ELO_AI & RBMS10, Part 1: An Overview & Introduction

June was a busy and productive month. I presented at both “Archive & Innovate,” the 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization held at Brown University in Providence, RI, and “Join or Die: Collaborations in Special Collections,” the Rare Books and Manuscript Section Preconference (of the American Libraries Association) held in Philadelphia, PA (home of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL)). Both conferences were exceptionally good and deepened my engagement in my career as a special collections librarian and as a scholar interested in “media change” and the history of the book.

I intend to unpack some of my own thinking and summarize some of the more interesting presentations, discussions, and concepts brought up at both of these conferences. This will happen over a few posts titled, “ELO-AI & RBMS10.”

I’ve written plenty on this blog about my ideas leading up to my paper that I delivered at ELOAI on the “body and the book” in the late age of print, using Steve Tomasula’s VAS and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl to examine the material relationships between readers and books in our current moment of media change. What I have not written much about is my role as an editor of the Electronic Literature Directory (ELD), a recently launched project of the Electronic Literature Organization. Or I should say, a relaunching of the ELD in a version 2.0 that takes selective—more on why ‘selective’ later—advantage of web 2.0 technologies such as the wiki platform and crowd-source tagging. The ELD was publically launched and presented in a panel (of which I was a participating panelist) at ELOAI. I’d also like to mention that the ELD was brought up at the RBMS preconference in James Ascher’s (et al.) wonderful discussion session on “Progressive Bibliography: Catalogers, Curators, and Crowdsourcing.” The ELD was noted as a model of a catalog using new media and social networking create new functionality and to actively engage its audience as participants and contributors. Synergy.

But first some background…

I have been involved with the Electronic Literature Organization since it’s very early days. As an undergraduate in my senior year as an English major at Loyola University in Chicago at the turn of the millennium (e.g. circa 2000), I had been daydreaming about the computer’s potential for revolutionizing literature. I was also working (read: volunteering) as an assistant editor of the long-running independent literary journal, Another Chicago Magazine (ACM). Full of energy and enthusiasm I wandered (unannounced, I think) into the small loft office of the recently formed Electronic Literature Organization. Could I have a job or a paid internship? I asked. Scott Rettberg, ELO’s founding executive director, apparently didn’t want to crush my dreams for the utopian future of a digital literature, so I found myself as an intern, soon-to-be “programs assistant” in the very eartly start-up days of the ELO.

It was here in the heady days of the pre-bubble bust internet economy that I toiled as the in-house underling at the ELO working in our cramped little loft space in Ravenswood, helping with the planning for the first version of the Electronic Literature Directory and helping plan the first-ever (and only, so far) Electronic Literature Awards held at the New School in New York in 2001.

Soon after this the dot.com bubble burst, promised funding fell out from underneath the organization, and luckily the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) stepped in to take in the previously independent ELO (I think this was initiated by Dr. N. Katherine Hayles, then at UCLA).

Now nearly a decade later, I find myself once again deeply engaged with the ELD. Since these green just out of undergraduate days, I have turned to special collections / rare book librarianship as my chosen profession and with my scholarly interests focusing on the history of the book and media change. Within this framework, I find myself considering the role of technological and cultural changes that shaped the form and content of early printed books, while also considering how today’s technological and cultural changes are shaping contemporary literary production, resituating our literary past, and changing our vital connection to the written word.

The Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) Explained & My Efforts on the Project

The ELD exists somewhere between an archive and a catalog. It is not an archive because it does not aim to preserve works of electronic literature for future use. (A secondary project of the ELD does intend to do this.) The ELD does serve as a catalog of works of electronic literature, though it’s functionality and aims are different than a typical library catalog that describes, for example, the holdings of a particular institution. If the ELD is an archive of anything, it is an archive of metadata about works of electronic literature. This metadata centers upon an encyclopedic entry, both critical and contextual, that serves to describe and classify a work of electronic literature. The ELD also is a site for critical dialog and exchange about the field of born-digital literature. Anyone can contribute entries or add tags to existing entries. And each entry allows for comments (much in the same way as this blog allows for comments on individual posts).

My own work on the ELD has focused on fronts. First, I will be taking a leading role in our collaboration with the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive (Archive-It.org). This is an archival initiative to ensure lasting access to web-based works. If the work is accessible on the web via an internet address, we can preserve it for later generations (emulation of current systems on future systems maybe necessary, however). In addition to this work, I have been working to create and populate an “antecedent” category. This category of entries intends to situate a deeper history of literature that informs and precedes today’s electronic literature. Sometimes they have an electronic component (as in Jackson Mac Low and Charles Hartman’s collaborations which used the computer to compose printed books) and sometimes they do not (as in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, a proto-hypertext novel in print). Whitney Trettien’s recent contributions of “antecedent” entries for both Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (1897) and Harsdörffer’s Denckring (1651) illustrate how brief descriptive writing can elucidate a literary prehistory for electronic literature that opens up the discussion to how technology and interactivity have enabled earlier (often seldom considered) modes of literary production outside the seemingly set conventions for print. Of course, where do the boundaries for this category begin or end? Well, determining this, and creating a critical discussion around this issue is part of the point. This is one example of the role played by the ELD to encourage, organize, and documenting

In addition to this work, I am working to build partnerships and collaborations with the ELD and institutions that are collecting the papers and digital files of writers of elit (e.g. the Ransom Center’s Michael Joyce collection, Duke’s Stephanie Strickland collection, and MITH’s Deena Larsen collection) and other elit focused collections (e.g. Brown University’s attempts to document the rich history of promoting the use of digital tools for literary production).

My engagement with the ELD project has opened up new ways of seeing medieval manuscripts and early printed books, while scholarship in bibliography and the history of the book has much to offer the community of scholars (most of whom are literary critics or writer/artist practitioners) that have gathered around the emerging field of electronic literature.

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