Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media

Social Media Content for Rob Kendall's "A Life Set for Two"

Performing a Traversal of Rob Kendall's "A Life Set for Two" live, online, and using social media channels adds a participatory aspect to the existing Pathfinders Traversal model. By sharing their existence with a wide audience we are able to keep seminal works like hers alive in the scholarly conversation. This captures more of the depth and richness of the scholarly conversation surrounding these works and allows for recording the ensuing conversation for posterity. For handling the social media, the undergraduate researchers had notes from their research and from Grigar’s critical study on hand to feed content into the social media conversations. They also took photographs, mixing in prepared research on the work and its criticism with observations, comments, and interactions with other participants. While Barber performed the Traversal, Grigar moderated the live YouTube chat and later the question and answer session, documented in the videos on this page. After the event Nicholas Schiller prepared a Storify site to gather social media posts and screen captures of the YouTube Chat. All of this material helps to further document the work and capture the audience experience with the work.

Facebook
We used three locations on Facebook to post for this event: 1) the site Grigar set up in 2013 for the Pathfinders project, entitled "elitpathfinders,"  with 245 followers, 2) the Electronic Literature Organization's page with over 1600 members, and 3) Grigar's personal site. ELL Team members with a Facebook page also posted to their personal sites. 

The first we put on Facebook, introduced the event to the general public on the day of the event.


The following posts release new information about the work for the audience who do not have prior knowledge of A Life Set for Two.








The next two posts comment on the perspective of the reader and the lens for which the story is written.



The next four Facebook posts offer information on digital poetry.





The following post offers information on the presenter of the live Traversal, Dr. John Barber.


The last two Facebook posts announce the start and end of the Q&A section for the live Traversal.




Twitter 
We used two accounts to tweet this live traversal: 1)ELL Team Member Katie Bowen and 2) Nicholas Schiller's account, with 2,200 followers. Bowen was in charge of posting and reposting on Twitter during the event. The hashtag we used was #elitpathfinders, the same hashtag developed for the original Pathfinders project.

The first posts announce the event ahead of time using the hashtag #elitpathfinders.




The following three posts are from DTC students at WSUV who attended the live Traversal.





The following tweets share information about the work discovered while researching A Life Set for Two.








Once the Traversal ended, we announced on Twitter that the Q & A would begin so that the audience could post questions to us to raise to the audience on the YouTube Chat and in the lab. We also continued to post information about the work inspired from the Live Traversal.




YouTube Chat
We use YouTube to distribute the live stream of our Traversals. YouTube has a chat feature that allows participants in the live stream to communicate with us and each other as the work is traversed and during the question and answer session. We have preserved the record of that conversation here.

Link: http://dtc-wsuv.org/ELL/kendallYouTubeChatComplete.jpg​

 
Storify
We found Storify useful as a tool for pulling together all of the Facebook and Twitter posts into one interface. While our story could have been exported as a .pdf or made into a screen capture, the output is not an accurate representation of the original format and presents other display issues. Instead, Nicholas opted to export the story to HTML, save the content locally, and then host it on our web server. Weeks into our project, the developers of Storify announced that the site would not be continued after May 2018, which means we will not have access to this tool in future stages of our project.

Link: http://dtc-wsuv.org/ELL/Kendall-storify.html 

 

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