mass audiences?

• Space between poetry and fiction very balkanized

• Future of E-Lit is in collaboration

Stuart Moulthrop

• Introduced a new hypertext entitled Radio Salience

• Computer gaming culture is growing up

• Good opportunity to open the door up and talk to them about E-Lit

Kate Hayles

• Offerred suggestions for when E-Lit leaves the computer

• Robert Coover’s cave

• Writers of interactive fiction should check out Croquet

• SMS fiction is huge in Japan

• Leave computer behind and move to the world!

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.