I ♥ E-Poetry and ELMCIP Knowledge Base Partnership

viz
Image links to I ♥ E-Poetry @ ELMCIP KB.

I ♥ E-Poetry and the ELMCIP Knowledge Base are now synchronized.

The ELMCIP Knowledge Base (KB) is a database that connects writers, creative works, critical writing, publications, and events. It is developed by Scott Rettberg and the Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen, in Norway, and expanded by an international community of scholars.

The KB and I ♥  E-Poetry have long been attuned, cross referencing  and creating records for works reviewed in this project. Many descriptions, screenshots, and information in the KB are drawn from I ♥ E-Poetry and some of the data from the KB has informed the metadata in I ♥ E-Poetry. Early on, Scott Rettberg added the ability to link back to the I ♥ E-Poetry entry on a given work, reciprocated in all the blog entries with the following image:

elmcipthumb

While Scott and I created the frameworks for integration, the most important contribution is actually entering the data, in both resources. Several members from the Electronic Literature Research Group have helped in this, among them Patricia Tomaszek, Eric Dean Rasmussen, Jill Walker Rettberg, Davin Heckman, and others, but none more than Hannelen Leirvag. Hannelen is a senior in the Digital Culture program at UiB and was my student in the Electronic Literature course in the Fall 2012 semester. Given administrator access to both resources, she put in long hours creating records, adding information to tags in both resources, linked KB records with I ♥ E-Poetry entries and viceversa, and helped debug both systems for optimal functionality. Her dedication and hard work have benefitted both projects immensely, for which I am extremely grateful.

What can we do with this integration? For starters, it allows me (and others) to extract data from the KB to create data visualizations, such as the ones below. Click on the images to visit the data visualizations.

awyviz
Author, Work, Year Visualization
I Love E-Poetry AWYT
Author, Work, Year, Tag Visualization

These published tools allow readers to see I ♥ E-Poetry through the ELMCIP KB’s eyes (so to speak), offering search tools, and a visual mapping that encourages exploration of different connections and affinities between authors, works, years, and tags (nodes). A little time spent searching, clicking through links, and mapping out the complex web of relations between nodes should lead to insight and discovery.

And this is only the beginning. I have received institutional support for the Fall 2013 semester in the shape of a research release time to continue developing I ♥ E-Poetry, and through an internship course, where I will have 2 students working with me to continue developing both resources. Their first mission, to update all the links to I ♥ E-Poetry entries in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, changing them from leonardoflores.net addresses to ones in iloveepoetry.com.

In the meantime, enjoy the resources and visualizations, and stay posted for future developments and partnerships!

And my heartfelt thanks to the ELMCIP KB  team for their generous support!

New Tools for Exploring I ♥ E-Poetry

The transition from Tumblr to WordPress is a transformation from a performance writing blog to a knowledge base and electronic publication– something that will be discussed in the near future.

A key change makes a more systematic and useful implementation of the information established in its original tagging system by converting tags into categories and grouping them. The only information that remained as tags is the author’s names, since it would add over 300 subcategories rendering category pull-down menus useless. WordPress allows me to deploy the categories in two significant ways:

  • A pull-down menu on the sidebar, which lists all categories with nested subcategories and the number of works under each category. That is a useful bit of information to be had at a glance, leading to exploration of other similar works.
  • A menu in the header which presents the categories side-by-side, revealing a selection of subcategories under each with a mouse-over.

So come explore this knowledge base of over 500 entries as never before!

Open Call for Contributions

Have you ever wanted to write an I ♥ E-Poetry entry?

Well this is your chance.

I ♥ E-Poetry invites guest contributions from its readers and the e-lit community.

Read the Submission Guidelines and use the form below to send me a brief description of what you’d like to write about. I’ll set you up with a contributor account and you can get started right away!

Everything begins with a single accepted entry. And why stop there? Multiple contributions are encouraged, even multi-part series. You may even become regular contributor.

“@ILoveEPoetry: A Break Bot” by Leonardo Flores

"@ILoveEPoetry: A Break Bot" by Leonardo Flores. A word cloud of words and concepts associated with E-Poetry. Text: "lines / poem / piece / aural / static / responsive / words / narrative / text / screen / works / image / code / language / (etc.)"
Open “@ILoveEPoetry: A Break Bot” by Leonardo Flores

This Twitter bot has has been designed to automatically post an I ♥ E-Poetry entry once an hour. If you’re interested in exploring other works reviewed or reliving the excitement (!!!) of each entry, then this is the account to follow. It should take this bot about 21 days to tweet the whole project— which is just right for my current needs.

After 500 consecutive days of reading and writing about e-poetry, I’m taking a much-needed break.

But no worries, this is far from over. This is simply a pause before embarking upon the next stage of this project. In the meantime, I’ll be conducting some assessment, redesigning some aspects of the blog, migrating it to a new site, integrating it with the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, inviting guest entries, and more.

See you in three weeks!

I ♥ E-Poetry: 500 Entries Later

I ♥ E-Poetry: 500 Entries Later

I ♥ E-Poetry Advisory Board

I am happy to announce that I ♥ E-Poetry now has an advisory board, consisting of three prestigious members of the electronic literature community (in alphabetical order):

  • Kathi Inman Berens teaches at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and is a Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, where she works on virtual classroom software and embodiment.  She curates and researches electronic literature. She teaches and researches transmedia branding, communication interfaces and hybrid pedagogy. You can visit her blog at http://kathiiberens.com/.
  • Alan Bigelow writes digital stories and poems for the web. His work, installations, and conversations concerning electronic literature have appeared in many prestigious international galleries, media shows, journals, and collections. In addition to teaching full-time at Medaille College, he has been a visiting online lecturer in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, UK. You can see Alan Bigelow’s work at http://www.webyarns.com.
  • Mark C. Marino is a critic and author of electronic literature, currently serving as the Director of Communication for the Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org). His work on Critical Code Studies has promoted the development of methodologies for interpreting computer source code. He is the director of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS Lab) at USC (http://haccslab.com). His portfolio can be found here: http://markcmarino.com.

I am grateful for the support and guidance they have offered in the past and look forward to continuing our conversation.

Stay posted for future calls for feedback on this scholarly blogging project.

I ♥ E-Poetry Nominated for 2012 DH Awards

I ♥ E-Poetry Nominated for 2012 DH Awards

Hello world

I’ve created over 25 websites, blogs, groups, and other online spaces since 1999. For the past 5 years, I’ve maintained a blog which documents my professional work, including most of my course blogs. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, sharing choice morsels of my personal life.

Aside from my dissertation, articles, and presentations, I’ve been searching for my voice as a scholar of digital literature. I use Twitter to connect with my peers in the digital humanities and e-literature communities. I read, favorite, retweet, share, and occasionally reply, but I don’t feel like I’m making a contribution.

My dad used to say one shouldn’t speak unless one had something to contribute to the conversation. So I’ve been mostly quiet: reading, listening, learning.

Today it struck me: I know what to contribute. I’m going to read an e-poem every day, and I will respond to it in writing: in about 100 words. Every day.

I’ll start with the Electronic Literature Collections, then take on the Electronic Poetry Center, or the Electronic Literature Directory, or the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, or poetry e-zines, or individual websites. The point is: there is enough e-poetry out there for me to read and respond to for a long while.

If this blog helps people discover the poetic potential of digital media or sparks some ideas, great. If you’re interested, feel free to follow, subscribe, like, share, retweet, bookmark, whatever. Or not: it’s all good.

It will serve me as an annotated bibliography of what I find interesting in e-poetry. And that alone will make it worth my time and effort.

I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Cheers!