Thank you for your post and your work on the digital history (or digital ethnography) on the software. I look forward to digging in to Mechanisms to find more about the mechanisms that have dug into me.

Thank you for joining our conversation. I appreciate your perspective. I just wanted to tell you that ELO at this conference is not the organization you last saw. (And please don’t take that the wrong way — I mean it more of a news missive.) I don’t want to gush about this too much (but will post on it later) — but I think you would be surprised to see the nature of this conference — the extent of this conference — the shear numbers of presentations — the quality of the presentations — the diversity of the works — the interdisciplinarity.

It’s like Web 2.0 (and perhaps post-modernism). It’s not that all these elements didn’t exist, say at UCLA in 2002 in ELO — but that they have manifest themselves at this conference to an extent that I have not seen in my readings about or my experience of ELO. It’s fascinating.

In some ways, this conference is more reminiscent of Coover’s 1993 Unspeakable Practices Vanguard Narrative Festival, where I first heard you present (having already experienced and used Storyspace in Landow’s hypertext course. And yet it is something different. Like an AWP of Elit — and yet also unlike it.

Best,
Mark