Our Project
The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction: Editions, Emulations, and Translations examines activities, approaches, and strategies underlying the preservation of born-digital literature. Drawing upon platform and code studies, archival theory, translation studies, and media theory, it addresses the growing concern among digital preservationists about how best to maintain and extend the accessibility of works created for hardware and with software no longer supported by contemporary computing systems and which often include contextualizing packaging and physical media that extend beyond what is traditionally recognized as “the work.”  As part of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Digital Literary Studies Series, the project involves the production of two books: the first, a print book that provides theories and concepts related to the topic; the second, this open-source digital book built on the Scalar platform that underpins the theories and concepts via 88 custom-made media assets, including videos clips, images, 2D animations, sound files, and other textual elements.

The significance of the project is that it introduces two important concepts relating to born-digital preservation: media translation and born-digital conservation. While other scholars discuss translating and preserving born-digital literature and art, we demonstrate––with many examples––how the form and material context of a born-digital work impact our understanding of its integrity as it migrates across  platforms, languages and reading communities.

This Multimedia Book
Another contribution of our work is the way in which we tie publications built for two different mediums together through visual clues, like icons, and rethink structural conventions, like table of contents, for organizing digital content. Inspired by the work of N. Katherine Hayles, we treat images, sound, animation, interaction, navigational functionalities, and other verbal and non-verbal features as elements that work together to form an expanded notion of “text,” arguing throughout our project that translation, in the context of electronic textuality, is always a media translation. 

Navigating through This Book
This multimedia book is aligned with the print book, chapter by chapter, so that discussions relating to particular works are accompanied by examples from the works themselves through animations, images, videos, charts, and sound files. Readers will find they can access our media in several ways.

First, hypertextually: They can use the "hamburger" menu found at the top left hand side of the screen to locate chapters and subsections and go directly to them. Or they can go to the page entitled, "Paths to Media Assets" and select the example they wish to experience by clicking on its icon. And finally, they can go to a chapter's introduction's page and select the example from those listed. 

Second, linearly: They can simply click on the blue button located on each page and access each example in order, much like Michael Joyce's notion of the "wave of returns." 

Final Remarks
We hope our research and the methods we have used prove useful to others who work with born-digital media as the field continues to evolve. Certainly working with the authors and works as we have done over our careers have been a source of great joy and inspiration for us.

Keywords

Digital Preservation, Born-Digital Literature, Media Translation, Emulation, Migration, Collection