Electronic Literature Organization

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature".

Founded by Scott Rettberg, Robert Coover, and Jeff Ballowe, the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) was established in Chicago in 1999 with Ballowe as its first president and Rettberg serving as Executive Director. During this period the ELO focused on developing sponsorships from dot.com businesses and embraced, along with hypertext narrative and fiction, emerging forms electronic-based literary works, including interactive narrative, net poetry, and others. In 2001, the Organization moved to UCLA under the guidance of noted media theorist N. Katherine Hayles, where it was supported by UCLA's English, SINAPSE, and Design|Media Arts departments. This period, influenced by the dot.com crash and 9/11, shifted the ELO's attention to developing infrastructure through academic support. Its first conference, State of the Arts, was held at UCLA in 2002. Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, the electronic literature artist writing under the name M. D. Coverley, took over as the Organization's second president at this time. Also during this period the ELO's publications about preservation, archiving and documenting, Acid-Free Bits (2004) and Born-Again Bits (2005) occurred; work on the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, an anthology of electronic literary works, was also begun.

In 2006, upon the departure of Hayles from UCLA to Duke University, the ELO moved to the University of Maryland, College Park where it was supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities under the direction of Digital Humanities scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum, with literary scholar Joseph Tabbi serving as President. Through Tabbi's leadership, the Organization developed the Consortium on Electronic Literature (CELL), "an open access, non-commercial resource offering centralized access to literary databases, archives, and institutional programs in the literary arts and scholarship, with a focus on electronic literature." The project received funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities Start Up Grant. The growth of the Organization due to its academic affiliations created the need to bring electronic literature scholars and artists together more frequently. This awareness led to The ELO's symposium, The Future of Electronic Literature, took place at the University of Maryland, College Park on May 3, 2007 and its first open conference and festival, Visionary Landscapes, at Washington State University Vancouver, chaired by Dene Grigar and John Barber in June 2008.

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