Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature

by Astrid Ensslin

This Element examines a watershed moment in the recent history of digital publishing through a case study of the pre-web, serious hypertext periodical, the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (1994-1995). Early hypertext writing relied on standalone, mainframe computers and specialized authoring software. With the Web launching as a mass distribution platform, EQRH faced a fast-evolving technological landscape, paired with an emergent gift and open access economy. Its non-linear writing experiments afford key insights into historical, medium-specific authoring practices. Access constraints have left EQRH under-researched and threatened by obsolescence. To address this challenge, this study offers platform-specific analyses of all the EQRH's cross-media materials, including works that have hitherto escaped scholarly attention. It deploys a form of conceptually oral the lore of electronic literature. The Element deepens our understanding of the North American publishing industry's history and contributes to the overdue preservation of early digital writing.

144 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2022

Reviews

[Colin Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an exemplar of e-lit scholarship, integrating archival preservation and literary analysis perfectly. Ensslin carries out close readings of all works featured in the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext along with in-depth interviews with the authors and Mark Bernstein of Eastgate. Ensslin describes her method as eliciting the lore of the late 90s hypertext community to recover the ethos and creative ideas fueling this important e-lot endeavor.

As someone who has copies of nearly all volumes of the EQRH and the old computers needed to play them, Ensslin’s text is still an essential companion to understanding the context in which these works were created and read. Preservation is about more than the bits, after all, but also the survival of cultural practices and ideas. Ensslin contributes to both sides of the digital preservation of these works here.