Electronic literature

Electronic literature is literature that needs a computer to exist. The Electronic Literature Organization’s definition is the field’s working one: works with an important literary aspect that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. N. Katherine Hayles sharpens it: electronic literature is “digital born”—created on a computer and usually meant to be read on one—which excludes e-books and digitized print. A hypertext fiction, a kinetic poem, a generated text, a literary chatbot: none of these can be carried onto paper without losing the thing itself.

The lineage is longer than the web. In 1952 Christopher Strachey’s love-letter generator for the Manchester Mark 1 produced combinatory poems—probably the first literature that requires a computer to be generated or read. Theo Lutz’s Stochastic Texts (1959) assembled sentences from the chapter headings of Kafka’s The Castle. The chatbot ELIZA followed in 1966; interactive fiction rose with Adventure (1975–76) and Infocom; hypertext fiction flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, first on diskette, then on the web; digital poetry animated the 2000s; and in the 2010s the field’s center of experiment moved onto social media platforms. Leonardo Flores sorts this into generations: a first, pre-web generation; a second, web-based; a third, native to social platforms.

The field organized itself at the century’s turn. The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) was founded in 1999 in Chicago by Scott Rettberg, the novelist Robert Coover, and Jeff Ballowe, to promote the creation, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. It holds annual conferences, makes annual awards—among them the Robert Coover Award for a work of electronic literature, the N. Katherine Hayles Award for criticism, and the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award, which went to Judy Malloy in 2020—and has published four curated Electronic Literature Collections (2006, 2011, 2016, 2022) that serve as a portable canon. After its Chicago years it has been hosted by universities, from UCLA to York University in Toronto.

Scholarship built the record-keeping to match. Journals, conferences, and research groups study the works as works and their platforms as poetics. In Europe, the ELMCIP project produced the Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, developed by the University of Bergen’s Electronic Literature Research Group: an open-access, extensively cross-referenced database of creative works, authors, critical writing, publishers, organizations, events, and teaching resources—more than 3,500 records by the project’s end in 2013, and still maintained and open to contributions. Scibe has a record in it, as do most of the works named in this wiki.

The field’s standing emergency is preservation. Works of electronic literature depend on particular software, operating systems, and hardware; when the platform dies, the work becomes unreadable even if its files survive. The works also stand outside the established publishing industry—no ISBN numbers, no reliable presence in library catalogues—so no ordinary machinery of custody catches them when they fall. The ELO addressed this early, in its Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) project reports of 2004 and 2005; archives, knowledge bases, and emulation projects—the ELMCIP Knowledge Base; The NEXT, which has emulated Malloy’s its name was Penelope for modern readers—exist to keep works legible, or at least documented, against platform death.

Scibe is that problem in miniature, and this edition is a small instance of the answer. The work survived for three decades on one person’s pages on one aging host; the scholarly record documented it from a distance; and a clone now stands beside the original so that the thing itself—not a description of it—remains readable. Why the clone exists is set out in the colophon.

Sources and further reading