Электронная литература: история и развитие организации ELO

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of and criticism of electronic literature, hosts online events and has published a series of collections of electronic literature.

The ELO was founded in 1999 in Chicago by Scott Rettberg, Robert Coover, and Jeff Ballowe. Rettberg took the role as CEO, and Ballowe was president. In a book chapter about this early phase, Rettberg describes the first three years as a "turbulent and exciting period". An article in the Los Angeles Times describes the first reading organised by the ELO in July 2000, "a recent evening at the home of Microsoft executive Richard Bangs", with "trays of light finger food and delicately chilled Chardonnay" with "guests from high tech east side Seattle mingled with representatives of the old guard arts establishment and half a dozen writers of new fiction who had come to read from their work". The new organization was able to ride the excitement of the tech industry during the dot com bubble, but also suffered from the subsequent crash. marking the first time this international organization has moved its headquarters outside of the United States.

Since the 2007 conference, the ELO has grown annually and by 2015 was gathering hundreds of people at each of its conferences.

Past presidents of the ELO include Jeff Ballowe, Scott Rettberg (as Executive Director), Marjorie Luesebrink, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Joseph Tabbi, Nick Montfort, Dene Grigar, and Leonardo Flores. Caitlin Fisher became president in July 2022.

The Electronic Literature Directory is a database of works of electronic literature. Two reports on the preservation of electronic literature were published in 2004 and 2005 by the ELO as part of the Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) project. A book series called Electronic Literature with Bloomsbury. Pathfinders, a documentation of the experience of early digital literature.

The ELO has curated and edited four volumes of electronic literature. Volume 1 (October 2006). Mark Marino noted in the Digital Humanities Quarterly, "Amidst the collection, there are some works that transcend the collection itself and stand out as pillars of electronic writing. Such pieces have already garnered much critical attention. Most notable among these would be Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter, Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue, Stuart Moulthrop’s Reagan Library, Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, and Kate Pulinger’s Inanimate Alice. Volume 2 (February 2011) Tim Wright explains that "the process of gathering, archiving and tagging the works to make them more easily available to a wider audience, also freezes (necessarily) what may have been otherwise ephemeral or in situ." Volume 3 (February 2016) Urszula Anna Pawlicka noted that ELC3 represents a "post" code range of literature. This work also includes Qianxun Chen's Shan Shui, Porpentine's With Those We Love Alive, Borsuk's Between Page and Screen, Illya Szilak's Queerskins, Emily Short and Liza Daly's First Draft of the Revolution, Jeremy Height's 34 North 118 West, J. R. Carpenter's Along the Briny Beach, Mark Marino and Rob Wittig's Being@Spencer Pratt, Caitlin Fisher's Everyone at This Party is Dead, Anna Anthropy's Hunt for the Gay Planet, N. Katherine Hayle'''s Speculation. Volume 4 (June 2022). ELC4'' presents the largest and most diverse group yet of elit authors writing in Afrikaans, Ancient Chinese, Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, isiXhosa, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mezangelle, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Setswana, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, South African Sign Language, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Yoruba

In 2001 the ELO announced the Electronic Literature Awards, with a $10,000 prize (funded by ZDNet) for the best work of fiction and the best work of poetry. 163 works were submitted, and each was reviewed by at least three people on the board, after which the highest scoring works were passed on to judges Larry McCaffery and Heather McHugh.

After a pause due to a lack of funding, the ELO Awards were rekindled in 2014, and since then an annual award has been given to the best literary work and the best work of scholarship on electronic literature. Each award comes with a $1000 stipend.

This award honors the best work of criticism of electronic literature of any length. +N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic LiteratureYearAwarded to2014Johannes Heldén [sv] and Håkan Jonson [sv], Evolution2015Sandy Baldwin, The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature2016Jeremy Douglass, Jessica Pressman, and Mark Marino, Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope2017David Jhave Johnston, Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry’s Ontological Implications2018Joseph Tabbi, Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature2019Scott Rettberg, Electronic Literature2020Mark Marino, Critical Code Studies2021Jessica Pressman, Bookishness2022Lai Tze Fan (editor) “Critical Making, Critical Design,” Issue 01 of The Digital Review2023Lyle Skains, Neverending Stories: The Popular Emergence of Digital Fiction. Runner up: Opera aperta: Italian Electronic Literature from the 1960s to the Present" by Emanuela Patti. Honorable mention: “Girl Online” by Joanna Walsh