Cover of Dene Grigar & Stuart Moulthrop's Pathfinders
Pathfinders, a project led by Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, developed the methodology for documenting born-digital literature. It answers the question, "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?" To that end, the Pathfinders methodology involves detailed documentation of the work, including photos of the physical media, interview with the artist, and video recordings of author-reader performances of a single path into the work using time-appropriate hardware and software.
Using this method, they documented Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger (1986-88), John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse (1992/93), Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) and Bill Bly's We Descend (1997) and published their data as an open-source, multimedia book, entitled Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature in 2015. 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.