The “electronicness” in literary writing, Ian Hatcher suggests, is more of a cognitive disposition, an atmosphere or condition that is present regardless of the print/screen/pen(cil)/paper medium one inhabits.

Recalling ebr’s early exploration into “green” and “grey” ecologies, invisible etchings on silicon and massive environmental consequences, Ben Bishop calls our attention to questions of “power” at the heart of our newly digitized critical and creative practices: “Not clout or capability, but electrical power generated by spinning turbines.”

Commenting on the high price of long term literary collaboration (and the brevity of most funding in the Humanities), Samantha Gorman asks if it’s necessary for arts practitioners today to create commercial start-ups. Can scholars and Digital Language Arts entrepreneurs find a way to bring literary work into “hybrid communities” and “outreach”?

For Patrick Lemieux, the future of electronic literature is not before us, and instead entails an investigation of the past–of the unknowable territories we collaborate with through e-lit.

The practice of Electronic Literature has long raised questions about literary form, literary content, the author, the reader, the moment of publication, and the artifact itself. The companion to the lifecycle of the work in its ecosystem, of course, is the editorial vision itself. In this essay, Sandy Baldwin and Tiffany Zerby call for editors and publishers of works on and about e-lit to become active participants in the process of creating the entire work and in creating the field around works of e-lit. Through analysis of historical and contemporary efforts to prepare edited “collections” (in print, on the web, and/or in databases), Baldwin and Zerby make editorial work visible as creative and critical practice.