ARHU Rocks

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Oct 252005

I recently got word from Rob Gregg, the Dean of Arts and Humanities, that ARHU will support two projects I proposed earlier this term. For the first time this year, Stockton earmarked research funds for projects by junior faculty, to be supported at the divisional level. Stockton is funding my travel to Copenhagen to present my paper “Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation” at the 2005 Digital Arts and Culture Conference. Stockton is also supporting the Electronic Literature Collection, a major publishing project by the ELO which will also be supported by the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, ELINOR: Electronic Literature in the Nordic Countries, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, and The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. I have been working with my ELO colleagues on developing the ELO program for the past six months, and I’m very pleased to that Stockton is one of the institutions supporting it. The Electronic Literature Collection will be an annual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. The publication will be made available both on the Web and as a packaged, cross-platform disc, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection will be offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others. We’ll be announcing the call for works next week, and the first Collection will be published next fall.

I’m grateful to be part of a department that recognizes not only the value of presenting scholarly work at an international conference, but also supporting the development of a publishing project that will have a significant impact on the curriculum of new media studies in literature both here and at other institutions.

ELO's New Site

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May 232005

The Electronic Literature Organization’s new site, designed and engineered by Nick Montfort, is now in place.

One new feature of the site is a showcase 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. The showcase is an excellent descriptive complement to the extant Electronic Literature Directory, a large index of information about e-lit. 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 (including a five-year archive) 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, more frequently updated and more useful, website is the first of several new initiatives planned by the organization. Stay tuned to the site for the launch of other new programs in coming months. The ELO is a 501(c)3 nonprofit literary organization founded in 1999 that has a mission to promote and facilitate the writing, reading, and distribution of electronic literature.

Props to Nick, a Vice-President of the board of the ELO, and his helpers for a job well done.

Acid-Free Bits

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Jul 052004

I've been meaning to blog Acid-Free Bits. The online and print document authored by Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin is one result of the Electronic Literature Organization's Preservation, Archiving and Dissemination initiative, a set of recommendations for authors of electronic literature who would like their work to last longer than the next browser upgrade.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin on New Media

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Jun 052003

A brief interview with Noah Wardrip-Fruin was published in the Guardian today, in which he emphasizes the importance of efforts to archive new media objects, such as the ELO's PAD project:

People think of new media as something without a history and, in terms of new media objects, we're certainly in trouble with respect to archiving. There are some interesting efforts being made to preserve digital objects but most are trying to preserve the same things about digital objects that you'd preserve about a book or a film. There aren't that many people working on the problem of trying to preserve things that are highly interactive, highly procedural pieces of new media. The Variable Media Initiative at the Guggenheim is working on it, as is the Electronic Literature Organisation – but they're definitely in the minority.

Au revoir, Doctor Bernstein

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May 202003

Mark Bernstein resigned from the ELO today — allegedly because he believes that it has “ceased to make any positive contribution to the field.” I can say without reservation that while I am among those who were grateful to Bernstein for his early service on the board, during the last two years he has done very little to advance the mission of the organization, and has often conflated and confused the goals of his company with those of the organization, and of the field as a whole. He consistently denigrated all of the organization's most successful programs, including the 2001 Electronic Literature Awards, the 2002 State of the Arts Symposium, and the organization's current Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination initiative. It is more than a bit ironic that in his letter of resignation Bernstein says that “ELO officials persistently denigrate those tools not marketed by Microsoft and Macromedia.” There is no evidence of that. In fact, Bernstein might have simply said that “ELO officials have done an inadequate job of advancing my personal goals, as I badgered them to do at every turn.” His resignation is the albatross set free.

Dr. Bernstein is a good toolmaker, and has done much to advance the field of electronic literature over the course of his career. Hopefully, he will continue to devote his considerable energies to those efforts, instead of working to obstruct the efforts of others. Au revoir.

What is an ExLiterature Type?

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May 142003

From what I saw at the ExLiterature Conference, an “exliterature type” is, well, a few examples:

* Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, instigator of the WELL, mover of the Long Now Foundation and the Library of Congress Digital Libraries initiative.

* Howard Besser, preservationist of digital culture.

* Jamie Boyle, one of the initiators of Creative Commons.

* Alan Liu, founder of the Voice of the Shuttle.

* Matthew Kirschenbaum, proposing new bibliographic language for electronic literature.

* Liam Quinn, XML guru of the W3C consortium, encouraging greater ties between creators of digital culture and the standards-making-organization of note.

* Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, editors of the New Media Reader — the first collected volume of keynote essays and articles on the history of New Media.

* Many writers working in the electronic medium concerned with the long term preservation of their work.

* Artists exploring the temporality of the Internet as a medium.

* Intelligent proposals on how to increase the durability, study-ability, and create-ability of new media writing.

Someone asked me, so I have to say that an “exliterature type” is someone concerned with the viability, preservation, and stamina of the “new media” culture of the past, present, and future. An “exliterature type” thinks beyond the commercial concerns of his or her own company, thinks “just what is the purpose of this art if not to be available for others two twenty two hundred years from now?” An exliterature type hopes for the free and open creation, dissemination, discussion and study of electronic literature by people unknown, well after we enarrative types are dead and gone.

Experiments in Irrational Exuberance

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Dec 192002

The talk I gave this spring at the Computers and Writing conference in Normal, Illinois: Experiments in Irrational Exuberance: The Present and Future of Electronic Literature or How I Became E-Literate was recently published online at Kairos.

There's a typo in there that I've decided to just leave in there, describing Spineless Books' “may other surprises” — I meant to say “many other” — but who likes perfect things anyway? and I kind of like the idea of the phrase “may other surprises.”

The New Media Studies focus of the American Book Review that I'm editing (for March/April 2003) came together beautifully over the last few weeks. Almost everyone got their pieces in on time, and I'm excited about the seven reviews — it's a nice cluster. Hopefully the editors of ABR will like it as much I do. The cluster will also be published online at the electronic book review this spring. Looking at all the reviews together, it's amazing how much activity is going on in e-lit/new media publishing over the next several months.

Back to grading papers. My worst moment in that process — one of my students plagiarized — through hamhanded ignorance — several writers by cut/pasting online w/ little or no attribution. The worst part — one of those writers was me. A particularly stupid way to underscore an F. But a couple of papers turned in have been a delight to read — including a very good one on weblogs.

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