Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media

Social Media Content for Sarah Smith's "King of Space"


Performing Traversals of electronic literature live, online, and using social media channels adds a participatory aspect to the existing Pathfinders Traversal model. We are able to keep seminal works like Sarah Smith's King of Space alive by sharing their existence with a wider audience, capturing more of the depth and richness of the scholarly conversation surrounding these works, and recording the ensuing conversation for posterity. 

On the day of the Traversal for Smith's work, the undergraduate researchers, ELL faculty and staff, and Amber Strother, who was performing the Traversal, gathered in the lab. The undergraduate researcher curating social media feeds had notes from their research and from Grigar’s critical study on hand to feed content into the social media conversations. While Strother performed the Traversal, Grigar moderated the live YouTube chat and later the question and answer session. The undergraduate researchers documented the event on Facebook and Twitter and with photography, mixing in prepared research on the work and its criticism with observations, comments, and interactions with other participants. After the event, we used Storify to gather posts and took screen captures of the YouTube Chat. All of this material helps to further document the work but also the audience experience with it.

To the research question underpinning this book, “How can a live internet broadcast and social media effort extend the reach and increase participation in a Traversal of a work of early e-lit?,” we discovered was that the use of social media channels did, in fact, extend the reach of the Traversal. The interactions gathered on Twitter differed from those gathered on Facebook. The chat conversation from the YouTube channel had the most interaction and the fastest paced conversation. Gathering Twitter and YouTube together, plus photographs, on Storify was a useful way of providing a lasting documentation of the conversation threads. Having multiple channels open and monitored during the question and answer session allowed for a broader, more varied, and richer conversation during the question and answer period. 

Facebook
We posted to three main sites on Facebook: 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 own site with over 1400. ELL Team members with a Facebook page also posted to their own sites. 

This post, the first we put on Facebook, introduced the event to the general public days before the event.



On the day before the live Traversal we held a rehearsal with Amber Strother and posted a photo of her practicing with the work.


The morning of the event, we posted this photo of Greg Philbrook setting up the equipment for capturing the live Traversal on YouTube


Just before we started, we posted a reminder to those on the elit-pathfinders site to join us at the event.


The next seven posts contained information about the work for the audience since most of them had never experienced King of Space and so had limited knowledge about it. In some cases the posts feature the ELL Team posting and/or monitoring sites.









We announced the Q & A to the audience so that those following us on Facebook could post questions to the performer and moderator




We also announced that we would create a Storify site for the Facebook and Twitter posts. 


One final photo we posted was this one of the onsite audience and ELL Team after the event ended.


Twitter
We tweeted on two Twitter sites: 1) Grigar's own site that had over 2800 followers, and 2) ELL Team Member Veronica Whitney's site, with over 175 members, because she was in charge of posting and reposting on Twitter during the event. The hashtag we used was #elitpathfinders, the same as the one developed for Pathfinders.

While Grigar posted announcements on her site about the event ahead of time, the first post that used the hashtag was the one that showed Strother rehearsing for the Live Traversal.


We tweeted this next photo of Grigar and Strother skyping with author Sarah Smith in the Electronic Literature Lab on the day before the event. 


The next two posts introduced the start of the event and highlighted the onsite audience in the lab.



The next eight posts followed the approach we used for Facebook by posting Strother's comments about the work during her Traversal and information gleaned from Grigar and Strother's Skype interview with Smith the day before.









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 we learned from the Live Traversal.






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 a good representation of the original format and too big for Scalar to host, respectively. So, Nicholas opted instead to export the story to HTML, save the content locally, and then move it to our webserver. 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 the next volume of our project.

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

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