WRT: Writer Response Theory

As most of you will be aware, the Electronic Literature Collection — Call for Works has gone out. To qualify, the work needs to be:

Literary quality will be the chief criterion for selection of works. Other aspects considered will include innovative use of electronic techniques, quality and navigability of interface, and adequate representation of the diverse forms of electronic literature in the collection as a whole.

Now, this means, any literary botfiction out there could get in. But since the collection is solely on the Net or on CD, no cross-media works (works that traverse media platforms) qualify. Here is the full wrap:

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks submissions for the first Electronic Literature Collection. We invite the submission of literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the computer. Works will be accepted until January 31, 2006. Up to three works per author will be considered.

The Electronic Literature Collection will be an annual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. The publication will be made available both online, where it will be available for download for free, and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection will be offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others.

The editorial collective for the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, to be published in 2006, is:

N. Katherine Hayles
Nick Montfort
Scott Rettberg
Stephanie Strickland

This collective will review the submitted work and select pieces for the Collection.

The editorial collectives for each volume will be chosen by the Electronic Literature Organizatio
n’s board of directors. The tentative editorial collective for the second Collection, to be published in 2007, includes Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Marjorie C. Luesebrink, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

For the first Collection, the collective will consider works up to 50 MB in size, uncompressed. Works submitted should function on both Macintosh OS X (10.4) and Windows XP. Works should function without requiring users to purchase or install additional software. Submissions may require software that is typically pre-installed on contemporary computers, such as a web browser, and are allowed to use the current versions of the most common plugins.

To have a work considered, all the authors of the work must agree that if their work is published in the Collection, they will license it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License , which will permit others to copy and freely redistribute the work, provided the work is attributed to its authors, that it is redistributed non-commercially, and that it is not used in the creation of derivativeworks. No other limitation is made regarding the author’s use of any work submitted or accepted.

To submit a work:

1) Prepare a plain text file with the following information:
a) The title of the work.
b) The names and email addresses of all authors and contributors
of the work.
c) The URL where you are going to make your .zip file available for us to download. The editorial collective will not publish the address of this file.
d) A short description of the work — less than 200 words in length.
f) Any instructions required to operate the work.
g) The date the work was first distributed or published, or “unpublished” if it has not yet been made available to the public.

2) Prepare a .zip archive including the work in its entirety. Include the text file from step (1) at the top level of this archive, and name it “submisson.txt”.

3) Upload the .zip file to a web server so that it is available at the specified location.

4) Place all of the text in the “submisson.txt” file in the body of an email and send it to [email protected] with the name of the piece being submitted included in the subject line.

The Electronic Literature Collection is supported by institutional partners including the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, ELINOR: Electronic Literature in the Nordic Countries, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota.