ELECTRONIC LITERATURE COMMUNITIES COMPUTING LITERATURE A book series by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University, in collaboration with the Laboratoire Paragraphe at the Université Paris VIII- Vincennes Saint-Denis, and in a distribution agreement with the West Virginia University Press. Volume 1 Regards Croisés: Perspectives on Digital Literature Edited by Philippe Bootz and Sandy Baldwin Volume 2 Writing Under: Selections from the Internet Text by Alan Sondheim Edited and Introduced by Sandy Baldwin Volume 3 Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Prac- tice: A Report from the HERA Joint Research Project Edited by Scott Rettberg and Sandy Baldwin Volume 4 Po.Ex: Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia Edited by Rui Torres and Sandy Baldwin Volume 5 Word Space Multiplicities, Openings, Andings By Jim Rosenberg Edited by Sandy Baldwin Volume 6 Electronic Literature Communities Edited by Scott Rettberg, Patricia Tomaszek, and Sandy Baldwin Series Editors Sandy Baldwin, West Virginia University Philippe Bootz, University of Paris VIII Editorial Board Laura Borràs Castanyer, University of Barcelona; Helen Burgess, North Carolina State University; Maria Engberg, Malmö University; Jason Nelson, Griffith Uni- versity; Alexandra Saemmer, University of Paris VIII; Janez Strehovec, University of Ljubljana ELECTRONIC LITERATURE COMMUNITIES EDITED BY SCOTT RETTBERG, PATRICIA TOMASZEK, AND SANDY BALDWIN COMPUTING LITERATURE MORGANTOWN, WV Computing Literature, the Center for Literary Computing, Morgantown, WV 26506 Published 2015 by the Center for Literary Computing and ELMCIP. Cover design by Christina Malitius. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY- NC 4.0). ISBN-13: 9781940425993 (pb) 978-1-943665-01-3 (elec) 978-1-943665-00-6 (pdf) v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ELMCIP was financially supported by HERA (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR and The European Commission FP7 2007-2013, un- der the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme. Generous support for the open access publication of this volume and its contents was provided by the University of Bergen Open Access Publication Fund, facilitated by the University of Bergen Library. Scott Rettberg: I would like to thank the Department of Research Management, the Faculty of the Humanities, and the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetics Studies at the University of Bergen for their support of this endeavor. Special thanks are due to members of the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group, who have put exceptional effort in the development of the ELMCIP Elec- tronic Literature Knowledge Base. Roberto Simanowski and his collaborators on the open access journal Dichtung Digital deserve thanks for enabling the initial online publication of the majority of the articles included in this book in two special issues of the journal. My co-editor and Ph.D. student Patricia Tomaszek merits special praise for her dedication to this project from its beginnings. As Patricia completes her doctoral work and moves on from the University of Bergen, I see a bright future ahead for her as an editor and as a scholar of electronic literature and developer of its research infrastructure. I also extend my thanks to my friend and colleague Sandy Baldwin and the team at the CLC at West Virginia University for their tireless work on this publication. Finally I thank Jill Walker Rettberg and our children Aurora, Jessica, and Benjamin for their love and support. Patricia Tomaszek: I’m grateful to my co-editor and Ph.D. supervisor Scott Rett- berg for this scholarly enriching editorial experience. I also thank Sandy Baldwin and his team for turning the manuscript into another worthy tangible object of the Computing Literature Series. This book is my premier appearance as co-editor. I thank Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer who, already at the beginning of my scholarly path entrusted vi me with editorial work behind the scenes of three book publications of the Media Upheavals series during my graduate studies. Sandy Baldwin: I would like to thank interns in the Center for Literature Com- puting and the Computing Literature book series, for their contributions to this book: Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang and Kayla Wolford. vii viii ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments v Networks of Creativity: Electronic Literature Communities By Scott Rettberg and Patricia Tomaszek 1 Electronic Literature Seen from a Distance: The Beginnings of a Field By Jill Walker Rettberg 11 Distributed Authorship and Creative Communities By Simon Biggs and Penny Travlou 29 Amateurs Online: Creativity in a Community By Yra van Dijk 45 Communities/Commons: A Snap Line of Digital Practice By Loss Pequeño Glazier 69 Developing an Identity for the Field of Electronic Literature: Reflections on the Electronic Literature Organization Archives By Scott Rettberg 81 Interactive Fiction Communities: From Preservation Through Promotion and Beyond By Nick Montfort and Emily Short 113 The Flash Community: Implications for Post-Conceptualism By Donna Leishman 131 Flâneur, a Walkthrough: Locative Literature as Participation and Play By Anders Sundnes Løvlie 151 Netprov: Elements of an Emerging Form By Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig 169 Bibliography 215 Index 247 INTRODUCTION | 1 NETWORKS OF CREATIVITY: ELECTRONIC LITERATURE COMMUNITIES INTRODUCTION BY SCOTT RETTBERG AND PATRICIA TOMASZEK t this point there is little doubt that electronic literature exists as a social formation and as an active field of creative practice: during the past two decades, electronic literature has emerged both as a vibrant, inter- Anational, network-based creative community and as a growing field of research. Multiple international conferences and festivals that present the current state of the art are annually dedicated to electronic literature. An extensive corpus of monographs and journal articles are extending a research discipline while creative works are being published, exhibited, and performed on a nearly con- tinuous basis. As such, the field presents us with a unique opportunity to consider ques- tions related to community formation and development in creative and critical practices after the digital turn. Certainly, electronic literature’s outreach has gone beyond the networked media environment where works are being published in online journals, while also having found exposure in museums, libraries and per- formance venues such as theatres. It is a field of interest for researchers working in many languages and cultures. A most recent example that testifies to this fact is the striking response to the call for the 2015 Electronic Literature Organiza- tion conference that included submissions from over 300 artists and research- ers from thirty-nine different countries from all continents. There is no doubt that an international electronic literature community exists and is thriving. In a sense, the mere practice of research and artistic work devoted electronic literature engenders a sense of community. Yet while we have been busy participating in this community, in writing and researching and publishing and performing in its many circus tents, we have rarely paused to consider how the relation between the communities of electronic literature and the creative work they produce are entailed, indeed to consider the relation between creativity and community that is perhaps always an aspect of innovation. 2 | ELECTRONIC LITERATURE COMMUNITIES Electronic Literature Communities collects some excellent essays from two special issues of the online journal Dichtung Digital (41 and 42)1 that emerged from the Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Litera- ture as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) joint research project. ELMCIP was a project of the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) framework program, under the theme of Creativity and Innovation. During a period when the humanities in general, in Europe as in many other parts of the world, have seemed somewhat besieged, convenient targets of auster- ity measures, HERA has been a particularly important bastion of humanities- centered research, funding ELMCIP among eighteen innovative transnational research projects during the 2010-2013 period. The ELMCIP project focused on a particular creative community, that of electronic literature practitioners, and asked how creative communities of practi- tioners took shape within transnational and transcultural contexts, within a glo- balized and distributed communications environment. In their interdisciplinary nature, creating works that employ diverse media and programming techniques, communities in electronic literature engage in various kinds of collaborative practice. Collaboration in networked computer environments involve working with people with different skills and in collaborative acts with systems. A guid- ing principle of the researchers working on ELMCIP was to contest the model of creativity specifically tied to the individual: the idea that the solitary artist, producing artifacts that embody creativity, is the isolated producer of creative outcomes. The ELMCIP project rather considered creativity to emerge from the activity of exchange between people and communities. Within this general frame ELMCIP asked “How do creative communities, amateur and professional, form and interact through distributed and media?” and more directly