Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media

The Pathfinders Methodology

How can we make an interactive, multimedia work of born digital media created on outmoded hardware and software accessible to today's readers in a way that preserves the experience of that work? That was the question driving Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop's research with their Pathfinders project. The answer? Detailed documentation of the work along with video recording author-reader performances of a single path into the work using time-appropriate hardware and software. They called their methodology, Pathfinders, and the videotaped performance, a Traversal. They used this method for documenting four early works of electronic literature: Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger, Version 3.3, John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse (1992), Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) and Bill Bly's We Descend (1997). The compiled all of their data into an open-source, multimedia book, entitled Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature, and published it on June 1, 2015. To date, the book has had over 25,000 views from readers from 58 countries representing 275 universities, centers, libraries, and schools. They followed this project with Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Digital Writing (The MIT Press, 2017), a book of critical essays about the four works. 

Our project builds on the Traversal methodology by including a live performance via streaming media and engaging the public in real-time using social media. In this way, the audience can interact with the author or reader performing the work, and ask questions which add commentary to the experience. The initial Pathfinders methodology includes the video recording of the live Traversal, background of the work, author information, photographs of all of the material components of the work, critical essays, resources, and in some cases, interviews and sound files. This new iteration also include screen captures of the Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, and YouTube chat that took place during the live performance. Taken together they document the work as well as the readers' and audience's experience with the works.

 

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