Students lead the future of digital storytelling in SDSU’s E-Lit Studio

As SDSU’s fall semester kicks off, the Digital Humanities Center is abuzz — laptops are engaged, giant screens are in place, and the podcast studio is recording student voices. At the center of the excitement is the E-Lit Studio, where students are building the next generation of digital stories.

Tucked away in the DH Center, in the San Diego State University Library, is a dynamic space reshaping how students and faculty engage with literature, technology, and storytelling. The E-Lit Studio — short for Electronic Literature Studio — is a working lab, digital archive, exhibition space, and creative hub of collaboration. It's a student-driven initiative that’s redefining what it means to study the humanities in the digital age.

What began as a niche interest in experimental and digital-first texts has blossomed into an expansive, interdisciplinary hub supported by the College of Arts and Letters and the University Library. 

“The more we worked through this, the more I realized how important it is,” said English Professor Jessica Pressman, scholar in electronic literature and digital humanities.. “It’s student-led, collaborative, and unique to SDSU. It’s becoming an archive, a lab, and a community all at once.”

At the heart of this initiative is a growing archive dedicated to electronic literature: digital storytelling that exists outside the confines of print. 

Students in Pressman’s English 562 Digital Humanities course partner with Anna Culbertson, head of Special Collections and University Archives, to catalog and preserve ephemera related to their class projects, including materials that support the creation of AI-driven texts. This archive will soon become part of SDSU’s Special Collections, ensuring that the university becomes a regional center for the study and preservation of electronic literature.

The archive itself is still taking shape, with plans to include donations from leading voices in the field. Once cataloged, much of the collection will be made visible and accessible in a public and interactive exhibition space. 

“We don’t want these materials hidden,” Pressman said. “We want students to see them, curate them, and contribute to the rich history that they represent.”

But the E-Lit Studio isn’t just about archiving — it’s about creating. The space regularly hosts workshops where students build their own electronic literature using tools like Twine, an open-source multi-modal platform for interactive storytelling. 

“We see the E-Lit Studio as a bridge,” said Joey King (‘23, M.A., English), a current digital fellow and one of the studio’s key organizers, who leads a Twine workshop for a lower-division writing course, demonstrating how the DH Center nurtures peer-to-peer learning and mentorship, “It connects first-year students with graduate-level digital projects, gives faculty a place to experiment, and opens doors to new forms of scholarly and creative expression.”

This fall, the project is inspiring fresh curricula, including an introductory course on digital tools, ethics and creativity, part of the College of Arts and Letters’ HŪMTECH push to put the humanities at the center of emerging tech conversations.

This semester, Pressman is teaching BOOKS!! Book as Medium, Object, Artform, Archive (ECL 596), exploring the book in all its forms. And coming next spring: a brand new course, AI Literatures, tracing the evolution from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and the hypertext classic “Patchwork Girl” to ChatGPT and beyond.

The studio and center’s collaborative nature also provides practical benefits. Students leave with portfolio-ready projects, often blending creative and analytical skills in ways highly valued by employers. 

“When students create something digital for class — a Twine story or an ArcGIS story map — they can use that in job applications. It’s tangible,” Pressman said. She credited Pam Lach, Digital Humanities librarian, and Patrick Flanigan, DH Center programs and operations specialist, for vital support and expertise at the studio.

Future plans include a digital volume introducing the field of electronic literature, with teaching resources, project samples, and recorded lectures, to help faculty across the country incorporate e-lit into their curricula.

Creative competition

Each year for the past six years the E-Lit Competition brings together students who create digital-first projects. 

This year’s winners were Jon Tobias, MFA in creative writing/poetry and Kasside Sahagun-Escalante, graduate student in English.

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“The meta poem is my homage to Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s ‘Travesty Generator’ (2019),” he said in his entry statement. “I wanted the coder to seem snarky and opinionated about the work they are writing. I wanted this to be an opportunity to remind the reader that in between every line of code is a coder who thinks and feels and has opinions about things which may be very different from what they are making. ” 

The judges called Tobias’ work “a wonderfully witty poem with bite that calls attention to specific locations within the work that some may overlook; the white space, margins, so that we consider the effect these ‘parts’ of the poem in this modality have on the piece.”

Sahagun-Escalante built a lush digital quilt made up of 300 QR codes. Jurors said, “This crazy quilt of QR codes offers an ingenious hypertextual experience that stitches together links to pages from Project Gutenberg texts to notes on JoAnn Fabrics closing to entire novels. As you pull the quilt over you, you begin to see the connections from code to culture to communities, not just any communities but ones bound largely by women with sewing needles and strings of code.”

Ultimately, the E-Lit Studio stands as a testament to what happens when creativity, pedagogy, and student passion converge. 

“This isn’t just about digital tools or technology,” said Pressman. “It’s about rethinking what literacy, literature, and research look like in the 21st century — and doing it together, from the ground up.”