A Survey of Electronic Literature Collections

In their article "A Survey of Electronic Literature Collections" Luis Pablo and María Goicoechea describe characteristics and functions of collections of electronic literature and analyze descriptors used and the way information can be accessed. Based on their observations, Pablo and Goicoechea advocate a database structure which is flexible and can produce a dynamic archiving model as texts are registered and collected so that tags form a close set for the texts in the collection and this set can expand as new texts make new tags necessary. Further, the organization of tags into ever more complex taxonomies seems inevitable, since this provides an accurate description of knowledge accumulation with respect to the field's richness. They postulate that the study of tagging practices applied to digital works provides us with guidelines not only to describe texts of electronic literature, but also to demonstrate the wide variety of forms which a literary text can embody. Luis Pablo and María Goicoechea, "A Survey of Electronic Literature Collections" page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.5 (2014): <http://docs.lib. purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss5/6> Special Issue New Work on Electronic Literature and Cyberculture. Ed. Maya Zalbidea, Mark C. Marino, and Asunción López-Varela Luis Pablo and María Goicoechea A Survey of Electronic Literature Collections One of the problems in the preservation of born-digital material is the rapid development of new technology and consequences of the obsolescence of older technology. For example, html coding becomes obsolete on certain browsers, desktop computers no longer read floppy disks, many URL-s are unstable, web pages disappear because of the non-payment of server fees, authors remove their web pages, etc. For these reasons, governments, institutions of higher learning, and private companies realize the importance of preserving born-digital material. For example, there are for the preservation of born-digital material in the internet archive WaybackMachine <http://archive.org/web/web.php>, the portico <http://www.portico. org> and clockss <http://www.lockss. org> archival systems for the preservation of born-digital scholarship, the Government of Canada Electronic Collection of Library and Archives Canada <http://www.collectionscanada. gc.ca/electroniccollection/>, the Government of France L'Institut National de l'Audiovisuel <http://www.institut-national-audiovisuel.fr/en/home>, etc. In the study at hand we discuss aspects of the following digital platforms established for the preservation of electronic literature: Electronic Literature Directory <http://directory.eliterature.org/>, Electronic Literature Collection 1 <http://collection.eliterature.org/1/>, Electronic Literature Collection 2 <http://collection.eliterature.org/2/>, NT2: Le Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Oeuvres Hypermédiatiques <http://nt2.uqam. ca>, Base de Récits Interactifs et Autres Oeuvres Interactives <http://www.utc. fr/~bouchard/recit/consultation/>, ELMCIP: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice <http://elmcip.net/>, CELL: Consortium on Electronic Literature <http://eliterature.org/cell/>, Hermeneia: Estudis literaris i technologies <http://www.hermeneia. net/>, and Literatura Electrónica Hispánica <http://www.cervantesvirtual. com/bib/portal/literaturaelectronica/>. We pay special attention to the manner in which information about the born-digital material is retrieved and to the way new literary works are tagged (a tag is a descriptive label assigned to individual works in a database). We also discuss the presence or absence of access points to the resources themselves and that allow users to read the literary texts referenced. Our main purpose is to foreground the effectiveness of the cataloging choices implemented in born-digital preservation platforms and we hope to contribute to the debate around the development of a common standard of metadata in the preservation of electronic literature. Information compiled in the above listed directories includes authors, work descriptions, scholarly articles, information about gatherings, as well as didactic practices for born-digital literature. Since they all share the same subject matter and have similar objectives, the connections among them are tight. Given different institutional origins, each directory has a different amount of registered works: for example in the Base de Récits 176 authors and texts to the more than 700 compiled in Hermeneia to the nearly 4000 in NT2. The objectives of Electronic Literature include the identification and description of electronic literature and their bibliographical resources. The reason behind its creation was to call attention to these new types of texts and to scholarship produced about them. Because electronic literature is a recent form of art, Electronic Literature also has the objective of showing the diversity of texts leaving for a second stage the analysis of patterns. However, since 2011 Electronic Literature has been transformed and now offers the possibility of using wiki software to include tags, descriptions, and discussions collaboratively. Implementing this transformation meant downloading the information from the old system and adding the descriptions and missing tags. As Joseph Tabbi points out, the inclusion of tags proved to be of great utility and the creation of the collaborative tool gave new study perspectives, in accordance with the original objective of the organization: "The critical function of 'tagging,' though it may have seemed a minor element in my 2007 essay starts to look more central when one recognizes that collecting works of born digital writing means recognizing, and revising 'the imaginative qualities of actual things' . The application of tags to the study of electronic literature has generated quite a bit of critical discussion about works that previously had been viewed through narrower perspectives" (<http://directory.eliterature.org/node/198>). In the Electronic Literature Directory file cards are compiled about published electronic literature, as well as information about the individual texts. In order to know which texts are included and see their file cards, the Directory offers several Luis Pablo and María Goicoechea, "A Survey of Electronic Literature Collections" page 3 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.5 (2014): <http://docs.lib. purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss5/6> Special Issue New Work on Electronic Literature and Cyberculture. Ed. Maya Zalbidea, Mark C. Marino, and Asunción López-Varela points of entry: the texts can be accessed through an alphabetic list of their titles or through a list of texts sorted by year. Another tab allows the user to see an alphabetically ordered list of authors and other contributors. Finally, a search engine allows users to make a simple or advanced search of all the content at the site. Another way in the Electronic Literature Directory to access texts is through tags and a section offers an alphabetic list of all the tags used to describe the texts gathered. However, the inclusion of these tags presents several problems: 1) They do not send the user to a closed set of controlled vocabulary and thus any word can become a tag including proper names such as Argentina, Alex Lemon, Brad Liening, Mark Bernstein, etc. This is positive as it allows freedom when tagging a text, but it hinders the retrieval of information; 2) The tags are not lemmatized and this means that the same concept can have variants which impede the retrieval of similar cards depending on the word which has been used: a) in singular or plural: antecedent/antecedents, anthologies/anthology, blog/ blogs, b) morphological variations: environment/environmental/environmentalism, c) semantic variations: prose poem/prose poetry; combination adventure/combinatorial combinatory/ combinatory poetics; d) digital literature/digital media/digital narrative/digital narratives/digital poetics/digital poetry/digital textuality/digital writing, e) interactive/interactivity/interactive art/ interactive cinema/interactive fiction/interactive motion graphics/interactive novel/interactive poetry/interactive visual art); and 3) Nearly all tags are in English, but when there are others in different languages owing to the origin of the commentators, there is no correspondence between cards from different languages. Similarly to tags, the lists offered to access the works through authors' names present duplications: sometimes there appear different cards for the same author. Thus, if one searches for Katherine Hayles instead of N. Katherine Hayles, the results are different and one has to access both cards for the complete information. Further, beginning with Alan Sondheim's "Text," the poems written in the programming language Pascal, and the Chinese poem "Clown" by Shaolian Su, the Electronic Literature Directory compiles works from 1979 to 2012. Under the epigraph "Antecedents" there are five more prose texts which share features with electronic literature although they were printed on paper, such as "100,000,000,000,000 Poèmes" by Raymond Queneau and "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard" by Stéphane Mallarmé. Every text included in the Electronic Literature Directory has a card composed of the following elements: 1) A brief description of the work, signed and dated by the person who composed the card plus some data about the work, author, year of publication, language, and technical specifications like the platform and software used, and finally the tags; 2) Screenshots are habitually included, as well as the URL where the work is located. However, not every card has this much information and some, like that of "Clown" (1981), do not have tags as they come from the previous version of the directory; and 3) the discussion section permits registered users to add comments about the work described and to open a chain of com