Making Connections Visible: Building a Knowledge Base for Electronic Literature

Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) is a collaborative research project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation. Focusing on the electronic literature community in Europe as a model of networked creativity and innovation in practice, ELMCIP is intended both to study the formation and interactions of that community and also to further electronic literature research and practice in Europe. The ELMCIP Knowledge Base is a publicly accessible online database that focuses on capturing core bibliographic data and archival materials about authors, creative works, critical writing, events, organizations, publishers, and teaching resources and on making visible the connections between creative and scholarly activities in the field.

This presentation will focus on three aspects of the ELMCIP Knowledge Base in particular:

1) Cross-referencing to make visible the emergence of creative and scholarly communities of practice

In developing the ELMCIP Knowledge Base platform, we put a particular emphasis on showing the connections between different forms of practice in scholarly and artistic communities, and making cross-references apparent and accessible. So for instance, records documenting creative works are automatically linked to critical writing that reference them, and vice versa, records of events and exhibition link to works that were presented, author records link to materials written, edited and taught. This capacity to show the web of connections on which a creative community is based is a distinguishing feature of the project.

2) Open access and international collaboration

The ELMCIP project is working with other international projects in the US, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Australia and elsewhere to establish open-access content sharing between the most active database projects and organizations in the field, to facilitate international cooperation and growth of the creative communities in which it is engaged.

3) Documenting and the path to Archiving electronic literature

The ELMCIP project includes both metadata-level documentation and some archival materials, such as .PDF files, source code of some works, audio and video documentation of presentations and so forth. This presentation will consider ways in which this might lead to the future development of an electronic literature repository, in which works of electronic literature are not only documented, but also in some fashion preserved for archival reference and future appreciation.

(Source: author's abstract)

Note: This presentation is based on the previously published essay "The ELMCIP Knowledge Base and the Formation of an International Field of Literary Scholarship and Practice"