The Bill Bly Collection & MITH's Symposium
Besides traveling to MITH to conduct the traversals and interviews for Bill Bly's We Descend, we also participated in "Reading, Rereading, and Recovering Electronic Literature," the symposium hosted by Matthew Kirschenbaum at the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland College Park. The event took place on Thursday, January 30 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. The symposium was followed by a public reading of We Descend by Bill Bly. In the audience were faculty and graduate students from the university and other interested individuals. Jason Rhody, our grant officer from the National Endowment for the Humanities that funded Pathfinders, was also present. During our visit to MITH, we also had the opportunity to look through the archives of The Bly Collection. The inventory dates from the late 1980s to 2004 and includes papers, art, and files by other artists like Deena Larsen. As Bly points out in the document, "BBLY | Holdings for MITH June 2011," all digital materials "with a few exceptions" were created with and for a Macintosh computer running the Classic operating system. Some of the materials available for viewing were records and programs from CyberMountain, proceedings from annual ACM Hypertext conferences dating back to 1996, and copies of the SIGLink Newsletter from 1998-2000.
