Grand Text Auto

Scott Rettberg accepts the 2016 Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature

On June 11, 2016, during the Electronic Literature Conference at University of Victoria, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project won the top prize for a creative work in the field of electronic literature, the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2016 Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature! The jury’s remarks from the awards ceremony:

The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature

Words I Have Used Only Once on Facebook

I recently downloaded my Facebook data. The following is a list of words that I used only one time in my Facebook postings. Some of the words are misspellings or parts of URLs but most are are intended words. I’m not sure what use I could put this information to, but it is interesting to me, for instance, that I have used the word “asshole” only once on Facebook, just as I have only written “pseudo-philosopher” in the status line one time.

The Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University has shared a video of the lecture I gave there on May 1st, 2014 “An Emerging Canon? Mapping a Field through Database Visualization.” The talk covers the ELMCIP project and offers a summary of the paper I published this month in the electronic book review: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/exploding

Video documentation excerpt of June 17, 2014 CAVE2 performance of Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project. Performance at University of Illinois Chicago, Electronic Visualization Lab.

Tuesday, June 17th, 3-5PM and
Monday, July 7th, 4-6 PM

The Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) is pleased to present two new artworks made for the CAVE2 and Cybercommons Tile Wall display. The projects were produced through a unique collaboration between EVL faculty and staff and visiting artists from Philadelphia and Norway.

I just submitted a revision of my paper “From Traces to Collective Memory: Databases and the Development of the Field of Electronic Literature” – my keynote talk for last year’s “The Digital Subject: Questioning Hypermnesia” conference at Paris 8 university. The essay considers how trivia and traces and databases are used to reconstruct memory and to develop the basis of fields, first by considering Paul Auster’s Winter Journal and D.T. Max’s Every Ghost Story is a Love Story, and then by considering the process of developing the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. The essay will be translated into French and published bilingually in “The Digital Subject: Questioning Hypermnesia” to be published by by Les Presses du Réel in 2014.

Three Rails Live has been translated as “Trois rails sous tension” and published on Revue bleuOrange #7.

“Three Rails Live” — the combinatory database film I produced with Roderick Coover and Nick Montfort has been translated into French as “Trois rails sous tension” and published in a special translation issue of Revue bleuOrange. Huge thanks to Carolyne Ouellette and Jordand Tudisco for their translation, to Serge Bouchardon and Laetitia LeChatton for their voice acting, and to the editorial team at bleuOrange. Magnifique!

Three Rails Live has been translated as “Trois rails sous tension” and published on Revue bleuOrange #7.

“Three Rails Live” — the combinatory database film I produced with Roderick Coover and Nick Montfort has been translated into French as “Trois rails sous tension” and published in a special translation issue of Revue bleuOrange. Huge thanks to Carolyne Ouellette and Jordand Tudisco for their translation, to Serge Bouchardon and Laetitia LeChatton for their voice acting, and to the editorial team at bleuOrange. Magnifique!

Full text PDF: An Emerging Canon? A Preliminary Analysis of All References to Creative Works in Critical Writing Documented in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base

Circular Visualization of all critical writing references to creative works documented in the ELMCIP KB.

ABSTRACT: As of July 2013, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base includes documentation of more than 2,000 creative works and more than 2,000 articles of critical writing. Many of the records of critical writing include cross-references to the creative works they address. This article presents a preliminary analysis of all of the critical writing-to-creative work cross-references currently documented in the Knowledge Base in the aggregate. By developing static and interactive visualizations of this data, we might begin to see the outlines of an emerging “canon” of electronic literature.

We are now working on getting together the ELMCIP Project Final Report, which will be published by ELMCIP in cooperation with the Computing Literature Series at West Virginia University Press and will included chapters by all of the principle investigators contributing the project. I recently completed the draft of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base Project Report, an extensive report detailing the development process, information architecture, and technical platform of the Knowledge Base. I wrote the report with some help and input from Eric Dean Rasmussen, who was a funded researcher on the project for the first year and a half of the development project and served as the Knowledge Base Editor.

I’ve written a chapter for the forthcoming Handbook of Human Computation to be published by Springer New York in winter 2013. I have posted a prepress draft of my chapter “Human Computation in Electronic Literature.”

April 2009

APRIL 28
Scott shared a link.

In 2013, my wife was part of the Atakan campaign for rector at UIB. When the opposition in a debate accused Team Atakan of knowing nothing about digitalization, Jill started up an “Atakan Meme” facebook page. I wanted to do what I could to help the campaign.

Davin Heckman will be joining us at the University of Bergen in August as our 2011-2012 Fulbright scholar in Digital Culture. Applications are now open for the 2012-2013 position. The deadline for applications is August 1, 2011.

Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2
Launch at the Bergen Public Library
Monday May 2, 2011

The Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic studies welcomes you to attend two special events celebrating the launch of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

I just prepared a screencast for Judy Malloy’s Authoring Software project, walking through the code of my generative fiction After Parthenope and explaining my process of writing and coding it in Processing.

After Parthenope Authoring Screencast from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

Tuesday, March 15th 12:15-14:00
HF Building, Room 301
“Reading Chatbots”
Visiting Fulbright lecturer Mark Marino, Asst. Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California, will discuss his current book project: Reading Chatbots: Conversational Actor Networks: an interdisciplinary investigation into autonomous conversational agents drawing upon theories from Communication, the Humanities, and Social Sciences. The book demonstrates a methodology of software studies, reading chatbots with attention to their performance of race, gender, sexuality, and class. http://markcmarino.com

Monday, March 21st 14:15-16:00
Sydneshaugen Skole, Room 304B
“Exquisite_Code”
Media artist Brendan Howell is in from Berlin as a visiting lecturer at KHiB. Howell will present the “Exquisite_Code” project, and other electronic literature related projects. Exquisite_Code is an algorithmic performance system for heterogeneous groups of writers. http://www.wintermute.org/brendan/

Screencast: Introducing the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (HD) from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

This semester we have initiated a new research group at UiB — the Electronic Literature Research Group. With so much research activity now happening in our group in this area, and after consulting with our colleagues in Digital Culture, we decided that it would be good to have a separate research group focused specifically on e-lit, digital art, and other digital media aesthetic-related research in addition to our existing research group in Digital Culture. We are hoping that the group will extend beyond our colleagues in the program at UiB and include researchers and writers interested in these topics from elsewhere, in other UiB departments, in Bergen (and the world).

Prepress English version of article forthcoming in Norwegian in Vagant 1/2011 as “Bokstaver i bevegelse”

Prepress version of article originally published in Norwegian in Vagant 4/2010 as “Flukten fra språkfengselet”

The first Electronic Literature Collection was published in 2006. Including 60 works of electronic literature of diverse form and content, all published under one cover online and on a CD-ROM, the collection offered readers and educators a valuable resource, a set of works distributed freely under a Creative Commons license. The ELC provided teachers with a place where they could send students interested in exploring e-lit, and critics with a set of archived works around which they could gather their discourse – a set of common touchstones that served to help develop and refine a shared critical language about the emergent forms of literary practice.

The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2 is now out! Congratulations to editors Talan Memmott, Brian Kim Stefans, Rita Raley, and Brian Kim Stefans on bringing this project to fruition. The collection includes 63 works in 6 languages from 12 countries, and includes a wide variety of work, ranging from the classic web hypertext The Unknown, to the amazing narrative database / textual performance work The Last Performance, the minimalist poetry generator stylings of Nick Montfort’s PPG256, to Alan Bigelow’s philsophocomical “comic strips for the Web” Brainstrips, to Allison Cliffords visually stunning interactive treatment of the poetry of ee cummings The Sweet Old Etc.

I have chapters in a couple of books that have just recently been released. Jill Walker Rettberg and I coauthored the chapter “Narrative and Digital Media” in the MLA Volume Teaching Narrative Theory. The chapter takes readers through a semester of teaching narrative-based electronic literature works. The volume offers a broad sweep of approaches to integrating the teaching of narrative theory in literature classrooms, and is edited by Jim Phelan, Brian McHale, and David Herman. I also recently published a chapter “Editorial Process and the Idea of Genre in Electronic Literature in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1″ in the volume Archiving Electronic Literature and Poetry: Problems, Tendencies, Perspectives published by the German journal SPEIL edited by Florian Hartling and Beat Suter. The book, including articles in English and in German by a number of leading editors, publishers, authors and artists working in the field of electronic literature, is a valuable contribution to the discourse of the challenges of publishing, disseminating, and preserving works of electronic literature.

Jim Andrews has launched a new collaborative blog, NetArtery, together with Andy Campbell, Chris Funkhouser, Cliff Syringe, Gregory Whitehead, and Jhave Johnston, an innovative and funky group of writers who play in a number of interesting forms of digital and other writing on the network. Should be an interesting one to watch.
# Jim Andrews

During the ELO_AI conference, David (jhave) Johnston shot a couple of wonderful little short films of people responding quickly to the question “What inspired you to get involved with electronic literature?” The results: 51 Keywords (33 seconds) and 51 Responses (18:25).