At the Woman E-Lit event this past Tuesday, Kathi Inman Berens described e-lit as “Literature that you can mess with, and that messes with you.” This feels like an apt starting point for attempting to categorize a variety of born-digital media that often eludes definition. Works of e-lit can be poetry, prose, images, audio/visual media, games and things defying a name.

Jeneen Naji spoke about her research into digital poetry – in particular, the rise of Instagram poets who are often overlooked by poetry gatekeepers as being frivolous or hobbyist. I admit, I had never really thought of social media as a vehicle for electronic literature, but just this morning, I watched the trailer for “Zola,” a film based off of a widely-read 148-tweet Twitter thread by Aziah “Zola” King in 2015. I can easily imagine this story being taught in a narrative studies class. (“How does each post move the story forward?” “Are there instances of foreshadowing?” “How do tweets convey tone, character, and setting?”)

Personally, I found my way to e-lit through interactive fiction, which relies on gaming elements and user input to progress through a story. There are parser-based text adventures, choose-your-own-adventure hypertext games, dialogue-heavy “visual novels” and point-and-click adventure games. “The Last Door” is a psychological horror game that blends a 90s-era interface with a late 19th century plot – with the story divided into playable “chapters” and much of the action involving letter-reading, it definitely feels “literary.” (Also, it’s an excellent example of how extremely low-res graphics can convey so much meaning - who knew pixels could be scary?) Meanwhile, Twine is contributing to the next era of hypertext fiction. The authoring tool is free, simple to learn, and can be as simple or as complicated as needed, which is excellent for encouraging new creators to develop their projects.

The loss of Flash hit the e-lit community hard, there are efforts to preserve these works using Ruffle and Conifer; one notable effort is that of Dene Grigar and her team at the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University. The ELL also has a collection of legacy computers that are used to view and make recordings of pre-web works, making sure that they are accessible for future viewers. (I wonder if any authoring programs will grow to take the place of Flash, or if the internet replaces the desire to make new multimedia works… We’ll see!)

Beyond the broad categories of Social Media, Interactive Fiction, and Multimedia, there are projects that are even more difficult to categorize. At the event, Annie Abrahams shared some of her collaborative poetry (“Constellations”) and networked sound performances (“Utterings.”) Judith Okonkwo, the founder of Imisi 3d, an AR/VR/XR lab in Lagos, defined e-lit creators as “Griottes of a New Age,” and highlighted those who “capture the pressing issues of our time, and our everyday stories, in compelling narrative driven immersive experiences.”

In the Zoom chat, Deena Larson wrote “We need the structure. We need ways to identify eliterature in the wild, and collaborate.” Carolina Gainza shared her project of documenting e-lit in Latin America, and Dene Grigar’s call to action encouraged participants to add Wikipedia articles about female e-lit creators and support efforts to document, amplify and make available their works. There are many collections and repositories of e-lit around the world; by looking at the different collections and identifying what elements and vocabulary are used as finding aids, I hope to find out what is most useful for a library catalog of these works.