We Descend
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We Descend
''We Descend'' is a work of electronic literature by American author Bill Bly. This work encompasses four different versions from 1997 through 2023 and was originally written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate Systems (1997). Plot and structure ''We Descend'' is a collection of writings passed along over many generations. The work has a default path which introduces us to these various assemblages and putative writers. "The story spans four timelines, beginning with a future post-apocalyptic storyline of Egderus who digs down through eons of data to reconstruct cultural history, encountering, along the way, writings by an ancient who calls himself the Last One. The metaphor of the “archaeological dig” serves “to visualize time” Bly uses hypertext linking to collate and annotate this archive and to create hidden writings that exist "behind gated links that may unlock truths about the archive." Publication history and influences The work was originally published on ...
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Electronic Literature
Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or Generative literature, algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, Tablet computer, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version. The first literary works for computers, created in the 1950s, were computer programs that generated poems or stories, now called generative literature. In the 1960s experimental poets began to explore the new digital medium, and the first early text-based games were created. Interactive fiction became a popular genre in the late 1970s and 1980s, with a thriving online community in the 2000s. In the 1980s and 1990s hypertext fiction begun to be published, first on floppy disks and later ...
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Storyspace
Storyspace is a software program for creating, editing, and reading hypertext fiction. It can also be used for writing and organizing fiction and non-fiction intended for print. Maintained and distributed by Eastgate Systems, the software is available both for Windows and Mac. History Storyspace was the first software program specifically developed for creating, editing, and reading hypertext fiction. It was created in the 1980s by Jay David Bolter, UNC Computer Science Professor John B. Smith, and Michael Joyce. Bolter and Joyce presented it to the first international meeting on Hypertext at Chapel Hill in October 1987. After a failed attempt to licence the software to Broderbund, they licenced it to Eastgate Systems in December 1990. Mark Bernstein, chief scientist at Eastgate, has maintained and developed the Storyspace program ever since. Artistic and educational use Several classics of hypertext literature were created using Storyspace, such as '' Afternoon, a story'' by M ...
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Eastgate Systems
Eastgate Systems is a hypertext publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts. Eastgate is a pioneer in hypertext publishing and electronic literature and one of the best known publishers of hypertext fiction. It publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry hypertexts by established authors with careers in print, as well as new authors. Its software tools include Storyspace, a hypertext system created by Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce and John B. Smith, in which much early hypertext fiction was written. Eastgate's chief scientist, Mark Bernstein, is a hypertext researcher, and has improved and extended Storyspace. He also developed new hypertext software, Tinderbox, a tool for managing notes and information. Storyspace was used in a project in Michigan to put judicial "bench books" into electronic form. History Eastgate Systems was founded by Mark Bernstein in 1982 and developed hypertext tools. Joyce and Bolter launched Storyspace in 1987, at ...
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Virginia Tech
The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly referred to as Virginia Tech (VT), is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. It was founded as the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1872. The university also has educational facilities in six regions statewide, a research center in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, and a study-abroad site in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland. Through its Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets, Corps of Cadets Reserve Officers' Training Corps, ROTC program, Virginia Tech is a United States Senior Military College, senior military college. Virginia Tech offers 280 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to its 37,000 students; as of 2016, it was the state's second-largest public university by enrollment. It is Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high r ...
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The NEXT Museum
The NEXT: Museum, Library, and Preservation Space is a repository of net art, electronic literature and games. It is supported by Washington State University at Vancouver and the Electronic Literature Organization. This is a digital museum dedicated to reviving and maintaining these works to make them accessible to all. Physical artifacts are held at the Electronic Literature Lab in Washington, US. History This digital museum originally housed 30 separate collections of 2,500 electronic literature works which had increased to over 3,000 works by 2022. The NEXT uses an Extended Electronic Metadata Schema (ELMS) to describe the complex and interactive digital works it holds. This metadata describes the work and alerts readers to potential reading issues such as fleeting text, color use, or requirements for moving a mouse or moving with a virtual reality environment. The lab opened officially in 2011. Reviving works Electronic literature pieces have used software available at ...
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Maryland Institute For Technology In The Humanities
The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is an international research center that works with humanities in the 21st century. A collaboration among the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities, Libraries, and Office of Information Technology, MITH cultivates research agendas clustered around digital tools, text mining and visualization, and the creation and preservation of electronic literature, digital games and virtual worlds. History Made possible by a challenge grant in late 1998 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), MITH began operations during the fall semester of 1999, under Martha Nell Smith, Professor of English at the University of Maryland. Smith left the directorship in 2005 and was replaced by Neil Fraistat, who assumed the role first in a one-year "acting" capacity and then, permanently, in 2006. Projects MITH is involved in several on-going projects, including the following: *'' BitCurator'', is a joint effort led ...
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Michael Joyce (writer)
Michael Joyce (born 1945) is a retired professor of English at Vassar College, New York, US. He is also an important author and critic of electronic literature. Joyce's '' afternoon, a story'', 1987, was among the first literary works of hypertext fiction to present itself as undeniably serious literature, and experimented with the short-story form in novel ways. It was created with the then-new Storyspace software, deployed the ambiguity and dubious narrator characteristic of high modernism, along with some suspense and romance elements, in a story whose meaning could change dramatically depending on the path taken through its lexias on each reading. For instance, a hard-to-find series of lexias presented a new set of facts about the narrator's actions which affects the reader's judgment of the narrator. In ''The New York Times'', Robert Coover called ''afternoon'' "the granddaddy of hypertext fictions", while The ''Toronto Globe and Mail'' said that it "is to the hypertext inter ...
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Dene Grigar
Dene (Rudyne) Grigar is a digital artist and scholar based in Vancouver, Washington. She was the president of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2013 to 2019. In 2016, Grigar received the International Digital Media and Arts Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. As director of the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University, Vancouver, Grigar collects, preserves, and analyzes digital media. Early life and career Dene Grigar married John Barber. Her mother is from what was then Czechoslovakia. Her interest in electronic literature began in fall 1991 when she took a graduate course with Nancy Kaplan in hypertext. She graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas with an MA in humanities in 1991 and a PhD in humanities in 1995. Grigar is currently the professor and director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Technology & Culture at Washington State University Vancouver. Scholarship Grigar is professor and di ...
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Stuart Moulthrop
Stuart Moulthrop (born 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States) is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works '' Victory Garden'' (1991), which was on the front-page of the ''New York Times Book Review'' in 1993, ''Reagan Library'' (1999), and ''Hegirascope'' (1995), amongst many others. Moulthrop is currently a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He also became a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999. Education Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, he became an English major at George Washington University after reading '' Gravity's Rainbow'' by Thomas Pynchon in 1975. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1986. He taught at Yale from 1984 to 1990, and then at the University of Texas at Austin and the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1994 he moved back to Baltimore ...
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Astrid Ensslin
Astrid Christina Ensslin is a German digital culture  scholar, and Professor of Dynamics of Virtual Communication Spaces at the University of Regensburg.  Ensslin is known for her work on digital fictions and video games, and her development of narratological theory to encompass digital narratives. Biography Ensslin received an undergraduate certificate in violin performance and music pedagogy from the Stuttgart Academy of Music and Performing Arts in 1996 and a BA/MA in English and German from the University of Tübingen in 2002. In 2006 she completed her PhD on digital literature and hypertexts at Heidelberg University, where it was short-listed for the Ruprecht-Karl's Award for outstanding scholarly and scientific research. In May 2012 she became a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Ensslin has received numerous awards for her research, teaching and supervision. Ensslin is the founding and principal editor of the journal ''Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds'', a r ...
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1990s Electronic Literature Works
Year 199 ( CXCIX) was a common year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was sometimes known as year 952 ''Ab urbe condita''. The denomination 199 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * Mesopotamia is partitioned into two Roman provinces divided by the Euphrates, Mesopotamia and Osroene. * Emperor Septimius Severus lays siege to the city-state Hatra in Central-Mesopotamia, but fails to capture the city despite breaching the walls. * Two new legions, I Parthica and III Parthica, are formed as a permanent garrison. China * Battle of Yijing: Chinese warlord Yuan Shao defeats Gongsun Zan. Korea * Geodeung succeeds Suro of Geumgwan Gaya, as king of the Korean kingdom of Gaya (traditional date). By topic Religion * Pope Zephyrinus succeeds Pope Victor I, as the 15th pope. Births Valerian Roman e ...
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