Scott Rettberg

Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of electronic literature based in Bergen, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization.^[1][2][3] He leads the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence from 2023 to 2033.^[4]

Scott Rettberg Ph.D.
In 2011
Nationality	American
Scientific career
Fields	Electronic literature, digital humanities
Institutions	University of Bergen
Website	www.uib.no/en/persons/Scott.Robert.Rettberg

Scholarship

Rettberg is a professor of Digital Culture in the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway.^[1] He is the author of the book Electronic Literature, which won the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature in 2019,^[5] described by Kathi Inman Berens as "a definitive overview of electronic literature".^[6] He has co-edited a number of academic collections, including Electronic Literature Communities.^[7]

Rettberg was the project leader of the HERA-Funded ELMCIP research project (2010–13), and is the director of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base.^[2]

Literary and artistic career

Rettberg became known as an author of hypertext fiction in the 1990s. His first major project was the collaborative web novel The Unknown, A Hypertext Novel, which was written in collaboration with William Gillespie, Dirk Stratton, and Frank Marquadt, and won the trAce/Alt-X Hypertext Competition 1998.^[8] It was also featured in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 2,^[9] and has been analysed by a number of scholars.^{[10][11][12][13]}

Rettberg's cinematic collaboration with Roderick Coover, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project, received the Robert Coover Award in 2016.^[14] The annual award is given by the Electronic Literature Organization each year in recognition of an outstanding work of electronic literature.^[15][16][17]

The combinatory film Toxi-City: A Climate Change Narrative was created with Roderick Coover, and is described as a film that "shape-shifts each time it plays; an algorithm selects fragments from each of the six narratives and reconfigures them to create an ever-changing, yet thematically consistent, production"^[18]

In 2023 Rettberg began experimenting with using ChatGPT and DALL-E to generate narratives^[19] that "neither human nor AI could have created alone",^[20] including the project Republicans in Love.

The Electronic Literature Organization

Main article: Electronic Literature Organization

Rettberg co-founded the Electronic Literature Organization with Robert Coover and Jeff Ballowe in 1999.^[21]

Selected bibliography

• Electronic literature, (Basingbroke: Polity, 2018. ISBN 978-1509516773) ^[22]