An updated version of an electronic-literature compendium is out, with the goal of creating a more interactive community.
Since 1998 the Electronic Literature Directory has compiled lists of works that are digitally born: for example, electronic poetry, or a text or even a game with a multimedia element. Electronic literature, or hypertext fiction, came to national attention in the 1990s; some called it revolutionary, others merely a passing trend.
The directory, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, now uses a wiki platform that allows the archive to include tags, descriptions, and discussions. Organizers hope to create a sort of “living archive,” which, like Wikipedia, is a communal effort. They also hope that the improvements will draw more readers and writers.
The directory has also added an editorial working group and an editorial board that curates each entry, “ensuring that each work represents electronic literature and not just digitized print literature and providing a scholarly annotation to help situate the work for readers,” said Mark Marino, the project’s director of communications.
“This directory has been a long time coming,” said Mr. Marino, an assistant professor of teaching at the University of Southern California. “… The previous version of the directory didn’t have the same type of collaborative structure. Like a museum, it reached its capacity.”
The revised Electronic Literature Directory is already online but will be released officially at the International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization, in early June.
What do you think about electronic literature? Has it lived up to the hype? We’d like to hear your thoughts in the comments or via Twitter @wiredcampus.
7 Responses to Electronic Literature Directory Gets a Redesign
loriemerson - May 14, 2010 at 6:34 pm
It is a real feat that so many have worked so tirelessly, and largely without much if any support at all from their home academic institutions, and built this Electronic Literature Directory. If it’s not already, the ELD will be the past, present, and future of e-literature and for this I’m very grateful. It also seems to me that much of the so-called hype about e-literature has been mis-informed or mis-guided – so my answer to whether it has lived up to the hype is “no – and thank goodness!” It is taking us a very long time indeed to find a way to value or appreciate e-literature on its own terms, without inadvertently or inevitably relying on print conventions.
jlaster - May 15, 2010 at 9:51 am
Thanks for your input! Interesting thoughts. -Jill Laster
eastgate - May 15, 2010 at 10:37 am
Is it sensible to ask whether “electronic literature has lived up to the hype?” First, the question invites a negative response. Indeed, it is compelled — otherwise we are casting ourselves as lemmings.What we call “hype” in electronic literature, we call “scholarship” in any other domain.What “hype” do you have in mind here? There’s twenty-three years of the ACM Hypertext Conference, which has always included research on literary hypertext. Reviews and essays about literary hypertext have appeared for twenty years in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, TLS, The New Yorker. The monograph literature on literary hypertext features major volumes from George P. Landow (Brown), Michael Joyce (Vassar), N. Katherine Hayles (Duke), Greg Ulmer (Florida), Dave Cicoricco (Christchurch), Astrid Ensslin (Bangor), Jay Bolter (GA Tech), J. Yellowlees Douglas (Florida), Noah Wardrip-Fruin (UC Santa Cruz), Matt Kirschenbaum (Maryland) and doubtless others whose omission will presently embarass me. The journal literature is even richer.Are the authors of these volumes guilty of hype? Or do you blame their publishers? With which critics, precisely, do you disagree?Thanks are due to the authors of the ELD for making a start on the bibliographic and critical work needed here. A short glance at the directory reveals that much remains to be done — this “directory” more closely resembles a sampling than it does a comprehensive guide. But a start needs to be made.
jtabbi - May 16, 2010 at 3:55 am
It’s true – when designing the directory, we used a wiki platform that resembles Wikipedia somewhat. Both are “communal efforts,” for sure. Unlike most wiki’s, though, the entries in the directory are attributed to individual authors, so that interpretations of new work can beeffectively challenged, and a critical discussion can emerge. And that’s the key contribution, in my opinion (as director of the project): the ELD brings to the field a chance for principled criticism. Presenting works on a directory is all about value judgments, not least the fundamental distinctions between, say, born-digital literature and print literature under glass. The directory working group, in presenting the current (surely not definitive) sample, has been refining those distinctions continually for each entry we’ve received. But the distinctions don’t end with a choice of this or that work for inclusion. We’re not just showcasing works, we’re also tracking the conversation that forms around works, and the keywords and developing critical vocabulary used to describe the emergence of new literary forms.The presentation of a work on the directory is an invitation to readers precisely to address the kind of questions that Mark Bernstein raises, in particular, “With which critics, precisely, do you disagree.” I think each one of the critics named by Bernstein is cited somewhere even in this initial, kernal version of the directory. At least one critic, Ciccoricco, has drafted an entry. Others have entries /on/ their work (in the ‘context’ section), and all are cited. I agree with Bernstein that we have a ‘rich’ selection of e-lit criticism in print, but until now we have not had a place, online, where critical, curatorial, and creative writing are presented in the same space, systematically not just occasionally, and where those who agree, or disagree, can enter the discussion directly. This kind of critical discussion, certainly, has been present in the formation of early hypertext and current e-lit culture. Collaborative, crowd-sourced knowledge formation has been proven through the popularity of Wikipedia. What the directory can do, by fixing entries and instituting discussion threads, is to bring e-lit’s culture of critique into the open, and make the communal presentation of knowledge consistent with protocols of debate and discussion. – Joseph Tabbi
jlaster - May 16, 2010 at 10:27 am
Thanks for your thoughts, eastgate. By “hype,” I just meant that in the mid- to late-1990s, there was a lot of talk about electronic literature and about how it was the future of literature. I wondered how what has happened in the last decade has matched some of the “hype,” or expectations perhaps laid upon hypertext literature by media attention. Does that make sense? -Jill LasterAnd many thanks for your thoughts, jtabbi!
kwsherwood - May 16, 2010 at 11:30 pm
One can well understand the consternation of Mark Bernstein and others at the rhetorical trap in the quesiton of hype. In journalism, but also in many educational settings, there reigns a sense of the E-lit as new and provisional. Amusing to revist the Nealon story of 1998 where Vassr Prof. Michael Joyce and his students encounter the new and strange. Unfortunately, outside of a few select neighborhoods (Brown, UCSD, …) that scenario is repeated as if no time had passed — because there’s still not significant cultural awareness or readiness to engage with what’s now a decade’s long tradition (or longer if one follows Funkhouser’s _Prehistoric Digital Poetry_). So digital writers and teachers continue the work. It would be nice if journals like the Chronicle could devote a more sustained treatment, so we could get beyond the new and strange phase. The directory is part of the solution to making it easier to appreciate the range of work being done. But we’re also talking about institutional / cultural shifts.
eastgate - May 17, 2010 at 12:26 pm
“> in the mid- to late-1990s, there was a lot of talk about electronic literature and about how it was the future of literature.”Was there a lot of talk? Who was talking? What did they say? If they were wrong, where exactly were they wrong?Questions like these are the foundation of scholarship. Yes, perhaps someone, somewhere, said this; why not identify them and respond specifically to their arguments rather than dismiss them out of hand as “hype”? And, indeed, that foolish mid-90′s prediction that electronic literarure was the future of literature — assuming someone did make it — looks oddly prescient right now. Magazine and newspaper circulation are suffering unprecedented reverses, while digital media — including this site — seem remarkably prosperous. Would it have been hype to suggest in 1990 that, twenty years from now, we’d be reading Chron H.Ed. on our mobile phones?