Acteme: The lowest level of hypertext activity, as defined by Jim Rosenberg, acteme is a unit of interaction with born-digital work: following a link and opening a menu with available destinations are examples of single actemes. The category is especially useful in restoration and reconstruction efforts because it points to affordances and limits of specific platforms or tools. The same action can take more actemes in the emulated / migrated edition than in the original.

Documentation: An activity that provides information about a work that may include one or a combination of the following methods: a textual entry into a scholarly database, a critical essay, mention in an object of ephemera (i.e. announcement card, poster), inclusion in an archive, photographs and images, video recordings capturing salient features of a work or insights into it from the author or others, and the like. The goal of documentation is to establish a record of the work.

Edition: "[T]he whole number of copies of [the work produced] at any time or times from substantially the same [approach]" (Bowers 1994: 39). For born-digital literature, an edition involves not just text but includes its underlying code, language, and presentation. There may be many copies made from any one edition over a length of time, but a new edition is identified as the work released again with changes to presentation, structure, and/or text. An edition is not reliant upon changes to a work’s code that results in a new version, but every new version does result in a new edition.

Emulation: A method of digital preservation that recreates computer hardware with software or “execution of a program written for a different computer, accepting the identical data and producing the identical results'' (Butterfield 2016: 550). Emulation allows users to run old applications on contemporary computing devices when the hardware and software is no longer compatible.

Lossless: The migration of the work from one time and place to another always comes with some loss that can occur in the code, language, or experience. Borrowed from the area of digital music and imaging, a lossless transfer, while never fully achievable, manages to migrate most of the linguistic, semiotic, poetic, material, or contextual aspects of the work in a way that satisfies the needs of the translator, preservationist, and target audience.

Lossy: A lossy migration is one that is able to recreate a bare minimum of many dimensions in which the original work was expressed.

Media Translation: Media translation is the transformation of a work, potentially, between formats, software, platforms, hardware, computer languages, and/or digital qualities in a way that impacts the human experience with such works. It may or may not involve linguistic transformation, but always the underlying code is affected and may or may not result in changes to functionality and presentation.

Migration: A method of digital preservation that involves moving a work or portions of a work into a format to ensure its accessibility.

Pathfinders: The methodology developed by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop for documenting born-digital works that involves a Traversal, images of the work, video recordings of interviews with the work’s author and readers, author biography, and critical writing about the work. This project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and resulted in their book of criticism, Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing, published by The MIT Press in 2017.

Radical Media Translation: A case of high-level intervention in the original work with many of its components reconstructed and reimagined from scratch, along its linguistic elements. Examples include Amnesia and the Polish Edition of afternoon, a story where low-end and high-end programming, system, platform, interface had to be redesigned for the new audience.

Rebooting: An activity whose goal is to revive a work through a variety of potential ways, such as documentation, restoration, and reconstruction.

Reconstruction: A type of rebooting project involving the complete rebuild of a work that affects its code and may also impact its functionality and presentation.

Restoration: A type of rebooting project that involves the intervention into portions of a work’s code (including changing linking structure) and/or aspects of the functionality of a work to make the work accessible again.

Traversal / Live Traversal: Described by Grigar and Moulthrop as the process of documenting a born-digital work via video recordings that “take place on equipment configured as closely as possible to the system used to create the work or on which the work might have been expected to reach its initial audience” (2008: 7). Traversals were later expanded by Grigar’s lab to focus on Live broadcasts via YouTube and/or Zoom to allow audience participation. This type of Traversal is called a Live Traversal.

Version: A version is a “revision” that may be “either physical (literally distinct documents) or inferred from the evidence available on one or more extant documents; a version of a work can always be linked to another version; versions are revisions of the works, and they may be initiated, either deliberately or inadvertently, by the author or by some other agency like an editor–or the public at large; versions do not depend on the authority of the author to be authorized as a version; versions are manifest by their degree of difference from other versions” (Bryant qtd. in Kirschenbaum 2008: 187-188). We use the term to refer to changes in software functionality. A new version always results in a new edition.