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Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 3: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop about Victory Garden

Following his Traversal, Moulthrop was interviewed by Dene Grigar about the development and concept behind Victory Garden. This event, part of the Pathfinders methodology, is intended to provide future scholars with the history and lore of early pioneering electronic literature.

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 1: Storyspace Methods

Part one of the author interview with Stuart Moulthrop begins with a discussion of the Storyspace environment. Moulthrop eschewed the map feature in Storyspace and instead mapped out the structure of Victory Garden using MacDraw. He describes the attempt to employ more ambitious graphical features than had been employed in Storyspace at that time. He notes that Shelly Jackson exceeded this in her later work Patchwork Girl. A question is asked about how character driven each of the paths through the work are. Moulthrop acknowledges that Victory Garden is a novel and this is seen throughout. The next question is about the media format the work was published on. Moulthrop responds that it originally came out on 3.5 flexidisk and somewhere in the 90s it was published on CD. Dene Grigar explains the history of the publication formats. Moulthrop closes this segment by recalling giving his family copies of Victory Garden as a holiday gift and needing to note that the Macintosh computer must be acquired separately.

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 2: Hypertext Foundation

Part two of the interview discusses the impact of the Hypertext Foundation. It opens with a memory from Stuart’s undergraduate days. He tells of taking a course in Computer Science in his final semester as an undergraduate student in English and realizing he majored in the wrong discipline and was about to go to graduate school in the wrong discipline. He felt the call of the computer and when personal computers became commercially available and played with words in the BASIC programming language. His early work is comparable to interactive fiction. He strongly felt the impact of having your own machine that allowed playful interaction, not just practical tasks such as word processing. Stuart recalls meeting J. David Bolter, one of the authors of Storyspace and corresponding with Michael Joyce. Joyce sent him afternoon, a story in 1986. He then built an interactive fiction in Hypercard during a sabbatical, which was never completed. Even with all of this work, hypertext was still considered not the “real” work for a professor of English. The role of Kinkos franchises in providing access to computers and publishing digital texts is discussed, before Eastgate Systems, Inc became a publisher. Voyager multimedia is discussed as another pioneer of publishing and distributing digital texts.

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 3

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Interview with Stuart Moulthrop about Victory Garden

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 1: Storyspace Methods

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 2: Hypertext Foundation

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 3

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 4

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 5

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 6

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 7

Interview with Stuart Moulthrop, Part 8

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