The Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group (BEL) studies literary works created for digital media and relate digital art forms. In 2021, our research group is co-organizing the ELO 2021 Conference and Festival: Platform (Post?) Pandemic, the most important annual conference in the field. An important project for us is the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, the most extensive open-access research database in the international field. Our research often combines theory and practice, as in the award-winning VR narrative Hearts and Minds, winner of the 2016 Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature. Members of our group frequently publish scholarship on electronic literature, including recently Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis by Astrid Ensslin (Ohio State, 2021), the two-volume Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from Electronic Book Review, edited by Joseph Tabbi (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg (Polity, 2019).
BEL frequently organizes international symposia and workshops, such as the Electronic Literature Knowledge Base Symposium and EcoDH seminar in 2018, and welcomes international speakers and visiting researchers. In 2015 we hosted the international Electronic Literature Organization conference and literary arts festival and in 2021 we are co-organizing the ELO 2021 Platform (Post?) Pandemic Conference and Festival. We embrace innovative forms of scholarly publishing, such as a four-part series of collaborative articles, conversations and interviews on the Metainterface and critical works of artistic digital media published in 2018-19 in the electronic book review. BEL has published annual reports documenting group activities since 2011, which are available in the Knowledge Base.
