Open Discussion Session on the Future of ELO

At the ELO conference in 2012, several authors had a discussion on the future of the ELO.

E-lit authors Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink organized a panel on the "Future of E--Lit" at the ELO 2012 conference, allowing emerging and early career authors to articulate institutional and economic, as well more familiar technological, developments that constrain and facilitate current practice. The panel papers were released in ebr in March 2014. Luesebrink and Strickland followed up with comments on the papers, offering a "progress report" on the future of the field. The individual responses are available as glosses on the essays and in full here.

In March 2014, the electronic book review (EBR) published nine short papers on the futures of electronic literature and the role of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). These papers reflect talks solicited for a special session of the 2012 ELO conference at West Virginia University, a session proposed by Marjorie Luesebrink in which emerging artists, scholars, and practitioners would offer suggestions on how to improve the ELO as it re-defined its mission in a shifting cultural, economic, and technological landscape. At Luesebrink’s request, Stephanie Strickland gathered a group to participate and moderated the discussion session. Responses ranged from the concrete to the poetic to the theoretical. Luesebrink and Strickland [L&S] respond briefly to each below, providing first the EBR capsule description of each paper and then delineating changes that have (and have not) been made by the organization in response.