2002
Linda Carolli on the third hybrid collection by Michael Joyce, a work (like the technological landscape it's about) at once industrial and informatic, essayistic and narrative, technical and autobiographical.
Polymythic Personalistic Organicism, Biocentric Egalitarianism, and the Postmodern Return to Religion.
Setting one scholar's legalistic solutions against texts by cyber-critics and posts by netizens and web artists, geniwate looks at the issue of copyright law online.
Christine Bucher, reviewing Beatriz Columnina, considers the narrative and photographic dimensions of interiors designed by Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier.
Adrien Gargett on Pierre Missac's unification of empirical biography and textual production, and the development of a "criticism of indirection" too often missing from Benjamin studies.
Entering the cyberdebates, Scott Rettberg moves beyond technique and proposes a more generative approach to hypertext, in which an author's intention and poetic purpose have a role.
A revaluation and appreciation of Stanley Elkin on the occasion of the Dalkey Archive reprinting of four separate volumes.
2001
Matt Kirschenbaum, a longtime ebr contributor who actually does some programming and much reading in electronic environments, sought to ground the discussion.
Daniel Wenk was living in Paris on a Fellowship during the initial discussions. He would eventually give the discussions their name, End Construction!, after treating a street sign in Chicago. Using black electrical tape the same width as the sign lettering, he formed an exclamation mark and so turned the statement into a command.
Eugene Thacker, who went on to help design the Alt-X e-book series, suggested some models for ebr designers to consider.
William S. Wilson, author of the story collection, Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka, audited the discussions on the new ebr Interface and posted a series of letters (backchannel), under the header, Why I Don't End Construction. His reasons have to do with audience building.
In response to Bill Wilson's provocation (about not "getting through" to a younger audience), Linda Brigham introduces a cognitive perspective and closes with a metaphor from music - eventually the design-governing metaphor for the site design.
Brian Lennon, who at the time of the discussions was reviewing a book on experimental poetry and poetics, joined the END CONSTRUCTION discussion as its first phase was winding down.
Elisabeth Joyce, co-editor of ebr3, Writing (Post) Feminism, entered the discussion on the new interface after the initiating posts by ebr design editor Anne Burdick, publisher Mark Amerika, editor Joseph Tabbi, and barker Rob Wittig. Joyce's post drew our very first gloss - by ebr contributing editor Steve Tomasula.
Responding to the potential for having "all of ebr current" and even viewable on a single screen, Brigham wonders if it might not be better to kill off content. Brigham's model is the Blair Witch project.
Steve Tomasula, who co-edited the two "image + narrative" issues of ebr in 1997, came in at the tailend of the discussions, when we stopped talking and began the three-year-long process of buiding the database/interface.
Rob Wittig, since composing this response, has been serving as the "street barker" who announces the appearance of new ebr content.
Publisher Mark Amerika's reaction to Burdick's proposal for ebr3.0...
In the fall of 1997, with the launch of ebr version 2.0, ebr editors Anne Burdick and Joseph Tabbi introduced a weaving metaphor to describe the journal interface. Three years later, Burdick sent in the following proposal for ebr 3.0, an entirely new version that enacts the metaphor using database technology.
Following Katherine Hayles, Matthew Kirschenbaum agrees that materiality matters.

