Reading, Rereading, Recovering Electronic Literature

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.

Dene Grigar is Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver whose research focuses on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of born-digital literature and net art. She has authored 16 media works such as “Curlew” (2014) and “A Villager’s Tale” (2011), as well as 71 scholarly articles and six books. She has curated exhibits at the British Computer Society and the Library of Congress and for the Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA), among other venues. With Stuart Moulthrop (U of Wisconsin Milwaukee) she developed the methodology for documenting born-digital media, a project that culminated in an open-source, multimedia book, entitled Pathfinders (2015), and book of media art criticism, entitled Traversals (2017), for The MIT Press. Her recent book, co-edited with James O'Sullivan (University College Cork) is entitled Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities. Grigar served as President of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2013-2019 and is now the organization's Digital Preservationist. Since 2003 she has been Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews. In 2017 She was awarded the Lewis E. and Stella G. Buchanan Distinguished Professorship by her university, where she also directs the Electronic Literature Lab at WSUV.

Kari Kraus is an Assistant Professor in the iSchool and the Department of English at the University of Maryland. Her research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, transmedia storytelling, and game studies. Kraus is a local Co-PI on an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant for preserving virtual worlds; the PI on an IMLS Digital Humanities Internship grant; and, with Derek Hansen (iSchool), the Co-Principal Investigator of the NSF grant underwriting the design of AGOG. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship; Digital Humanities Quarterly; Digital Media: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on History, Preservation, and Ontology; The Journal of Visual Culture; and_ Studies in Romanticism_. She first became interested in ARGs when Marc Ruppel, a PhD student in the Department of English, introduced her to Cathy’s Book, billed as the first alternate reality game developed specifically for the publishing industry. In 2008, in conjunction with the University of Maryland’s Mobility Initiative, she and her graduate students designed a mobile scavenger hunt that they playtested with a group of undergraduate students who had received free iPhones and iPod Touches as part of the Provost’s pilot project. Inspired by ARGs, the on-campus hunt made use of the technological affordances of the iPhone and iTouch – e.g., camera, phone, texting, and GPS functionality – to enhance interactivity and integrate the offline and online worlds in creative ways. The narrative framework was designed to teach students about University of Maryland history, particularly the Great Fire of 1912.