How is the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting measures, and movement of cultural life online reflected in electronic literature and other digital narrative practices online? With this roundtable we propose an exploration and discussion of electronic literature during this time of COVID.

In the current situation, public libraries, theatres, cultural festivals have been closed across many countries and virtually all cultural life creative practices have moved online. This presents an opportunity for electronic literature and net art, but also necessitates new ways of understanding online media and making sense of current life worlds.

Works of e-lit, such as poetry and narrative generators, collective narratives, and interactive fiction, have already been developed that deal contextually and thematically with the virus, social distancing and isolation, and the absurdities of everyday life as we adjust to an online social sphere. Forms of a collective creativity, such as the popular meme of imitating classical paintings while sheltering place, and other types of online collective creativity, may signal the emergence of new e-lit related practices emerging during the COVID era.

The roundtable discussion will emerge from the shared activity of developing a focused research collection of works responding to or related to the pandemic in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base as an open-access research resource. We will use an online form and a Facebook group to launch this collective research, which will involve and be open to the larger research community.

(Source: Authors' abstract)

Complete video documentation of the panel discussion is available online.

E-lit Pandemics - Roundtable

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