We are pleased to announce that the editorial collective of the 4th volume of the Electronic Literature Collection is adding a new member, Lyle Skains.  Skains will be bringing a broad sense of the field, especially through her work with Wonderbox.  Lyle will be joining Kathi Inman Berens, John Murray, Rui Torres, and  Mia Zamora.  The team is currently reviewing the submissions for the forthcoming collection. Lyle researches and teaches Creative Digital Writing and Science Communication, conducting practice-based research into writing, reading/playing, publishing digital and transmedia narratives, and how these can be used for health and science communication. Her recent digital fiction includes No World 4 Tomorrow for the You & CO2 project, and Only, Always, Never for the Infectious Storytelling project; both works were designed to effect social change. She is the founder of Wonderbox Digital, a marketplace for digital fiction, aiming to explore innovations in digital and online publishing and creativity. Her digital fiction can be found at lyleskains.com; articles in Convergence, Digital Creativity, and Computers and Composition; and books with Cambridge UP (Digital Authorship), forthcoming Emerald (interdisciplinary scicomm) and Bloomsbury (convergent evolution of mainstream digital fiction). She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Health and Science Communication at Bournemouth University. ELO is grateful for her service in this key publication in our field.

Call for Proposals: Emerging Spaces for E-Lit Creations

The electronic literature community has developed many online publications (‘zines and similar resources) that feature Web-based technologies and have typically taken the form of websites. The ELO seeks to encourage the creation of new spaces (‘zines) in which to curate, promote, and explore a greatly expanded set of works on popular social media spaces online. These might include video sharing sites, mobile platforms, or social media networks. The goal of our initiative is to stimulate and support the creation and dissemination of quality electronic literature in a much greater variety of locations.

We are looking for proposals to create new recurrent publication spaces that:

• Are designed as fully integrated venues in app ecosystems and/or social media platforms. These publication venues can have a web component, but the primary means of distribution should be through these platforms.
• Consider the promotion of creative work a priority but are open for creative/scholarly combinations.
• Follow community credentialing standards, such as editorial oversight, peer review, juries, etc.
• Have a marketing and social media distribution plan to build up their audience.
• Publish at least two “issues” per year.
• Are team efforts with a clear work plan.
• Have an estimate of monetary needs.
• Have a sustainability plan that considers three aspects:
  • Financial: explains how they will generate revenue to sustain operations,
  • Organizational: has a plan for continuing beyond its founding publishers,
  • Preservation: has plans for maintaining publication in the long term, and documentation of ephemeral works.

Interested? Send us a 500 word proposal that addresses all the points above by November 1, 2020. If you have any questions or seek additional guidance, please contact ELO President Leonardo Flores (leo@eliterature.org).

The ELO is prepared to fund one or more proposals in 2020-21, which will receive up to $1,000 in startup funds to cover licensing and developer fees, graphic design, software infrastructure, marketing, programming, etc. We can also help the team(s) with recruiting efforts, disseminating calls, and promoting it through our communication channels.

The winning team(s) will run the publication and prepare a report in which it shares its plans and processes, successes, lessons learned, and other insights from creating and running the publication. This report is to be presented in the ELO 2022 Conference.

ELO Board members are not eligible to apply to this initiative.

We are pleased to announce the 2020 ELO Prize winners.

The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature

• 1st Place: The Library of Nonhuman Books by Karen Ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato
• Runner Up: Déprise (Loss of Grasp) by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert
• Committee Members: Annie Abrahams, Giovanna di Rosario, Talan Memmott

The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature honors the year’s best work of electronic literature, of any form or genre. It comes with a $1000 stipend.  The Winner of the 2020 Award is The Library of Nonhuman Books by Karen Ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato

According to the judges: “With The Library of Nonhuman Books, Karen Ann Donnachie & Andy Simionato have produced a work that is perhaps best defined as multiple. Rather than a stand alone work of electronic literature, what we have here is a system that touches upon machine reading, the algorithmic manipulation of text, and authorship.  The “work” in this regard is in the production of a complex set of operations capable of producing endless texts. Though, the end result may in fact be a physical book, what is most interesting from an electronic literature perspective is the potential for a literary practice dominated by the machine.”

The Runner up for the 2020 Coover Award is Déprise (Loss of Grasp) by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert

According to the judges, “Déprise by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert is an intelligent and literary sophisticated interactive narrative that has contributed to spread elit around the world. Published in French in 2010, it has been translated in ten languages. Déprise is one of the many digital works that has experienced the obsolescence of programming software. However, Bouchardon migrated the text (and four translations) written in Flash into JavaScript to save his work.”

The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature

• 1st Place: Critical Code Studies by Mark C. Marino (MIT Press)
• Honorable Mention: Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider by Aaron Reed, John Murray, and Anastasia Salter (Bloomsbury)
• Shortlisted Titles:
  • “Creative Making As Creative Writing,” issue 4.1 of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, edited by Kathi Inman Berens.
  • Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games by Alenda Y. Chang.
• Committee Members: Lai-Tze Fan, Jon Saklofske, Caleb Milligan

The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature honors the best work of criticism of electronic literature of any length. Endowed through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this annual prize recognizes excellence in the field. The Prize for 1st Place comes with a $1000 award.  The 2020 N.  Katherine Hayles award goes to Critical Code Studies by Mark C. Marino is the recipient of the 2020 N. Katherine Hayles Award.

Critical Code Studies is an important and necessary book, staging an instructive, provocative, and creative interruption into the field of computer science and related creative projects.  Challenging fundamental assumptions and habits of critical practice, it argues for the political and cultural necessity of becoming critically lucid about this invisibilized layer of meaning, materiality, and process that is at the heart of every experience of electronic literature. Understanding code for its linguistic capacity and meaning-making flexibility, as a subtle layer of signs that communicate essential socio-political contexts, this book’s varied case studies are instrumental in unfolding the complexity and richness of CCS’ interventional possibility.

Honourable Mention: Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider by Aaron Reed, John Murray, and Anastasia Salter

Adventure Games is a collaborative work that mixes history, theory, close readings, and larger implications in a comprehensive analysis of the thoroughly e-literary genre of adventure games, braiding electronic literature into broader and more inclusive critical conversations.  Reaching out to audiences beyond academia, this volume identifies and counters marginalization and othering aspects of particular interactive experiences via a radical inclusion, collectively considering design elements, mechanics, and dynamics; choice and episodic structures; innovation in story, puzzle & exploration; walking simulators and the representation of space;  character and conversation focused games and queer modalities of play; and emerging technologies of perception and play.

The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award

• Winner: Judy Malloy
• Committee: Matt Kirschenbaum, Perla Sasson Henry, and Jessica Pressman

The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award honors a visionary artist and/or scholar who has brought excellence to the field of electronic literature and has inspired others to help create and build the field. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation, it comes with the following: a $1000 award that can go directly to the awardee or to a young scholar who would use the funds in support of developing content for online resources about the awardee’s achievements; a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement; and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.

The Artist or Scholar selected for this award should demonstrate excellence in four or more of the following categories:

• Creation of opportunities for younger scholars
• Publication of influential academic studies of electronic literature
• Practice-based artistic research in the field, with significant presentations and exhibitions of creative work
• Curatorial activities, particularly including editing and the organization of exhibitions, conferences, workshops, roundtables and research groups
• Preservationist work, whether individual or institutional
• Active participation in conferences and exhibitions, both national and international
• Contribution to ELO as an organization, whether as a member of the Board of Directors or Literary Art Board or as informal advisor

We are delighted to announce this year’s winner of the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award, pioneer in digital writing  Judy Malloy.

The judges offered the following celebration of Judy Malloy:

For the duration, breadth, and perhaps above all the constancy of her contributions to the field of electronic literature, we select Judy Malloy for the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award. Since Uncle Roger, Its Name Was Penelope, and other pioneering works of first-generation e-lit, Judy Malloy has presented a striking and original body of creative work, programming, and scholarship in the field of electronic literature. Throughout her career she has written poems, narratives and essays that explore who we are, where we come from, and our relationship with others and technology. Her visionary creative and critical work as well as her teaching have inspired many. She has done all of this without benefit of a permanent academic appointment.

Malloy has been a particularly strong advocate for women in the field, as evidenced by her 2003 MIT Press volume on Women, Art, and Technology, one of the first of its kind. Like her later volume on Social Media Poetics, it is a “sourcebook,” collecting the writings of others for documentation and dissemination. That she has continued preserving her own earliest work, updating it for the Web and new platforms, speaks to her ongoing interest in reaching an audience; as does her long-running Writer’s Notebook on the WELL, a kind of blog avant la lettre. For all of these reasons, Judy Malloy is our unanimous choice.

ELO awards these prizes at its annual conference. The call for next year’s awards will be issued months before via ELO’s website.

A PDF of the press release is available here.

Highlighted features:

• Support Brown University record status.
• Tools to allow the University of Bergen Library help out curate records.
• Infrastructure improvement in https://test.elmcip.net, upgrades and bugfixes.

More details in our milstone on Github.com

• Read more about ELMCIP v1.33 released

06 Octobre 2020 - 09 Octobre 2020

Journée d’étude organisée par Greice Schneider (UQAM/UFS, Brésil), Vincent Lavoie (UQAM) et Joanne Lalonde (UQAM), avec le soutien de l’équipe de recherche «Archiver le présent».

06 Octobre 2020 - 09 Octobre 2020

Journée d’étude organisée par Greice Schneider (UQAM/UFS, Brésil), Vincent Lavoie (UQAM) et Joanne Lalonde (UQAM), avec le soutien de l’équipe de recherche «Archiver le présent».

ELO is pleased to announce the ELO Fellowship scheme into its second year, aiming to expand our scholarly activity, and our curatorial and creative practices with the appointment of seven graduate and early career fellows. In the spirit of protest, change, and justice, and in an attempt to further strengthen the Organization’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion framework, two of the fellows (one creative, one scholarly) were chosen for our new “Amplify Anti-Racism” scheme. 

Meredith Dabek (Ireland)
Malthe Stavning Erslev (Denmark)
Roberta Iadevaia (Italy)
Dani Spinosa (Canada)
Yohanna Joseph Waliya (Nigeria)
Margaret Rhee (AAR) (U.S.A.) – scholarly
Keith Wilson (AAR) (U.S.A) – creative

 The ELO Fellows are six graduate and early career Research Fellows for the academic year 2020/21, each of whom have been awarded a $500 stipend along with a one year ELO membership. Fellows help contribute to various ELO projects, including the Electronic Literature Directory and its alliances with partner organizations such as ELO. Each Fellow will be paired with a mentor.  “The Fellows program is critical to the sustained success and development of the ELO and its many projects, and it’s truly rewarding to be working with such a diverse and stellar group of scholars and artists, from so many regions around the world,” comments ELO Board Member Astrid Ensslin, who oversees the ELO Fellowship scheme.

 The AAR Fellows take two forms. The creative Fellowship is intended for a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and Persons of Color) identifying a digital creator whose work should aspire to use digital media in e-literary ways, but there is no technical skill requirement to apply. The Fellows receive mentorship and support. The scholarly Fellow will be undertaking activities in support of developing the ELO’s racially/ethnically inclusive and activist policies and projects. These may include, for example, identifying e-literature initiatives and creative works by BIPOC within ELO existing databases, curating the collection of works and criticism by BIPOC and/or related to racial justice and anti-racism, developing racially and ethnically diverse and inclusive ontologies for the ELO’s databases, and/or supporting the design and development of e-lit works promoting racial justice and anti-racism.

“We are excited to have this excellent group joining in ELO’s efforts to promote scholarly and creative work in electronic literature while working to create an inclusive and welcoming community,” said President Leonardo Flores when the Fellows were announced during the 2020 conference, which was held online this summer.

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) seeks proposals to host the ELO 2021 Conference and Festival.

Given the uncertainty surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic the ELO wishes to protect its community by planning its 2021 conference as an online conference and festival. We recognize the importance of maintaining the tradition of an event that brings together scholars, artists, and people interested in digital language arts from around the world. This year, we had to pivot from a traditional conference to an online, virtual one, and are grateful for Anastasia Salter and her team’s resiliency.

For next year, we wish to consider proposals from individuals or teams that wish to host our conference and are designing it to be online from the outset. We are open to consider innovative proposals from individuals or teams from a single or several collaborating institutions that wish to host our conference and are designing it to be online from the outset. We are particularly interested in conferences hosted outside North America, possibly located in two distinct time zones, or teams interested in running one aspect of the conference, such as the academic presentations, the arts festival, or the social spaces. We are also interested in joint conferences with organizations whose interests overlap with ours, such as ACM Hypertext, SLSA, and others.

Interested parties should contact the ELO President, Leonardo Flores (leo@eliterature.org), for guidance on developing a proposal for the conference. We encourage sending a pre-proposal no later than August 31, 2020 to help develop it into a full proposal. The deadline for complete proposals is September 30, 2020. The Board of Directors will consider proposals and make a decision shortly thereafter.

Next year, we will reassess the state of the Covid-19 pandemic and decide if we continue with online conferences or return to a face-to-face modality in 2022. Those interested in hosting the 2022 conference (be it online or face-to-face) should also contact Leonardo Flores to discuss options.

Here’s a link to a downloadable PDF of the Call for Proposals.

03 Septembre 2020 - 04 Septembre 2020

Ce colloque international repose sur une coopération franco-québécoise déjà initiée qui associe des unités de recherche et des opérateurs culturels. Il s’inscrit dans le projet CRÉALIT (Création croisée arts littéraires, 2019-2021), lauréat du Fonds franco-québécois pour la coopération décentralisée (ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères, ministère des relations internationales et de la francophonie), qui s’actualise notamment à travers une résidence croisée, incluant la création d’un réseau de création artistique entre la France et le Québec, en fonction de divers partenaires (la ville de Metz désignée «Ville créative dans le domaine de la musique» par l’Unesco, le Centre de recherche sur les médiations/Université de Lorraine, la Cité musicale, le festival Le Livre à Metz, la Maison de la littérature de Québec, l’Institut Canadien de Québec, la ville de Québec désignée «Ville créative dans le domaine de la littérature» par l’Unesco). Le dispositif implique une réflexion sur les formes actuelles de la littérature hors de la page, à travers ses enjeux identitaires et symboliques, tout en privilégiant la circulation des oeuvres artistiques et littéraires francophones.

03 Septembre 2020 - 04 Septembre 2020

Ce colloque international repose sur une coopération franco-québécoise déjà initiée qui associe des unités de recherche et des opérateurs culturels. Il s’inscrit dans le projet CRÉALIT (Création croisée arts littéraires, 2019-2021), lauréat du Fonds franco-québécois pour la coopération décentralisée (ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères, ministère des relations internationales et de la francophonie), qui s’actualise notamment à travers une résidence croisée, incluant la création d’un réseau de création artistique entre la France et le Québec, en fonction de divers partenaires (la ville de Metz désignée «Ville créative dans le domaine de la musique» par l’Unesco, le Centre de recherche sur les médiations/Université de Lorraine, la Cité musicale, le festival Le Livre à Metz, la Maison de la littérature de Québec, l’Institut Canadien de Québec, la ville de Québec désignée «Ville créative dans le domaine de la littérature» par l’Unesco). Le dispositif implique une réflexion sur les formes actuelles de la littérature hors de la page, à travers ses enjeux identitaires et symboliques, tout en privilégiant la circulation des oeuvres artistiques et littéraires francophones.

As we prepare to launch this year’s online conference, we would like to invite our community to support the ELO with their 2020 membership dues ($50 regular membership, $25 for unaffiliated scholars, independent artists, and students).

Take a look at all the amazing content in this year’s conference:

• Live Program: https://elo.cah.ucf.edu/virtual-program-overview/
• Asynchronous Program: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2020/asynchronous/
• Discord (chat, voice, video, private social media space): https://discord.com/invite/uXsxZ67

The content of the conference is free and open access. Even if you don’t register, you’ll be able to access talks, papers, and EVENTUALLY the recorded Zoom sessions. To participate in or access the Live Program, you will need to be a member of the organization and register for the conference.

The Electronic Literature Organization is committed to free and open access to all the resources and collections it creates, year round. And the way you can support these initiatives and publications is by renewing your membership dues every year.

Go here and renew and register!
https://elo.cah.ucf.edu/registration/

For your convenience, here’s the Live Events Calendar in a Google Calendar.

22 Octobre 2020

Après le succès des années passées, l’activité Particules–correspondances inattendues reviendra pour une 3e édition dans le cadre du volet numérique Bell des Journées de la culture le jeudi 22 octobre, de 14h à 16h, sur Twitter. À nouveau, elle sera coproduite par Culture pour tous et Littérature québécoise mobile en collaboration avec le Mouvement Art Mobile.

22 Octobre 2020

Après le succès des années passées, l’activité Particules–correspondances inattendues reviendra pour une 3e édition dans le cadre du volet numérique Bell des Journées de la culture le jeudi 22 octobre, de 14h à 16h, sur Twitter. À nouveau, elle sera coproduite par Culture pour tous et Littérature québécoise mobile en collaboration avec le Mouvement Art Mobile.

In the spirit of protest, change, and justice, and in an attempt to further strengthen its EDI (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion) framework, the Electronic Literature Organization invites applications for two dedicated Fellowships aimed to Amplify Anti-Racism: a creative and a scholarly one.

In line with its other five 2020/21 Fellowships, the two AAR Fellowships will be a one-year opportunity for early career applicants with strong interests in the area of anti-racist electronic literature and/or digital arts.

The creative Fellowship is intended for a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and Persons of Color) identifying digital creator whose work should aspire to use digital media in e-literary ways, but there is no technical skill requirement to apply. The successful applicant will receive mentorship and support. The scholarly Fellow will be undertaking activities in support of developing the ELO’s racially/ethnically inclusive and activist policies and projects. These may include, for example, identifying e-literature initiatives and creative works by BIPOC within ELO existing databases, curating the collection of works and criticism by BIPOC and/or related to racial justice and anti-racism, developing racially and ethnically diverse and inclusive ontologies for the ELO’s databases, and/or supporting the design and development of e-lit works promoting racial justice and anti-racism.

Both Fellowships will come with a $500 stipend and a one year ELO membership. The awardees will be announced during the virtual ELO conference in July.

One page letters of application, and short CV’s can be sent to the Fellowship committee chair, Astrid Ensslin (ensslin at ualberta.ca). Applicants for the creative Fellowship are further encouraged to include a portfolio link to samples of their work.

Deadline to apply: June 21st, 2020.

11 Juin 2020 - 31 Août 2020

**Appel prolongé au 31 août 2020**

Les universités de Rennes 2 et de Bretagne Occidentale organisent la seconde déclinaison du cycle de colloques portant sur «Formes et représentations du pouvoir et de l’autorité en culture de l’écran»

11 Juin 2020 - 31 Août 2020

**Appel prolongé au 31 août 2020**

Les universités de Rennes 2 et de Bretagne Occidentale organisent la seconde déclinaison du cycle de colloques portant sur «Formes et représentations du pouvoir et de l’autorité en culture de l’écran»

17 Juin 2020

Le groupe de recherche Archiver le présent est fier de lancer l’exposition en ligne Re|Search!

17 Juin 2020

Le groupe de recherche Archiver le présent est fier de lancer l’exposition en ligne Re|Search!

09 Juin 2020 - 22 Juin 2020

Le partenariat Littérature Québecoise Mobile prépare un sondage afin de récolter un peu plus d'information sur les habitudes de consultation d'Opuscules avant d'entreprendre le développement de la version 3.

Voici le lien vers le sondage: https://forms.gle/J66LX4Z5wASKoFxe8

Les réponses recueillies seront anonymes. Le sondage est disponible dès maintenant et il sera fermé le 22 juin 2020 à 23h59.

09 Juin 2020 - 22 Juin 2020

Le partenariat Littérature Québecoise Mobile prépare un sondage afin de récolter un peu plus d'information sur les habitudes de consultation d'Opuscules avant d'entreprendre le développement de la version 3.

Voici le lien vers le sondage: https://forms.gle/J66LX4Z5wASKoFxe8

Les réponses recueillies seront anonymes. Le sondage est disponible dès maintenant et il sera fermé le 22 juin 2020 à 23h59.