Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media Volume 1

From the ELL Website:

Written and produced by the Electronic Literature Lab Team––Dene Grigar, PhD; Nicholas Schiller, MLIS; Vanessa Rhodes, B.A.; Mariah Gwin, Veronica Whitney, B.A.; and Katie Bowen––Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Born Digital Pre-Web Media provides scholars with access to fragile, seminal works published on floppy disks and CD-ROMs between 1986-1996, including:

• Sarah Smith’s science fiction hypertext novel King of Space(1991)
• David Kolb’s hypertext essay “Socrates in the Labyrinth” (1994)
• J. Yellowlees Douglas’ hypertext narrative “I Have Said Nothing” (1994)
• Thomas M. Disch’s text adventure AMNESIA (1986)
• Rob Kendall’s hypertext animated poem A Life Set for Two (1996)
• Judy Malloy’s generative hypertext narrative its name was Penelope (Version 3.0, 1993)
• Mary-Kim Arnold’s hypertext narrative poem “Lust” (1994)

The book features 85,000 words of artist biographies, descriptions of media, and critical essays; 350 photos of artists, works, and their original packaging; and 55 videos of artist readings and interviews and Live Stream Traversals.

Critical essays include:

• “Contextualizing Sarah Smith’s King of Space“
• “Untangling the Threads of the Labyrinth in David Kolb’s ‘Socrates in the Labyrinth'”
• “Saying Something about J. Yellowlees Douglas’ ‘I Have Said Nothing'”
• “Remembering the 1980s with Thomas M. Disch’s AMNESIA“
• “Love and Loss in Robert Kendall’s A Life Set for Two”
• “On Memory, the Muse, and Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope“
• “Repetition in Mary-Kim Arnold’s ‘Lust'”

It also offers scholarly resources and versioning and publication information about each work.