Electronic Literature Collection 5 is open for submissions!

Competitions
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While not strictly a competition, the Electronic Literature Collection 5 (ELC5) is open for submissions. Organized by the Electronic Literature Organization, a new volume has been published roughly every five years. Works in the collection volumes are often cited and assigned in classrooms across the world.

For ELC5, the submission window will remain open through early-to-mid January 2026 with reviewing and editorial statements written through 2026 and into 2027 with the publishing to happen summer 2027. All accepted works will have their metadata, author data, and at least one traversal (recording, often a video) of the work preserved by the Electronic Literature Organization into the future.

Work is planned (by me) to update the platform used for ELC4 (Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4) to include greater accessibility options and information, matching the ELMS format. We are also working toward greater compatibility with CELL and its use of Wikidata fields.

Disclaimer: I (Dan Cox) am part of the reviewing collective and will be part of much of the metadata compatibility and programming work toward the new platform for 2027.

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Could you give us some indication of the inclusion criteria? I once submitted something to it, and got a no information rejection which left me highly uncertain about how the process works and what the committee is looking for.

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In case it sheds any light, here are tags showing those works on IFDB which were included in previous collections: volume 1, 2, 3, 4.

(I’ve no information about the inclusion criteria.)

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Could you give us some indication of the inclusion criteria? I once submitted something to it, and got a no information rejection which left me highly uncertain about how the process works and what the committee is looking for.

I’m sorry you had a bad experience with a previous collection. Often, the number of submissions is in the hundreds and only roughly 40-50 are accepted each time. Each collection, like this one, also have multiple consultants, translators, and a smaller set of volunteers acting as editors.

For this upcoming collection, we emphasize the following priorities:

Relevance to the Moment

These collections serve as snapshots of the current landscape of electronic literature in its various forms. Similar to how ELC 3 captured discussions around “bots” ( Collection: Bots ) in 2016, we aim to feature works that engage with or respond to contemporary discussions around technology, interventions, and cultural responses. We specifically highlight technologies such as generative AI and blockchain, prioritizing transparency, deliberation, and accountability in their usage. While traditional works remain eligible, each collection seeks to preserve and reflect the unique character of its submission period.

Previously Unarchived Works

Building on priorities established in ELC 3 and ELC 4, we aim to highlight forms and communities not previously represented in earlier collections or at Electronic Literature Organization conferences. We are committed to reaching diverse communities and have made our call available in over a dozen translations.

Obsolete or Inaccessible Works

Recognizing the death of many platforms, tools, and formats, we welcome works not traditionally featured in electronic literature collections, including location-based, time-bound, and ephemeral works. This priority extends to XR projects tied to specific places or interaction modes.

Reviewing based on Submissions

The final criteria will be developed after reviewing all submissions with our translators and consultants. We won’t know what we have until we start this long process. I can’t share what the acceptance criteria will be until we know what we have and what might still be missing. We are considering, like previous collections, also including nominated and even commercial works.

The best advice I can give anyone is to consider submitting something if they are interested. This is not a competition and more of ongoing work to define what the “moment” looks like and could help others understand what electronic literature was in the period of 2025 to 2027.

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This kinda surprises me tbh as an organization apparently celebrating written creative works. There’s a fairly strong pushback from most artistic sectors on placing limitations on genAI. If you want an idea, there a very long thread started during IFComp and I’ve seen them on most other literature type forums. Traditional work remains present and strong. A lot of the push for GenAI is to actively push creatives out of that space and replace them with fast, cheap machine, soulesss alternatives rather than reflecting a “character of the time”. GenAI could potentially be used to assist rather than replace writers and artists, but that frequently isn’t what its being used at present and the training of even “ethical” systems often remains murky. Each to their own, but I’m not convinced showcasing GenAI over human generated works as the emerging trend of this era in a creative space is amazing personally. But maybe I’ve missed the purpose of this.

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Is the implication here that in order for a work of electronic literature to be “relevant to the moment” it has to be concerned specifically with technology and innovation? What about works that discuss aspects of contemporary culture or politics not specifically related to technology?

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I think the intent is to prioritize works written by humans that talk about these technologies, rather than works written by or with them, though if that’s the case I still find it a slightly puzzling decision - possibly it’s just the enervation born of three straight years of LLM discourse coming right on the heels of the NFT and metaverse non-crazes, but I’m not sure why pieces about this stuff would have more literary value or provide a better snapshot of the last five years to future readers than, say, COVID. But I admit I’m only glancingly familiar with the organization and the previous collections, maybe tech is a part of the premise.

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I think we agree here, and maybe I’ve been slightly confusing. If someone chooses to engage with technologies like generative AI and blockchain, we want those actions to be done with “transparency, deliberation, and accountability in their usage.” If you use generative AI, we want you to be up-front about how it was used and why you used it in the creation of a work. We aren’t necessarily prioritizing one type of work over another, but the amount of works using generative AI has grown quite high in many circles and we want people to be transparent about when they are using it and for what purposes to speak to the very concerns you raise. Many people are very opposed to any usage, and we want any submissions to be clear about how they engaged with generative AI, or even blockchain technologies, as part of their submission.

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We define electronic literature “as any work that is fundamentally shaped by its digital nature, whether they exist purely on screens, in hybrid formats, in print, or in physical spaces.”

Works can engage with a variety of topics. Like how Twitter bots had a major moment around the same period as ELC 3 in 2016, we also want to try to capture some amount of the current moment. That may be much more traditional forms or it may not be. The non-exhaustive list of things we hope to receive include: “Twine works, bots, locative projects, narratives that take place via email or social media, book apps, sound/visual/AR poetry, zines, games, computer-generated literature, fanfiction works, and others.” We hope for as much diversity and variety as possible.

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To state the obvious: Your organisation, like many before it, may possibly come to the conclusion eventually that openness to AI generated content, even if limited and discouraged, will turn you into one of the few places where AI generated content is still allowed to stand next to human generated content, with the consequence that you draw much interest from people who would like what they generated with the assistance of AI to be considered on equal grounds to what other people created without.

If you hamstring them by requiring disclosure of AI usage, you are creating an incentive to cheat. Now you might say that they would only be harming themselves by this, since your audience is surely perceptive enough to notice the difference and call out the fraud. Your organisation will, however, at least be remembered as one which allowed such people to waste the audience’s time in this manner.

I hesitate to call this course of events inevitable, but I didn’t want you to forego a fair warning.

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While there’s no need to catastrophize, I think the questions here suggest a lack of clarity on the submission form. I was not completely comfortable submitting my work, for instance, before reading some of the added context here. It couldn’t hurt to give the guidance a second look.

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I think “specifically highlight” is the confusing part here because it makes it sound like these works are a priority with this edition. I mean, it definitely is a big part of the cultural moment, but… as I’ve concluded before, I’m yet to see anyone do anything artistically interesting with that technology - possibly because unlike Twitter bots, AI and blockchain are not so much formats as monetisation schemes/ams. So I think more clarity would be welcomed, because I would like to submit something!

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Please do!

We are not prioritizing generative AI over anything else but we do expect to get some works using it in some way. If people use it, we would like people to be deliberate in their choices and transparent in their authorial statements.

I’d really love to see a wide range of things and diverse submissions across different languages. We are the first collection to have so many different translations of our call released at the same time and it’d be awesome to have that same diversity be present in the published collection.