15-20 Minute Paper
Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker Rettberg
University of Bergen
Biographies
Scott Rettberg is associate professor of digital culture in the department of linguistic, literacy and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Prior to moving to Norway in 2006, Rettberg directed the new media studies track of the literature program at Richard Stockton College in NJ. Rettberg is the cofounder and served as the first executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Literature Organization, where he directed major projects funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen and is running for the position of Vice-Rector for International Relations. Her research focus has for many years been on how people tell stories online, and she has explored this is electronic literature blogging and social media more broadly.
Abstract
Electronic literature is digitally native literature and most, though not all, e-lit is only published online. Despite this, the lack of established metadata standards, a central repository or bibliography of electronic literature make it difficult to use digital methods to analyze a field. Over the last years, several databases have sought to provide a stronger infrastrcture for the field, including the ELD, NT@, and the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, which is the focus of this paper.
The ELMCIP Knowledge Base is a research resource for electronic literature. It provides cross-referenced, contextualized information about authors, creative works, critical writing, and practices. This paper will discuss some of the methodological choices made both when designing and editing a database and when analyzing the materials that are compiled. The vital content types of the field have only become apparent to us as we have worked on the database. Developing research infrastructure is research.
This paper will also consider the future of this kind of work. Right now databases are clearly needed to develop the field of electronic literature, and to document and to some extent archive its core materials. But are human-edited databases sustainable? Can we image a way of compiling the database in future that does not require the degree of human editing we now contribute? This paper will also consider the relationship of the ELMCIP Knowledge Base to the Consortium for Electronic Literature, an international network linking six different databases projects that documents electronic literature, who are working together to share data and develop standards for documenting electronic literature.