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A Short History of Electronic Literature and Communities in the Nordic Countries
While literary hypertexts and the research field were still in an early stage, Nordic researchers laid their eyes on the literary potential of hypertext technologies. Some Nordic researchers (e.g. Aarseth 1994; Koskimaa 1994; Liestøl 1994), I would claim (perhaps in a moment of patriotism), contributed significantly to a research field still in its infancy. Still, after almost twenty years, it is hard to discover a specifically Nordic community for electronic literature. Those scholars conducting research on electronic literature in the Nordic countries are usually associates of international communities like the Electronic Literature Organization, Digital Fiction International Network and Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice. Similar communities in the Nordic countries are not that easy to spot, but we might say that they exist, although as rather small-scale projects and communities. This does however not imply that they are insignificant.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 23.03.2012 - 07:26
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Developing an Identity for the Field of Electronic Literature: Reflections on the Electronic Literature Organization Archives
The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) was founded as a literary nonprofit organization in 1999 after the Technology Platforms for 21st Century Literature conference at Brown University. Along with Jeff Ballowe and Robert Coover, I was a co-founder of the ELO, and served as its first Executive Director from 1999-2001, and have served on its board of directors in the years since then. Today it is one of the most active organizations in the field of electronic literature, central to the practice of e-lit in the United States and its establishment as an academic discipline. This essay briefly outlines the early history of the organization, the ways that the mission, profile, and the focus of the organization evolved and changed in its first decade, and offers some tentative insights into the ways that an institutionally structured community can facilitate network-mediated art practice.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 23.03.2012 - 07:30
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Electronic Literature Seen from a Distance: The Beginnings of a Field
This paper outlines the development of the hypertext fiction community that developed in the United States of America from the late eighties and onwards. This community was separate from the interactive fiction community (and largely thought of its works as different from “games”) and largely revolved around the use of Storyspace, a software tool for creating electronic literature, and later, around Eastgate, a publisher of hypertext fiction and the company that developed Storyspace. While some work was written and published in Hypercard and other systems, the technology of a dominant software authoring tool and of the mechanics of distribution (diskettes sold by mail order) formed the hub of the electronic literature community during this period. There was little or no communication with other communities, such as the IF community or digital art communities. With the advent of the web, new authoring and distribution channels opened up, and this hub gradually lost its dominance. The transition from this relatively centralised and explicit community to the networked communities and scattered individuals of the Web is an interesting one to explore.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 23.03.2012 - 07:32
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Digital Literature in France
Serge Bouchardon's paper concludes with the observation that the field of digital literature "is based on each country's own conception of literariness, of the digital medium, as well as on the relation between the two" and completes his article with a question to be considered in future research on communities, asking if digital literature is a coherent international field or a mere collection of cultural specificities. Giving an account of how digital literature in France evolved theoretically and historically through the creation of creative works and their traditional filiations, within a study of two socio-technical devices, he also analyzes how a particular mailing list, "a reflexive device" of a community possibly contributes to the construction of the field. His contribution comes along with a rich collection of links to various French actors in the field.
(Source: Article abstract.)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 23.03.2012 - 15:36
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Dichtung Digital 41
The first of two special issues of Dichtung Digital emerging from the 2010 ELMCIP seminar on electronic literature communities (Bergen). Articles explore electronic literature from a variety of perspectives, including regional or language-based communities, communities of practice that form around particular genres or technologies, and communities that develop around insitutionalization efforts.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 23.03.2012 - 15:44
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What Hypertext Is
Over the past couple decades, as the term "hypertext" has gained a certain popular currency, a question has been raised repeatedly: "What is hypertext?" Our most respected scholars offer a range of different, at times incompatible, answers. This paper argues that our best response to this situation is to adopt the approach taken with other terms that are central to intellectual communities (such as "natural selection," "communism," and "psychoanalysis"), a historical approach. In the case of "hypertext" the term began with Theodor Holm ("Ted") Nelson, and in this paper two of his early publications of "hypertext" are used to determine its initial meaning: the 1965 "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" and the 1970 "No More Teachers' Dirty Looks." It is concluded that hypertext began as a term for forms of hypermedia (human-authored media that "branch or perform on request") that operate textually. This runs counter to definitions of hypertext in the literary community that focus solely on the link. It also runs counter to definitions in the research community that privilege tools for knowledge work over media.
Scott Rettberg - 25.05.2012 - 14:15
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Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together
"Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together" was commissioned for xxxboîte, an artifact produced in celebration of the first ten years of Studio XX, a Feminist art centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique, founded in Montreal in 1996.
J. R. Carpenter - 29.07.2012 - 13:13
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Machine Enhanced (Re)minding: the Development of Storyspace
This article traces the history of Storyspace, the world’s first program for creating, editing and reading hypertext fiction. Storyspace is crucial to the history of hypertext as well as the history of interactive fiction. It argues that Storyspace was built around a topographic metaphor and that it attempts to model human associative memory. The article is based on interviews with key hypertext pioneers as well as documents created at the time.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 04.11.2012 - 09:43
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The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008
The Last Vispo Anthology is composed of vispo (a portmanteau of the words “visual” and “poetry") from the years 1998 to 2008, during a burst of creative activity fueled by file sharing and email, which made it possible for the vispo community to establish a more heightened and sophisticated dialogue with one another. The collection extends the dialectic between art and literature that began with ancient “shaped text,” medieval pattern poetry, and dada typography, pushing past the concrete poetics of the 1950s and the subsequent mail art movement of the 1980s to its current incarnation. Rather than settle into predictable, unchallenged patterns, this vibrant poetry seizes new tools to expand the body of work that inhabits the borderlands of visual art and poetic language.
Scott Rettberg - 07.12.2012 - 15:29
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Digging For The Roots Of Interactive Storytelling
This paper is a writer's reflections on the pre-computer origins of interactive narrative. It seeks out forms of human expression dating back to prehistory that can viewed as the precursors of contemporary interactive storytelling and contemplates what can be learned from these forms that can be applied to contemporary works of interactive storytelling. The examined forms include the participatory myth-based dramas of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks; coming of age rituals in traditional societies; games that blend spiritual beliefs and athleticism; and various Judeo-Christian and pagan religious practices.
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:46
