Six Themes: One Dispersed Exhibition

This is only one of many sites/portal/exhibition spaces that will appear in relation to the ELO2021 Conference.

Exhibitions for ELO 2021 will unfold on an extended time scale from March-May 2021. All exhibitions will be fully exhibited online, though some will also include local physical exhibitions.

The following exhibitions will be part of the festival:

Posthuman Electronic Literature.

An online exhibition with a projection exhibition component focused on electronic literature and media art that addresses posthumanism. To be featured during European SLSA conference at the University of Bergen. Curated by Joseph Tabbi, Scott Rettberg, Jason Nelson, Eamon O’Kane. MARCH 4-7, 2021.

COVID E-Lit.

An online exhibition of works that respond thematically to the pandemic and/or are produced within the specific context of platform culture during the pandemic. A library exhibition version of the exhibition will also be produced. Curated by Anna Nacher, Søren Pold, and Scott Rettberg. APRIL 2021.

Flashback:

A special celebration of Flash and Shockwave e-lit held in the Electronic Literature Repository with artists on hand to talk about their work. Curated by Dene Grigar at Washington State University Vancouver’s Electronic Literature Lab. MAY 24-28, 2021.

Platforming Utopias (and Platformed Dystopias):

This will be the largest open submission exhibition, responding to the conference theme. MAY 24-28 2021.

Platform as a place of study - E-lit as already decolonised:

A series of exhibitions, workshops and activities focused on Indian and Asian E-Lit that will unfold through Spring 2021. MARCH-MAY 2021. Call will be announced separately. Curated by dra.ft

The dra.ft team from their ==> WEBSITE

agat

- Theatre Maker. Educator. Designer.

nanditi

- Technical Program Manager turned Arts Professional. Classical Musician. Live Coder. Co-founder, Ajaibghar.

ambika

- Museum Professional. Creative Coder. Certified Project Manager. Computational_Mama. Co-founder, Ajaibghar.

Kid E-Lit:

An online exhibition of electronic literature for young audiences, and work work by young authors. Curated by Mark Marino and Maria Goicoechea. MAY 24-28, 2021.

ELO2021 Exhibitions committee:

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
Alan Bigelow,
Simon Biggs,
John Cayley,
Angela Chang,
Claire Donato
dra.ft:
-agat
-nanditi
-ambika
Astrid Ensslin,
Irene Fabbri,
Erika Fülöp,
Aud Gjersdal,
Maria Goicoechea,
Dene Grigar,
Ann Klingenberg,
Claudia Kozak
Milton Läufer,
Laurie Lax,
Erik Loyer,
Mark Marino,
Lucila Mayol,
John Murray,
Kat Mustatea,
Nick Montfort,
Anna Nacher,
Jason Nelson,
Eamon O'Kane,
Allison Parrish,
Søren Bro Pold,
Scott Rettberg,
Samya Brata Roy,
Carlota Salvador,
Winnie Soon,
Zach Whalen

Exhibition Statement is coming soon

Soon you can Download ==> Print Version

Posters Exhibition Statement

In lieu of a physical room in which authors can stand next to their posters and discuss their work with conference participants, ELO2021 features The Posters on this exhibition website. Scholars and artists of a myriad of backgrounds introduce their work-in-progress and recent projects. In addition to the exhibition page, registered ELO participants can join the poster sessions. Authors will give lightning talks about their posters and afterwards there will be time to ask questions and discuss the posters. The poster sessions are divided in two based on time zones. On 24 May 18:00-19:30 UTC, The North and South American Poster Session will include Vinícius Pereira, Kendra McPheeters, Devin Shepherd, Bradley Shepherd, and Will McEnery, and Erin Kathleen Bahl. On 25 May 12:30-13:45 UTC, the European Poster Session will include Alessia Pannese, Jocelyn Ibarra, Caitlin Fisher and Maureen Engel, Giulia Carla Rossi, Daria Petrova, and Claus-Michael Schlesinger et al.. If you miss the posters sessions, not to worry. Throughout ELO 2021, the ELO discord channel will have the channel #the-poster-room where you can discuss all the posters with the authors.

by Hannah Ackermans

link = Platforms of contemplation in times of confinement

Poster Session Schedule:

Europe: 25. May, 12.30-1.45 PM UTC

Description:

The forced confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic has been framed as a condition from which to reassess modern life's habits and values, and build upon such reassessment in order to reimagine a more sustainable and equitable future.

A ubiquitous feature of such confinement has been the transition from physical/presential modes of expression and interaction to virtual ones, typically supported through electronic platforms.

In the current conditions of physical distancing and confinement, electronic-platform culture presents a tension between two opposite but coexisting aspects – isolation and connectedness – both of which it seems to amplify: the former through its implication of physical distance, the latter through its global reach.

My poster will offer a reflection on today's recourse to electronic platforms under conditions of physical confinement in light of physiological evidence and philosophical ideas, in particular the work of ancient Chinese thinker Zhuang Zhou's (369-286 BC) emphasis on contemplation as vehicle for the achievement of virtue and wisdom.

Biography:

Pannese is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Oxford, where she previously studied literature and arts.
She also has a medico-neuroscientific background, having trained in veterinary medicine (University of Perugia; University of Cambridge) and neurobiology (Columbia University).

She has held fellowships at Institutes for Advanced Studies in New York (Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America), Paris (Institut d'études avancées), Delmenhorst (Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg), London (University College London – Institute of Advanced Studies), and Amsterdam (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies).

link = The Time Travel Agency's
The Algorithm of Donated Dreams

Poster Session Schedule:

Europe: 25. May, 12.30-1.45 PM UTC

Description:

The Algorithm of Donated Dreams is a sociotechnical artifact and a piece of computational poetry.
It is the product of a speculative design experience for the blockchain community DAOstack and the Reshaping Work Barcelona conference in 2019. It is also published in Taper 04 and is live here: https://taper.badquar.to/4/

Guests who participated in its making went through a game of futures to speculate "What if we lived in a society where we donated dreams like we donate blood? And what if those dreams were inserted in an algorithm that made us see we can build that society?".

Through our game, guests found challenges in that future society and prototyped solutions first with objects around them and then with language. There were two experiences to arrive to the algorithm:
IRL: https://thetimetravel.agency/The-Laboratory-of-Donated-Dreams
Online: https://thetimetravel.agency/The-Algorithm-of-Donated-Dreams

The code for the algorithm was taken from a tiny computational poem at Taper.

Direct link to the algorithm:
https://taper.badquar.to/4/algorithm_of_donated_dreams.html

Biography:

Jocelyn is the showrunner and lead of The Time Travel Agency.
She is an artist and designer interested in sociotechnical artifacts, distributed technologies, interactive fiction, and narrative design.

Jocelyn has in-depth knowledge of co-creative methods, multistakeholder governance, and lean and innovation processes within the creative, coworking, and software industries.

link = Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino

Poster Session Schedule:

America: 24. May, 6-7.30PM UTC

Description:

In 1956, the Brazilian avant-garde poet Wlademir Dias-Pino published one of his most famous books: A Ave.
All copies of this conceptual work were produced in a craft press, and the content and form of the text (a process poem, as Dias-Pino called it) are inextricable from the materiality of the book, composed of superimposed perforated pages of different colors and transparency levels, with printed letters and polygonal lines. Scholars have considered A Ave an analog predecessor of new media poetry, reflecting on the affordances of paper, ink, punch hole, and bookbinding, and their creative use in a book of visual poetry centered on the imagery of birds in flight.

Wlademir Dias-Pino also wrote theoretical texts and a manifest that point to the permutational and the procedural nature of poetic language as code. His contributions as an antecedent to Latin-American digital literature still require further investigation, especially because scholars interested in the history of new media poetry in the continent often pay more attention to the Brazilian concrete poets from São Paulo, such as Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari. Nonetheless, an important gesture of acknowledging Dias-Pino’s contribution to the field was made by the Uruguayan poet Clemente Padín, who created in 2003 the Flash piece Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino.

In this animation, a bird graphically constructed as a calligram is seen in flight, and the animal’s body and wings are made of a combination of words that allude to the metadata of A Ave among apparently random ASCII symbols.
Padín’s work is included in the Litelat Anthology, but it can no longer be accessed in its “original” format due to the obsolescence of Flash. Although this might initially seem just a setback, the limited temporality of Flash has more to say: as a technological platform with its own lifecycle, it highlights the historicity of Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino as a piece of electronic literature produced for specific software from a specific age.

A Ave, on the other hand, is a piece of analog procedural literature meant to be read without any extraneous device, but also susceptible to the physical deterioration that all material culture is liable to. This poster presents some reflections on convergences and dissonances between Wlademir Dias-Pino’s A Ave and Clemente Padín’s Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino, considering both artists’ aesthetic projects, the poetic codes they used, and the affordances of the materialities in which they inscribed their images of birds in flight.

We intend to point out how the work by a prominent predecessor of electronic literature is revisited by an established digital artist of our times in a dialogue that is of much interest to the community of Latin American e-lit and to that of electronic literature as a whole.

Biography:

Vinícius Pereira, Phd and Masters in Literary Studies - Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
Bachelor in Portuguese and English and in Portuguese and English Education - Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Professor at the Modern Languages Department and at the Graduate Program in Language Studies of the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT). Former post-doctoral internship at the Universidade de Nottingham (UoN), in the UK.

Leader of the research group SEMIC- Semióticas Contemporâneas, coordinator of the Semiotic Engineering and Digital Arts Extension of SERG.PUC-Rio/Ideias, and member of the research group DAVI - Data Beyond Life. Coordinator of Postgraduate Studies at UFMT.
Main interest areas: Contemporary Literature; Literature, Media and Technology; Electronic Literature; Digital Art; Semiology. 

link = Edge Effects

Poster Session Schedule:

Europe: 25. May, 12.30-1.45 PM UTC

Description:

What happens at the edges of bordercrossing technologies? Our poster showcases an exploratory, Benjaminian digital experiment that queers the investigation into who and what and how emerging technologies connect with our bodies, lives and desires.

This work is part of a larger project investigating tools, platforms and digital strategies that help us to weave together the digital and the analogue, human and machine, and interactivity that moves us beyond linearity to multiplicity, and for ELO we are excited to highlighting our proposed experimental project archive, still in the early stages of development as we are considering multiple platforms and seeking feedback.

We’re building a kind of queer digital arcades - both platform and method - weaving together poetry, elit, theory and ephemera to perform an interactive, technoerotic story that troubles the borders between technologies, selves, others and the world. Our goal is to offer de-centred and multiple entry points to explore the increasingly ubiquitous technologies that summon our curiosities, vulnerabilities and penetrability, and implicate our skin, our memories of the basement bar, and our bravery.

This multivocal work includes both poetic and analytical texts, electronic literature and theory as we work to visually and associatively map a series of technologies and concepts into constellations and queer formations. We understand and use the term “queer” methodologically – that is, we believe that queerness is a way of doing, whether that doing is in the production, consumption, or circulation of digital forms.

The queerness here is in the very structure of the interface, the affordances of the platform, the non-linear, expansive, and associative logics that are revealed through exploration. The result is aspirational as much as, or more than, it is analytic, prompting users to imagine new speculative queer worlds as we all grapple with the ones we currently inhabit. The larger project aims to literalize the circuit formed by the digital and the queer, thus representing an emerging, heterogenous interactivity that produces radical possibilities, possibilities that we call edge effects.
Our Benjaminian digital arcade aims both to capture and perform some of these edge effects and will include new electronic writing alongside experiments in spatial theorymaking.

We are considering a variety of platforms at this time, including:
1) VR Chat;
2) an emerging beta platform for webvr and
3) Unity.

We anticipate having screen captures of prototypes across multiple platforms and perhaps active links to beta worlds to share at the time of the conference.

Biography:

Caitlin Fisher directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab @Cinespace Studios and the Augmented Reality Lab at York University in Toronto where she is also a Professor and Chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Arts.

A co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab and former Fulbright and Canada Research Chair, Caitlin is an award-winning digital storyteller.
She serves on the international Board of Directors for HASTAC, the Humanities Arts Science Alliance and Collaboratory, and as Vice-President of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Maureen Engel is a lecturer in digital culture in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland and Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, Canada.

At Alberta, she served as Director of Digital Humanities (2011-13; 2015-2019), and Director of the Canadian Institute for Research Computing in Arts (2011-2019). Formally trained as a textual scholar, her background is in cultural studies, queer theory, and feminist theory.

Her principal research area is the spatial humanities, and the intricate relationships that inhere in and develop from the concepts of space, place, history, and narrative.

link = Creating and Archiving Electronic Literature During the Pandemic

Poster Session Schedule:

Europe: 25. May, 12.30-1.45 PM UTC

Description:

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on the way cultural heritage organisations engage with their audiences. At a time when public exhibitions and events have to be postponed indefinitely or cancelled, many GLAM institutions have chosen to increase their online presence instead, looking at virtual platforms as a means to deliver content, showcase their collections and drive engagement.

The British Library Simulator is a brief video game created and released in June 2020, as a way to engage with our audience while the physical library buildings were closed.
The game, created using the free online game engine Bitsy, allows players to explore a pixelated rendition of some popular areas of the British Library; by moving their avatar and interacting with other characters in the game, players can learn facts about the history of the building and discover some of the projects the library staff have been working on during the pandemic. One of the main projects we wanted to raise awareness about is the Emerging Formats project: the British Library, with the other five UK Legal Deposit Libraries, have been researching, collecting, archiving and preserving complex digital publications produced in the UK for the past four years.

We curate a growing collection of web-based interactive narratives hosted in the UK Web Archive, which includes a variety of format types and interaction patterns, and have just recently launched a collection of all winning and shortlisted entries for the New Media Writing Prize.

While most of the collected entries are only available on Library premises for legal reasons, a few can be accessed remotely, allowing for part of the collection to be accessible even during lockdown.
Another aim of the game was to highlight the British Library’s effort to collect and archive around COVID-19: the Library has been collecting radio stations recordings, interviews, websites and testimonies to capture the experience of lockdown and living through the pandemic.

These also include examples of e-lit produced in the UK, as well as extensive dedicated collections in the UK Web Archive and the British Library Sounds.
Both are mentioned in the game, in an effort to direct audiences to our digital resources and bring our steady online services into the spotlight.

The British Library Simulator offered us a chance to present libraries not just as keepers of knowledge, but as active and engaging content creators; it allowed us to reach new audiences, outside of the usual academic circle; by being an interactive narrative itself, it helped us stress the importance of collecting and preserving contemporary born-digital publications, as well as provide and example of the electronic literature the Library is interested in collecting; and lastly, it highlighted our ongoing effort to keep offering our services online even while the physical Library remains closed.

Biography:

Giulia Carla Rossi is the British Library’s Curator for Digital Publications.
She is responsible for supporting the Library in developing capacity to manage collections of complex digital objects as part of the Emerging Formats Project.

Currently, the project is focusing on publications produced for mobile devices (apps) and interactive narratives, covering requirements across the collection management lifecycle. She’s in the process of curating an online collection of all shortlisted and winning entries to the New Media Writing Prize, to be hosted on the UK Web Archive.

She is interested in interactive storytelling, net art and how new technologies and forms of creating and consuming content are challenging existing practices in collecting institutions.

link = "Thin Spaces"

Poster Session Schedule:

America: 24. May, 6-7.30PM UTC

Description:

For individuals who have suffered from abuse, working with hyperlink texts can, but does not necessarily, provide an opportunity to unpack trauma and experience catharsis. As a disclaimer, this should only be done with the support of a counselor as this sort of writing can also result in becoming retraumatized.

“Thin Spaces” is a hyperlink text that introduces interactors to a narrator reliving her experiences of being in an abusive marriage and her subsequent PTSD. Through presenting this autobiographical IDN, the hope is to shed light on abuse cycles and demonstrate one way that they can be broken.

“Thin Spaces” weaves through two timelines: a personal timeline of key moments surrounding the abuse and a genealogical timeline consisting of historical documents and family stories of the narrator’s ancestors. The blending of personal experience and genealogy shows that abuse can span generations. The initial framework of the story forms a cycle that culminates in a therapy session. This lexia’s single hyperlink takes readers back to an earlier lexia in the story.
This earlier lexia maintains its initial hyperlinks but introduces a new option to break the cycle using an italicized sentence offset from the rest of the text. The strand of lexia proceeding from this new hyperlink moves interactors through the aftermath of the narrator’s divorce, culminating in the hope that survival is possible.

Like PTSD, some options in the new lexia–with inverse colors from the initial cycle–cause the reader to re-experience the traumatic episodes of the piece and require them to make the conscious decision to either hit the previous screen arrow within Twine to exit that phase quickly or work through the abusive sections again to find their way back out of the abuse. Being given this choice ties to the aftermath of trauma in which some PTSD episodes can be resolved quickly through deep breathing, self-talk, or somatic strategies while other episodes resist these tactics and take longer to escape.
The interactor must be cognizant of the strategy of clicking the previous screen arrow in order to avoid lapsing back into a more lengthy process of sifting through abusive flashbacks, which parallels abuse survivors needing to have the wherewithal to employ the strategies they learn in order to avoid more serious flashbacks or PTSD episodes.

At its conclusion, “Thin Spaces” shifts to the narrator being in a healthier place, though still using coping mechanisms to deal with the effects of the trauma. The piece allows readers the choice to exit with the call of the common loon, a calming sound to soothe the interactor after this experience.
With this presentation, the audience will have access to “Thin Spaces” and see how the author’s writing process during the Pandemic unfolded, including choices in structure and color as well as the personal experience of writing autobiographically about trauma while quarantining.

Biography:

Kendra McPheeters is a graduate student and high school English teacher in northwest Indiana.
She also trains teachers in project-based learning and coaches fencing. Kendra published a chapter in Literacy Teaching and Learning in Rural Communities: Problematizing Stereotypes, Challenging Myths in 2014 and has presented at numerous education conferences over the use of improvisation games in the classroom and the necessity of literacy education.

ELO 2021 is Kendra's first academic conference in which she is presenting creative work, which she wrote during the Pandemic for one of her graduate courses covering interactive digital narratives.

link = The Mediapoetry Laboratory 101

Poster Session Schedule:

Europe: 25. May, 12.30-1.45 PM UTC

Description:

My poster will be full of works of participants of the first Russian Laboratory of Mediapoetry 101 for teenagers (12-19 years old).

It just turned out that the fate of the project is closely related to circumstances of pandemic that is why a search for new forms of creative cooperation, ways of communication and methods of creating new projects has become overarching issue of the work of the laboratory participants.

I am the curator of the Mediapoetry Laboratory 101. Although “curator” is poorly conclusive definition. An ideologist, a dreamer, an inspirer, the one who has got a grant (financial support) from the government for a genre of mediapoetry which is not recognized in Russia yet.
The project got the grant in February, 2020.
My gladness did not see any limits. Off-line sessions had to start from April, 2020, but everyone knows what prevented it to happen. The terms of the project were extended for several times in accordance with a level of my optimism. Either to autumn or to winter. Due to formal limitations and restrictions of the grant I found myself among different restrictions: necessity to hold the Laboratory not later the spring 2021, to hold at least some meetings offline. But at the same moment the government makes new resolutions not in advance enough.

All of us know about new rules approximately a day before the come into force. And for the audience of my laboratory the restrictions were the most severe ones. However I believe that, such disempowerment is breeding ground for creators. Isn’t it allowed to gather in the room? We will prepare a media poetic walk&performance. Isn’t it allowed to come up to each other closer than 1,5 meter? We will make a performance about disengagement and invisible relations. Isn’t it allowed to go out? We are glad to remember about air mail and surface mail, about telegrams and helium balloons. Students of the Laboratory have been already chosen and are on the point of starting the work.

In April I will see different projects in mediapoetry genre: games, performances, chat-poetry, texting-games, locative narrative etc. I am sure that we are waited by interesting experience of creative work. The teenagers are very flexible they needed just a little time to get used to new communicative reality of the pandemic, switching over to distant studying was easier for them than for teachers. To my mind, adolescents have better skills of new media language. They are more organic in using it that means they have greater chances to leap forward from creative and semantic point of view.

Together with this young audience we are going to discuss about culture of platforms, how they have changed visually and our feelings about communication with society, what we have known about ourselves during lockdown and how to create and keep creative collaborations. Results of this breathtaking work will be presented by me at the conference as a poster which unites works of the Laboratory participants, their thoughts, discoveries and predictions.

Biography:

Daria Petrova (Russia, Saint Petersburg) is an independent media poet and a 101.

Mediapoetry Festival cofounder and curator (101.ru.com). She is also an author of the Creative technologies course at the ITMO University.

As an artist Petrova is interested in art walks, digital performances and non-digital media.
She took part in Ypoetry – Experimental Poetry Lab, held lectures and performances at the Geek Picknic festival, the Pushkin Laboratories festival, the children’s bureau “Kulturny Kot” (all of the above in Saint Petersburg), the Frankfurt Book Fair (Russian exhibition stand), the Moscow Book Fair, two-day intensive course “Art in the city: the formation of the contemporary cultural landscape” by the Calvert foundation (Russia, Khanty-Mansyisk).

link = Tenure Track

Poster Session Schedule:

America: 24. May, 6-7.30PM UTC

Description:

Tenure Track is a postmodernist critique of 21st-century academia in the form of a simulation game.
In the vein of satirical games like Cow Clicker—a product of “carpentry,” or a strategy for creating philosophical, creative work, according to its designer Ian Bogost—Tenure Track also borrows game mechanics from popular puzzle simulators like Papers, Please, merging the finite potentiality of a critical text with the lightheartedness and non-prescriptiveness of play. Additionally, the simulation game as a genre harkens back to philosophical toys of the 19th century, such as the thaumatrope, the purpose of which was demystification through wonderment.

The proposed poster would include imagery from the game, as well as links to interactive components (gameplay footage, demos) and brief descriptions of the mechanics and concept of the game. Developed in Unity for desktop and VR over the past year, Tenure Track visually consists of a 3D re-creation of a nondescript office, viewed from a first-person perspective, with every object in the space being manipulable.

The goal of the game is to achieve tenure by completing research, grading papers, and communicating with students and administrators. Much of this “work” is mediated through a variety of simulated digital platforms, which are accessed via a desktop monitor and a mobile phone. The centering of platforms underscores the degree to which they are essential to what constitutes labor.

Post-pandemic, this can be read as referencing a potentially obsolete “platform”: the physical office. As the player performs a litany of menial tasks over the course of a series of seconds-long days, they are interrupted constantly by notifications and knocks at the door. Over time, this produces a simulacrum of the frantic yet mundane administrative role many modern-day academics find themselves “playing” as they strive for the promised land of tenure. The sequence of predefined yet somewhat open-ended steps in the tenure process lends itself to this kind of gamification, which resists the interpretation of a prescribed process as fair or logical.
The many small but cumulatively important decisions players make imparts a feeling of decision fatigue common to most knowledge work, playing with the assumption many outside of academe have of the professoriate as belonging to an exceptional, noble profession. What is not known until the game’s conclusion is that, once a player reaches one of several possible “endings,” the days continue to loop continuously.

While the game rewards literacy of both games and academe by subverting the former and reifying the latter, arguably the most satisfying interactions are the ones that are, in reality, the most disruptive (dropping the mobile phone and cracking the screen) or least salient (disposing of empty beverage containers in a recycling bin). Those who misunderstand the tenure track job as a stairway to heaven, or even as fundamentally different from other types of white-collar jobs, stand to see it in an uncanny light.

Biography:

Bradley Shepherd, Devin Shepherd, and Will McEnery comprise the indie game studio Boreal Games.

We are focused on developing XR game experiences. Beyond our collective projects, Devin is pursuing a Master of Arts in English at the University of Arkansas, and Will and Bradley are independent professionals in intermedia design and software development, respectively.

link = Science Data Center for Literature

Poster Session Schedule:

Europe: 25. May, 12.30-1.45 PM UTC

Description:

The interdisciplinary Science Data Center for Literature (SDC4Lit) reflects on the demands that net literature and born-digital archival material place on archiving, research and reading.
The main goal is to implement appropriate solutions for a sustainable data lifecycle for the archive and for research purposes, which include introductory uses at university and school level. The focus is on the establishment of distributed long-term repositories for net literature and born-digital archival material and the development of a research platform.

The repositories will be regularly expanded by the project and its cooperation partners and will form a hub for harvesting various forms of net literature in the future operation of SDC4Lit. The research platform will offer the possibility of computer-assisted work with the archived material.

Since such a repository structure, which integrates collecting, archiving, and analysis, can only be accomplished through interdisciplinary collaboration, the project brings together partners with expertise in the subfields of archives, supercomputing, natural language processing, and digital humanities: The German Literature Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv) with a focus on archiving and preservation; the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) with a focus on computing; the Institute for Natural Language Processing and the Institute for Literary Studies at the University of Stuttgart with a focus on NLP, cultural and literary history and digital humanities.

An important task of the project is the modeling of net literature and born-digital literature, which will initially be carried out in an example-oriented manner in dealing with an already existing corpus of net literature and exampes from the large born-digital collection at DLA. Underlying research on both technical and poetological challenges of digital, non-digital, and post-digital literature, e.g. on questions of genre or on computational approaches towards net literature and literary blogs as digital and networked objects.

In addition to digital objects and corresponding metadata, the accruing research data are also stored in a sustainable manner. Research data includes, first, research data generated in the course of the project's work, especially data used by regular services on the platform such as named entity recognition trained with data from the archived material. Secondly, the repository should offer the possibility to store research data generated by users of the research platform in a structured way and to make it available for further research.

The connection of archival repository, research platform and research data repository follows standard research data management practices (FAIR principles) and works toward the goal to support a sustainable research data lifecycle for archivists and researchers working with electronic literature (on the web) and born-digital literature archived at the DLA archive and potential future cooperating institutions.

Biography:

Alex Holz is a Digital Curator at Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (German Literature Archive) and at the Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel Research Alliance and part of the Science Data Center for Literature project.
Web: https://www.mww-forschung.de/mitarbeiter*innen/holz

Mona Ulrich is preservation manager (M.A.) with the focus on web archiving and a research assistant at Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (German Literature Archive) where she is co-responsible for the net literature department in the Science Data Center for Literature project.
Web: https://monaulrich.online

Dr. Claus-Michael Schlesinger has a background in literary studies, history of knowledge and digital humanities; he is a research associate at the Digital Humanities department, Institute for Literary Studies, University of Stuttgart, and part of the Science Data Center for Literature project.
Web: https://esthet1cs.net
ORCID: 0000-0001-6718-5773

Poster Session Schedule:

Europe: 25. May, 12.30-1.45 PM UTC

Description:

This poster presents the in-house development environment used for translation and migration of Michael Joyce’s Twilight.
A Symphony (2021) into browser/online edition. The framework has been built from scratch but based on translations of Joyce's hypertexts into Polish. Apart from supporting guard fields, outgoing link labelling and conditional links – for the first time in the history of Storyspace ports – it will also support mobile friendly visualisation of the Storyspace Map View. Programming tools: Java, HTML, JavaScript, Microsoft .NET MVC Framework. The poster will present the scheme of media translation process and visualization template.

Biography:

Michał Furgał: I'm a programmer and student at University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszów, Poland. 

link = Botanicals

Poster Session Schedule:

America: 24. May, 6-7.30PM UTC

Description:

In this in-progress research-creative project, I explore the role of “teacher” as creative maker, designer, and crafter of epistemological experiences.
Building on the work of artist-scholar-teachers such as Lynda Barry (2014, 2019), Jody Shipka (2011), Kate Hanzalik (2021), and Hanzalik and Virgintino (2019), I investigate what it means to be a digital designer who cultivates aesthetic learning experiences for my students, with all the wonder and uncertainty and risk this process entails. Specifically, I develop an interactive webcomic that constructs an online gallery for an assignment in an asynchronous graduate-level professional writing course. By breaking away from the temporal logics of a course content management system, a webcomic designed from scratch instead allows instructors to use the logics of the “infinite canvas” (McCloud, 2009) to craft spaces that foster exploration according to a student’s own pace, sequence, and learning goals.

Inspired by interactive webcomics such as Emily Carroll’s “Margot’s Room” (2011) and “Grave of the Lizard Queen” (2013), Botanicals: An Interactive Pedagogical Webcomic is built from HTML/CSS with embedded hyperlinked illustrations and other media. Designed around the visual metaphors of a greenhouse and a garden path, the comic offers several interwoven paths. Viewers might wander through as students in pursuit of a pedagogical experience, or they might situate themselves as scholarly readers and fellow designer-teachers through “framed reflections” on the pedagogical-aesthetic decisions informing the webcomic’s design process. This project emerges from my ongoing work as digital scholarship designer and independent comics creator, in an attempt to bring this critical-creative practice into closer conversation with my teaching practices.

Recent global shifts to online learning have offered increased opportunities to design media for students in online environments, via a range of teaching modalities. Responding to these exigencies, I strive to create pedagogical webcomics that are beautiful, engaging, and aesthetically pleasing for their own sake, as works (like Lynda Barry’s Syllabus [2014] and Making Comics [2019]) at the intersections of “pedagogical delivery tool” and “aesthetic object.”
These interactive comics facilitate pedagogical user experiences (Borgman and McArdle, 2019) that invite students into inventive exploration, that will help them design their own learning experiences, and that encourage instructor-designers to bring their critical making imaginations to bear upon teaching as a way of creating knowledge together with students through interactive design.

As instructor and designer, I reflect on how the role of asynchronous course designer overlaps with that of webcomic designer, and on the possibilities these connections suggest toward designing pedagogical materials for online asynchronous course modalities. Overall, I ask what it means to approach teaching as a process of making and designing for and with my students, and offer this critically theorized webcomic as one possible answer to that question.

Biography:

Erin Kathleen Bahl is Assistant Professor of Applied and Professional Writing in the Kennesaw State University English Department (Atlanta, Georgia).
Her research, teaching, and design explore the possibilities digital technologies afford for creating knowledge and telling stories. She is the managing editor for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, part of the Filter Insta-Zine editorial collective, and writer/designer of the ongoing webcomic Little Yellow Bird.

Poster Session Schedule:

America: 24. May, 6-7.30PM UTC

Description:

This poster presentation summarizes the interactive narrative designs of a historical series of significant works of interactive cinema, from Kinoautomat (1967) to Bandersnatch (2018).
It focuses on comparison and contrast of the graph or flowchart representation of the interactive choice structure for each work, whether highly constrained or expansive, highlighting points of comparison and contrast. Visualization of each works and data on their choice structure is based on upcoming contributions to the Transverse Reading Gallery project, which maps interactive plot structures across form and media from the 1920s to the present starting with the print gamebooks of the Demian Katz Archive.

Link: https://jeremydouglass.github.io/transverse-gallery/gallery.html

Biography:

Jeremy Douglass is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
He serves as the faculty director of the Digital Arts and Humanities Commons (DAHC), and is the former director of Transcriptions, a center for research in literature, culture, media, and the digital humanities.

He is co-author, with Jessica Pressman and Mark C. Marino, of Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (Iowa UP, 2015), and co-author, with Montfort et. al, of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (The MIT Press, 2012).
He is co-PI on the WhatEvery1Says project. Douglass conducts research on interactive narrative, games, and electronic literature, with a focus on the methods of software studies, critical code studies, and cultural analytics. His work has been supported by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, ACLS, Calit2, HASTAC, and NERSC.