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• 1 2015-01-19T11:09:20-08:00 Introduction to Pathfinders 181 An introduction to Pathfinders with detailed information about the project plain 116021 2015-06-01T06:56:29-07:00
  Pathfinders begins the necessary process of documenting early digital literature, specifically pre-web hypertext fiction and poetry, from 1986-1995. These literary works were produced with programming languages like BASIC or authoring systems like Storyspace and HyperCard and require a degree of interactivity between the reader and the work. They were also among the first computer-based works of literature to be sold commercially in the U.S. and, because of their availability through commercial distribution, were influential in shaping literary theory and criticism that, today, are used to discuss born digital writing. They are also literary works in danger of becoming inaccessible to the public because they were produced on and for computer platforms that today are obsolete.
  
  From among the many hypertexts and other digital projects we could have selected to document, we decided on four:

  1. Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger, programmed in BASIC as a serial novel and published on the net from 1986-1987; sold from 1987-1988  in various versions on 5 ¼ floppy disks through Art Com Catalog; published in 1995 on the web
  
  2. John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, a hypermedia novel created in Hypercard 2.0 and published in 1993 by Eastgate System, Inc. as a box containing artifacts from the literary estate of the titular Uncle Buddy
  
  3. Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, produced on Eastgate's Storyspace platform and published by the company in 1995; regarded by critics as an important work of hypertext and cyberfeminism
  
  4. Bill Bly’s We Descend, a complex hypertext novel––also created on Eastgate's Storyspace platform for both floppy disks and CDs––that experiments with the layering of time and published by the company in 1997

  We chose these four because they are long-form works that represent a specific individual contribution unique to the field as well as reflect a wide range of experimentation taking place during this period. For example, Malloy’s Uncle Roger, the first commercial work of electronic literature to be sold in the United States, was first published in 1986 as a serial novel delivered to an online audience on the Whole Earth ‘Lectric Link (WELL). Later iterations expressed on floppy disks and the web speak to its enduring popularity and give rise to its status as a classic work of the period. John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse was produced with HyperCard, a software application available on Apple computers for creating hypermedia. Like Malloy's Uncle Roger, Funhouse is a novel, but one that includes sound and printed elements as part of its storytelling strategy. Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, produced with Storyspace––a hypertext authoring system created and sold by Eastgate Systems, Inc. ideal for long-form, complex writing––is viewed by many as the high point of hypertext literature in the pre-web period of the early digital age. Its recent re-release on flash drive, 20 years after its first publication, demonstrates its on-going status as an important work of contemporary fiction. Finally, Bill Bly's hypertext novel We Descend, also created with Storyspace, takes advantages of the affordances of this tool to experiment successfully with the multi-temporal narrative and intricate narrative structure.
  
  Our method of documentation is unique in that we videotaped each artist and two additional readers interacting with a work on its original computer platform––a methodology we call “traversal.” When watching the traversal for Uncle Roger, for example, scholars can hear the crackle of the Apple IIe as it boots up and see the words “Bad Information” appear a few seconds later on the screen. Neither of these two elements is part of the story, but they are important cultural and artistic features lost in the migration to the web version that came later. Traversal recordings also capture the musings of authors about intentions, circumstances of writing, and on some occasions, effects that no longer work as intended.
  
  We see our work with documentation as a form of digital preservation, one that builds on the method of “collection,” as opposed to the other two more common methods, “migration” and “emulation,” by providing scholars wanting to experience the work in its original format access to video documentation of the works in performance on a computer with which the work would have been originally experienced.
  
  Besides videos of traversals, Pathfinders also includes videos of interviews with the artists and readers of the four main works; photos of physical artifacts such as floppies, folio covers or boxes containing floppies and other media; sound files from traversals and interviews; and commentary about the works and media. For example, John McDaid’s Funhouse consisted of five floppy disks packaged in a black box. Nowhere is it documented that the box also contains two music cassettes, a paper copy of a short story marked up by an editor, and a letter from the editor. All of these additional materials also make up the Funhouse and, so, are crucial to one’s understanding of the work. Pathfinders provides a video of McDaid opening the box and discussing each item found inside; certainly, an experience that scholars will see as helpful for understanding the breadth of McDaid’s vision. In total, Pathfinders features 173 screens of content, including 53,857 words, 104 video clips, 204 color photos, and three audio files.
   
  In developing the project, we have striven to provide information helpful to scholars. Publication dates, versions, production methods have been vetted by publishers and artists when possible. Thus, we hope to clear up discrepancies relating to this information as well as offer information previously unknown about these works. Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger serves as a case in point. While many scholars know that she published "A Party in Woodside" in 1987, they may not be aware that she updated and republished it in 1988. Nor it is well-known that the Modern Museum of Art holds a copy of the 1987 version of Uncle Roger, numbered "no. 10.", a fact highlights the work's status as a recognized work of art.
  
  With the traversal videos and ensuing author interviews, we attempted a first cut at an oral history of early electronic literature. This effort yielded several notable insights, such as Judy Malloy's description of online interactions with her audience during the composition of Uncle Roger, Shelley Jackson's acknowledgment that the origins of Patchwork Girl owe something to Avital Ronell as well as George Landow, John McDaid's description of Funhouse as an attempt to "write a novel no 20th-century novelist could write," and Bill Bly's revelation that his work on We Descend has continued beyond Storyspace into the Web and other environments.
  
  This open-source, multimedia book, is funded by The National Endowment for the Humanities through a Start Up grant from the Office of Digital Humanities. The NEH support made it possible to work directly with the artists, develop the materials for this book, and create this book for open-source access. Without the assistance from the NEH, Pathfinders would not have been possible.
  
  Many individuals and organizations provided support for our research.
  
  From the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver: Madeleine Brookman served as Grigar's research assistant and was funded through fellowships and grants provided by Washington State University. She was responsible for final edits for and the management of all of the videos found in the book, the production of the Pathfinders trailer, and uploading, tagging and describing media for the book. We acknowledge the videography of Aaron Wintersong and early organization by Amalia Vacca, who served as Grigar's first research assistant and who helped to organize the traversals and interviews. Greg Philbrook provided tech support for most traversals and interviews. Will Luers, faculty member in the CMDC leading its digital publishing initiative, is responsible for the design and styling of this book.
  
  From the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: Brian Keilen and Rachael Sullivan, both doctoral students, worked with Moulthrop to catalog the raw video and audio files, construct first cuts of the traversal videos, and assemble static graphics. The Digital Humanities Laboratory in the Golda Meir Memorial Library at UWM provided work space and equipment for this effort. 
  
  We thank the Electronic Literature Organization for 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––activities from which this research grows. We owe special thanks to Dean Anne Balsamo of the New School of Public Engagement, who brought together the two incipient strains of this project, and to Noah Wardrip-Fruin of the University of California Santa Cruz, whose 2012 Media Systems Workshop set the scene for that crucial conversation. We appreciate the support of Tara McPherson, Erik Loyer, and others at the University of Southern California's Alliance for Networking Visual Culture for the development of the Scalar platform on which the book is built. We thank Matthew Kirschenbaum and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland College Park for sharing The Bly Collection with us for our project. We particularly recognize Grigar’s Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver, which provided access to her collection of computers and works, without which the project would not have been possible. We thank Mark Bernstein of Eastgate for taking the time to answer questions about publication dates and packaging, as well as giving us access to images needed for the book. We also thank the Modern Language Association for allowing us to exhibit our Pathfinders research at the 2014 conference in Chicago. Finally, we thank the four artists who provided their time and insights into their work. They all shared so much of their knowledge, history, insights, and time to this project. Literary history is better for it.

  
  The development of this project is documented at the Pathfinders blog managed by Grigar. Also of note is the Pathfinders YouTube channel where rough cuts of videos were made available, early on, for scholars to use for their research and the curated Vimeo channel where all videos are now hosted.
  
  The exhibit, mentioned previously, that showcased these authors and their works as well as contemporary expressions of experimental writing at the Modern Language Association's 2014 convention, is archived at Pathfinders: 25 Years of Experimental Literary Art. The exhibition ran from 9-11 January and was curated by Grigar and Moulthrop. Literary scholars were able to preview the videos and photos developed for the project and access some of works on Grigar's vintage computers, though it should be noted that three of the computers shipped to Chicago were destroyed en route to the exhibit. Though we mourn their loss, it represents exactly the calamity our work of preservation is meant to address.
   

  Finally, we are already thinking ahead to an independent book project, Traversals, that further explores the uses of preservation for digital writing, and to the next version of Pathfinders that will include Moulthrop's Victory Garden, an afterword by Joseph Tabbi, and possibly transcriptions of the traversal videos for each artist. In a word, we see this project as one that will continue, adding artists and their works and capturing important information that needs to be documented for posterity.

   

  Funders and Collaborators

  

   

   
• 1 2015-01-19T11:20:13-08:00 "A Case for [Electronic] Literary History: John McDaid and Pathfinders" by Dene Grigar 15 "A Case for [Electronic] Literary History: John McDaid and Pathfinders" by Dene Grigar plain 2015-05-30T16:27:19-07:00 The Pathfinders team worked this week with John McDaid to preserve his work, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse. Begun in 1986 as a challenge to write a novel "that no one else could write," Uncle Buddy’s was expressed in hypermedia and published by Eastgate Systems in 1993. It constitutes the second work we have documented now––Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden was the proof of concept that tested our theories and plans. While we recognized the importance of documenting these works for posterity,  it was Uncle Buddy’s, a work out of print and impossible to find even used––that made us acutely aware of the historical implications of our efforts. The fact of the matter is, Pathfinders is about contributing to the future of literature through documenting its past––and the past we are documenting focuses on experimental literary writing that emerged in the 1980s and has continued to grow and develop into what we call electronic literature today. We are, in effect, involved in creating the infrastructure for a literary history of electronic literature.
   
   

  I have to admit that I love literary history and have, in my life, collected volumes of books about it. Baugh’s A Literary History of England, published in 1948, is a case in point. Close to 1700 pages, the book covers over a thousand years of English literary heritage, beginning with the middle ages. The copy I own was purchased second-hand well after I finished my undergraduate degrees in French and English and merely studying British literature for my own edification. I was delighted to find the previous author’s marginalia and underlined text, for they linked me to the book’s own history. At the first university where I held  a tenure-track position, the PhD students in my department were required to know the literary history of England and America, in a strict chronology, for their exams. The department has long since revised this requirement, but during those early years of my career the “Baugh,” as I called it, served as a sort of bible for me because I was not an expert in British literature and needed to have at my disposal the information it contained between its covers. Keep in mind this was the mid-1990s when the browser was just introduced and the web still in its infancy. Books like the Baugh constituted the references we used for research.
   
  Eschew literary history all you want––and, yes, making grad students memorize historical “facts” found in them for their exams is a good reason to complain––but print literary scholars at least have a documented history to argue about or from. Those of us working in electronic literature should be so fortunate. We are working to construct ours, pixel by pixel, frame by frame, tag by tag. Making the task challenging is the fact that the works we seek to historicize are rendered obsolete sometimes seemingly overnight. The truth is, in order to have a history, one needs a stable present so that one can readily study the works one needs for that historicization. Pathfinders represents one of many efforts scholars in the U.S. and abroad are undertaking to document the heritage of electronic literature before it is too late.
   
  I use the phrase, too late, not so lightly. During the panel presentation that I participated in at the 2013 Digital Humanities conference held in Lincoln, NE, an audience member asked the panelists how early electronic literature was received by the public when these works were first released. Two of us (a man in the back of the room and me) from about 50 people could share with the audience the memory of picking up the slim folio (that contained the floppy disk and directions for how to install and interact with the work) of a hypertext novel in our hands and trying to figure out how to begin our reading adventure. The truth of the matter is that when that man and I are dead and gone from this world, it may very well be up to pure conjecture to figure out what people thought of these works when they were first released. We absolutely have no idea what people thought the first time they heard the Odyssey recited by the Homeric poet either, but we expect to have this gap of cultural history with a work written thousands of years ago when orality was the only mode for sharing one’s heritage. However, in an age when we have such such a wide variety of communication channels with which to express our views, not having a record of human experience with a cultural object produced a mere 20 years ago is absurd if not ironic.
   
  More challenging is that even if you got your hands on a copy of Uncle Buddy’s (doubtful, as I mentioned earlier, since it is currently out of print), you would need a Macintosh computer running the Classic operating system with the ability to read either floppies or a CD and loaded with Hypercard 2.0. Without it, you cannot do much except explore the contents of Uncle Buddy’s estate contained in the box with little idea of how the various items connect to the story.
   
   

  So, the Pathfinders team documented John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse. McDaid was on hand to give a traversal; an in-depth interview about the works’ origins, its influences, and its challenges; and a public lecture. Two readers joined us to traverse the works themselves. Taken together, these activities provide information that will help others to gain a better understanding of this particular work and the experiments that contributed to the field of electronic literature. Readers can find in this section of the book information about the work, including: 1) a complete inventory of the contents of his box (replete with photos of each), 2) a complete inventory of the media included in the work itself, and 3) a complete inventory of the art forms he experiments with in the work. The special video of John opening the box containing Uncle Buddy’s (what he said Mark Bernstein referred to as “the chocolate box full of death”) and talking about each item and the part each plays in the story will also be made available.
  
  So, I have a vision. Hear me out, and don’t laugh. One day, 70 years from now, literary scholars will argue about the 1700 pages (or screens or whatever the heck they call the presentational modality at that time) of electronic literary history that some future Baugh has painstakingly detailed. These scholars will exclaim that such labor is not necessary, will complain that such work is hegemonic, a master narrative in need of overhaul. In that imagined future, these scholars can well afford the luxury of rejecting literary history. But we can’t. Not today when we cannot even locate Uncle Buddy’s at our local library.