A collection of texts from the original Fall '96 issue of electronic book review: writing (post) feminism, edited by Elisabeth Joyce with Gay Lynn Crossley.

This special gathering collects reflections of the Critical Code Studies Working Group 2020 (CCSWG ‘20), a biannual meeting to explore the intersections of humanistic inquiry and computer code studies. Coordinated by Mark Marino (USC), Jeremy Douglass (UCSB), and Zach Mann (USC), the 2020 Working Group was held online from January 20 to February 3. It brought together more than 150 participants from around the world to share ideas, populating dozens of discussion threads with hundreds of comments, critiques, and critical readings.

In May 2021, *ELO 2021 Conference and Festival: Platform *[Post?]Pandemic took place online, co-organized by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (University of Aarhus, Denmark) and the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group (University of Bergen, Norway) in collaboration with dra.ft (India) and the Electronic Literature Lab (Washington State University Vancouver, USA). With over a year of experience with digital meetings, it was clear that the typical 20-minute conference presentations for a full week would simply be a battle of endurance rather than the generative space similar to the hustle and bustle of in-person conference. Instead, the organization chose a format of 5-minute presentations combined with extended time for engaged discussions. Most presenters also submitted a written papers in advance, all of which were added to the conference documentation on emlcip.net as well as the conference website. This gathering makes up a small selection of these papers, revised from the original submission based on peer review comments and author's own new insights from their conference session. As such, we hope to allow for a generative process rather than product. The gathering will be published in three subsequent batches that correspond to the three parts of the conference theme: 'platform', '[post?]', and 'pandemic'.

The journals electronic book review (digital literary studies, est. 1995) and The Digital Review (born-digital arts and writing, est. 2020) are proud to announce their first collaboration: a special double issue on "Critical Making, Critical Design" that pairs digital works of making or design with critical and scholarly mediation.

The title of this special gathering describes a digital poetics of the nation state that is currently known as Canada; however, the Editors and authors of this issue wish to acknowledge that this land is made up of over 630 First Nation communities, representing more than 50 nations and 50 Indigenous languages. This special gathering’s description of a “Canadian digital poetics” is for the purpose of consistency and not the homogeneity of these diverse communities, nations, and languages, which we do not take for granted. The Editors, Dani Spinosa and Lai-Tze Fan, additionally acknowledge that they have put together this gathering as settlers of the traditional, ancestral, unceded land of the nations of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. Looking at the combination of practices and methodologies that come about through e-lit’s production, study, and dissemination, these articles explore the disruptive potential of electronic literature to decenter and complement the DH field. Creativity is central and found at all levels and spheres of e-lit, but as the articles in this gathering show, there is a need to redeploy creative practice critically to address the increasing instrumentalization of the digital humanities and to turn the digital humanities towards the digital cultures of the present.

It seems strange during pandemic-induced isolation to reflect on last summer’s ELO2019 gathering, the first time the Electronic Literature Organization’s annual conference and media arts festival was hosted in Ireland. It was a privilege for all at University College Cork to welcome so many scholars, practitioners and colleagues to our campus and city, a privilege that is only magnified now that same cohort is unable to convene in Orlando, Florida for ELO2020. The editors of this special issue would like it dedicated to ELO2020 organisers, whose labour is seen and valued.

"Natural media" re-valuates the communicative potential of natural spaces, especially in instances where symbolic import collides with raw matter in a manner that hides from, disguises, or elides stark reality. It considers intersections, collisions, tensions, opportunities, and affordances that arise in the discussion of "Natural Media," both broadly conceived and in its contributors' particular areas of research. This collection emerges from a panel hosted by the Modern Language Association's MS Forum on Visual Media in 2017. The co-editors, Lisa Swanstrom and Eric Dean Rasmussen, first met in person and began collaborating on the "Natural Media" gathering in May-June 2018 when, at the invitation of Eric and his colleagues at The Greenhouse (an environmental humanities research initiative), the University of Stavanger hosted Lisa as a visiting scholar-in-resident. We are grateful for the institutional support.

This gathering is unique. What differentiates it from other gatherings on the electronic book review is that rather than being compiled and united via subject matter, what unites these papers is that they were all first delivered at the Arabic E-lit Conference in Dubai which took place in February 2018. The publication of conference proceedings may not be particularly innovative. In this way, the gathering works to "Mind the Gap" in the scholarship surrounding electronic literature, providing open access to conference papers that the scheduling and finances of travelling may have made inaccessible to some scholars. Incidentally, "minding" this gap in access and in study was the primary theme of the 2018 ELO conference on electronic literature. This theme, and the topics discussed at the Arabic E-lit conference, suggest that we have arrived at a moment in the digital humanities and the study of e-lit in which scholars are now paying acute attention to the ways in which our scholarship must address not just the affordances and intermedialities of electronic literature, but also the barriers to its study and reception.

Toward the end of William Gaddis's novel of American capitalism, J R (1975), a truck passes by on a Manhattan Street displaying five dwarves who are house painters and the words, "None of Us Grew but the Business." At the time of publication, readers might have taken this phrase and Gaddis's novel itself, as a corporate satire: one that traces (in grueling detail), the construction of a multi-billion-dollar empire by a solitary pre-adolescent, J R van Sant, who owns and operates a conglomerate from his grade school payphone. A handkerchief that he'd put over the mouthpiece makes him sound 'bigger,' or so he'd imagined—even as our handheld devices today allow us to continually update and reconstruct our own corporate identities, or to have them constructed for us by platforms and algorithms to which we freely subscribe.

Vienna Now! Recent literary studies such as Mark Taylor's Rewiring the Real (read Vanwesenbeeck's review); Michael LeMahieu's Fictions of Fact and Value; and the volume Wittgenstein and Modernism (edited by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé and LeMahieu), have ushered in a return to logical positivism in literary studies, more than two decades after the perceived impasse between continental and analytical philosophy (as captured in the historical stand-off between Derrida and Searle) seemed to have been decisively settled in favor of the former (read Kellert's essay and Michaels' essay). Perhaps not coincidentally, this return to logical positivism is drawing renewed attention to the Vienna Circle and its towering central figure, Ludwig Wittgenstein whose advocacy of linguistic-philosophical hygiene ("whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent"), to those of us not partisan-inclined, always seemed like another version of the de-sedimentation (or "bracketing") urged by phenomenology. It is the latter method, articulated perhaps most famously, in Husserl's "Vienna Lecture" of 1935, that in turn would pave the way for Derridean deconstruction and the postmodern French Connection of Lyotard, Foucault, Barthes, Bataille (read Berry's essay).

In the context of the 1990s, there are three writers to whom the phrase "electronic literature, c'est moi" could conceivably apply: Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, and Shelley Jackson. In particular, afternoon, a story, Victory Garden, and Patchwork Girl were generative works that exerted outsize influence both within and beyond the genre.1 The scale of proliferation that accompanied and followed this period, however, in tandem with the rapid commercialization of the Internet, was something few predicted. Issues of monetization, open access, how to define electronic literature, whether hypertext is dead, and whether print is dead or dying, are only a sampling of debates continuing to play out in the pages of ebr and elsewhere. These numbers will be outdated by the time of publication: 1.6 billion Facebook users navigate a constellation of image and narrative at least once per month; around 40% of humanity has Internet access (in 1995 that number was less than 1%). The growth since has been remarkable, but perhaps more unanticipated is the poignancy involved in the act of looking backward. Not only has our online experience changed, much of the old content is now inaccessible. A quote by N. Katherine Hayles is worth noting in this context: "Books printed on good quality paper can endure for centuries, electronic literature routinely becomes unplayable (and hence unreadable) after a decade or even less." Indeed, a cursory search of my university's library, as well as interlibrary loan, turned up four versions of Patchwork Girl: two on 3.5 inch "floppy" disks (1995 and 2000 editions), one on CD (with software from 2000), and one on USB flash drive (2014, though not requestable).2

This special gathering of ebr aims to re-frame the conversation about digital and natural ecologies in two important ways. It does so firstly by refusing to indulge in post-apocalyptic speculation. And secondly, in contrast to the large-scale rhetoric that associates technology—all of it, but particularly digital technology—with the “End Times,” it seeks to examine the ways that digital technology is, already, participating in environmental discourse, neither as an agent of ecological devastation nor a figure of salvation. Instead, the essays in this special gathering demonstrate the ways that the digital is always already overlaid with the environment and interwoven with environmental aesthetics.

A few years before the Electronic Book Review was launched, the late Umberto Eco, addressing a symposium on the future of the book at the University of San Marino, made use of a familiar allegory. This was the story of Thoth and the invention of writing, and he told it as a way of prefacing his enthusiasm (as opposed to a general despair in the broader public) for the emerging correspondent modes reading and thinking. Then, as now, our vantage point is liminal, a Duchampian infra-thin in which one age (the age of the book) is transitioning into another (the age of the screen).

Following in the line of Cary Wolfe's MusicSoundNoise thread (2001), Trace Reddell's LitMixer (2001), Mark Amerika's Sounds of the Digital Intelligencia (2007), and Reddell's subsequent Sonic Contents (2006), the present gathering from Robert Cashin Ryan further explores the noise of culture and productive capacity of sound.

In June of 2015 at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, the "What [in the World] was Postmodernism?" Symposium brought together scholars, poets, and media artists to reflect on how postmodernism has shaped their respective fields and practices, and how the defining traits of that movement have managed to—or failed to—translate into whatever we decide has superseded it in today’s postcolonial, posthumanist, and digital culture. Scholars interrogated how we might deconstruct or reconstruct the phenomenon of the postmodern—as a style, philosophy, or era, among other possibilities—along 21st century fissures and fault lines. They paid particular attention to the global, regional, and local contexts bracketed by "in the world," while keeping in mind the ontological implications of the duplicitous and multiplicitous worlds postmodernism so often entails. This gathering of essays for the electronic book review was conceived as a kind of antipodean offshoot of the larger, contemporaneous project of The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature (2016), and it draws together some of the most compelling responses to the puzzles of postmodernism put forth at the 2015 event.

These essays, also an ebook, have not been written according to an Ulmerian formula. Their only common feature is the application of a structural language that eschews beginnings, middles and ends. Instead these essays prioritize the organization of different material by juxtaposition, analogy and thematic extension - an appropriate logic for an age contoured by recombinant media.

As I thread my way through ebr, I touch base with the artificial intelligentsia that my work circulates in. The artificial intelligentsia is an internetworked intelligence that consists of all the linked data being distributed in cyberspace at any given time, one that is powered by artistic- intellectual agents remixing the flow of contemporary thought.

There has never been a 'Best of the Electronic Book Review' or a print collection. After ten full years of online publication, ebr has devised other ways of marking time, using techniques available in the same electronic media where the work first appeared. Here the editor presents an initial 'Gathering' of ebr essays, pulled from each of the journal's threads to date. Read more here