with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access.

hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author. Hypertext reader and writer are said to become co-learners or co-writers, as it were, fellow-travelers in the mapping and remapping of textual (and visual, kinetic and aural) components, not all of which are provided by what used to be called the author.

What makes the work that the ELO does absolutely imperative in this “Digital Information Age,” as scholar Paul Ceruzzi calls it, is its leadership in developing methods for evaluating quality of “digital” creative and critical works and its insights into cataloging its growing body of “digital” fiction, poetry, and other literary forms, for the ELO is the only scholarly body in the U.S. dedicated solely to the investigation of literature produced for the digital medium.