Pathfinders Main Menu Introduction to Pathfinders An introduction to Pathfinders with detailed information about the project Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger Judy Malloy's Opening Page John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse John McDaid's opening page for Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl This is the opening page of the Jackson Reading Path for Patchwork Girl Bill Bly's We Descend Bill Bly's opening page Traversals and Interviews Documentation The documentation used for the traversals and Interviews Authors' and Contributors' Bios The bios of those who authored and produced Pathfinders References and For Further Reading Books, essays, and non-print media informing Pathfinders Nouspace Publications | Washington State University Vancouver

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Pathfinders can be interrogated from two perspectives: as a material object and as an idea.

As a material object, Pathfinders raises questions of nomenclature:  What do you call a publication that contains a central idea comprised of many discrete sections of information contributing to that central idea?  What if that publication entails the use words, images, sound, and videos for expressing the ideas?  What if it is produced on the web but exported for one's own personal computing device?  Certainly, we cannot call such a material object a book––at least, not in the traditional sense of the word because, well, its, it's not a printed self-contained artifact one would archive on a bookshelf since the tablet it resides on is used for other purposes than reading publications.  It's also not an eBook because the content is dynamic, alive with movement and sound. It's not a website (though certainly its production took place on the web using web tools) because one can export Pathfinders and carry it around on a personal computing device.  The best way to think about the artifact that is Pathfinders in its current iteration is as a "knowledge environment"––a highly experimental, web-based multimedia one created to provide criticism and scholarly content to a wide audience interested in experimental writing and literature of the late 20th century.

As an idea, it raises questions of purpose:  What does one call an initiative to keep a work alive by documenting its existence, dynamism, and experience? While Pathfinders is intended as a kind of digital preservation project, is it actually preserving work when it does not migrate or emulate, for example, one single node or path of Bill Bly's novel We Descend?  Even as Pathfinders features Bly's performance by the work, one collected along with vintage computers needed to read it, does Pathfinders even constitute preservation by collection? The answer is, on the one hand, no.  But at its core, Pathfinders' purpose is to make it possible for scholars and the reading public to experience a work of digital literature as close to its original cultural context as possible by showing videos of people––the artist, readers––experiencing works in original formats and on original computers used for their production and presentation. Libraries and other venues that house early digital literature but can't or do not want to collect computers for showing this kind of work are able to supplement the experience of looking at, for example, Judy Malloy's hand-made box of Uncle Roger along with a video of Malloy performing it on the computer it was intended for at the time she produced it. In this way, those studying the work can see and hear the way it functioned in 1987 on the Apple IIe in order to tease out unique characteristics lost in the migrated web version. So, the answer is, on the other, yes, Pathfinders constitutes form of collection that utilizes documentation to preserve the cultural and historical context of a work and provide access to those in danger of becoming obsolete and forgotten alive to the public.






Pathfinders is built on the Scalar platform, an innovation