We’re organising an international workshop today on Databases and Bibliographic Standards for Electronic Literature, and I’ve been tweeting away from the ELMCIP account. I’m so impressed at how much work is being done around the world on documenting and archiving electronic literature. I already knew about the Electronic Literature Directory, of course, and our own ELMCIP Knowledge Base, but I was less familiar with Montreal-based NT2. I mean, I’ve visited, but not very thoroughly. In addition to having records for about 3000 works of mostly francophone electronic literature, they have some interesting ways of documenting things. One really useful thing is that they try to include videos that show how a work can be read – so one possible navigation through a work. Here’s the record for Mouchette, for instance. That can be useful just to get a quick impression of what a work is like, but also an invaluable documentation for if a work disappears, or stops working on current browsers. The Portuguese project Arquivo Digital da Literatura Experimental Portuguesa is amazing for its exhaustive approach to documentation: let’s include EVERYTHING about experimental poetry, and electronic literature is a form of experimental literature.

I’ve not blogged in over two months. Oh dear. It’s a temporary slow – we’ve not had proper daycare for our sixteen month old, and fitting full time jobs into weekends, evenings and a few hours of babysitting here and there leaves little time for blogging. After the summer I’ll have normal working hours again and I really look forwards to having the time to think, read and participate in conversations online again.