digital preservation

Tablet computers such as the iPad come with standard technological affordances that other computers such as laptops and desktops do not have as a default, such as touch screens, gyroscopes, and accelerometers. Their simplicity of design, consisting of a flat screen with no required peripherals (such as a mouse and keyboard), and their manipulability (they can be held in one hand, utilized assuming multiple bodily positions, held at different angles and in various distances from one’s face, and easily switched between portrait and landscape orientations) have opened new creative opportunities for multimedia authors. In doing so, ‘TabLit’ (or ‘AppLit’) has challenged scholars, teachers and preservationists of eLit to address the unique features of the platform which has enabled and shaped this body of work. This presentation represents a preliminary foray into delineating and foregrounding some of the key issues of tabLit from theoretical, instructional, and preservation and access perspectives, using four mobile-only works as case studies: Erik Loyer’s Strange Rain (2011), Semyon Polyakonskiy’s Maginary (2020), Tiger Style’s Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (2009), and Simogo’s DEVICE 6 (2013).Tablet computers, in terms of technological design, are much closer than other computer types to an approximation of the book page. Although some works of appLit simulate the ‘turnable’ pages of the print book, others replace this navigation with page scrolling, and still others radically rethink the idea of ‘the page,’ requiring the development of a new poetics of the page. In large part due to the touch screen, two common design paradigms can be distinguished in the design of the tabLit page/screen: the indexical or digital instrument, which require requires skilled use of a finger (or fingers), and the frame and infinite page, where the tablet screen becomes a ‘moveable’ viewing window over a page that extends in multiple directions beyond this window.In regard to teaching tabLit, this presentation will describe a pilot tablet lending program the author developed with his university library in order to ensure that tablet-based works assigned in a course (“Narrative in a Digital Age”) were accessible to students. It will outline some of the challenges this pilot faced, including students’ tablet/tabLit literacy and technological obsolescence. This last challenge offers a germane segue way into the final topic, preservation and access, which is (or should be) a key concern for both scholars and teachers of tabLit. Two current but far from optimal sites that address access (and, though this access, a form of preservation) will be discussed: the website and social media channels of the iOS game reviewer, App Unwrapper, and GameClub, a subscription service that enables access to a “library of iconic games,” created in response to the concern that “We’re losing the history of the App Store” (Eli Hodapp, 2019). To conclude, the presentation will survey how resources like the Electronic Literature Directory and the ELMCIP Knowledge Base are currently covering tabLit and suggest possible improvements.

Visual artists, writers, and other cultural producers have long leveraged networked technologies to establish platforms that circulate cultural products in participatory contexts intentionally distinct from cultural institutions. As technologies change over time—including deprecated plug-ins, changes to HTML, and linkrot—these platforms fall into various states of decay. In this paper, I examine an example of a platform, the Net Art Latino Database (1999-2004), an effort to document net-based artworks vulnerable to obsolescence that overall stands as a precarious monument to an earlier era of digital culture. As the platform slowly falls out of joint with current web technologies, the Database illustrates practices of cultural production that respond to the decay of the very technologies being used.

The Net Art Latino Database was initiated by the Uruguayan digital artist Brian Mackern to compile examples of net art activity by Latinx artists, working at the periphery of English-language dominant net art communities. The Database functions as an art platform in the sense offered by Olga Goriunova: a dynamic configuration of people and technologies amplifying new kinds of creative activities that push beyond the boundaries of existing categories of cultural production. As Goriunova’s theorization of art platforms suggests, the lines between categories like ‘net art’ and ‘electronic literature’ are often blurry, as artists and writers deploy the same technologies and pursue similar aesthetic strategies to circulate digital cultural production online.

While the Database catalogs principally digital visual artworks, it is instructive to think about this platform in the context of electronic literature specifically. First, the Database documents works that function expressly as electronic literature, including listings for e-zines. More fundamentally, though, the Database can be read as a work of electronic literature. Coded by hand in HTML, Mackern’s work exemplifies the scribal practices that were the foundation of early Web culture. The text-based work consists entirely of descriptions of other artworks and links to other projects. These sites are frequently located under the top-level domains of Central or South American countries, though many are no longer active, and these defunct sites are rarely captured in public web archives. As such, the Database serves an ekphrastic function, evoking multimedia artworks that no longer readily circulate online—and may no longer materially exist beyond this description.

I approach this analysis from the discipline of library and information science (LIS). A deeper understanding of Mackern’s artistic and curatorial practices can help to shape professional perspectives on the preservation of net art, electronic literature, and digital cultural production more generally. Unlike a traditional institutional repository, the diverse artworks included in the database are documented as part of a living, interconnected media ecology. Rather than adaptively preserving individual works through migration to new technological environments, Mackern’s Database enacts a poetics of obsolescence, carefully stewarding works on a platform built with the recognition of its own fragility.

The complexities of archiving digital content, particularly those story forms reliant on multiple platforms, highlights technical, cultural and curatorial issues that remain difficult to reconcile coherently. Seeking to frame the issues within this special Debates section, this essay outlines issues facing the field of digital storytelling; examining narrative form, instantiation and subsequent archival.

In 1996, Geoff Ryman released 253: or Tube Theatre, a novel that used hypertext linking to set the stage for his fictitious story about the crash of a London Underground train. The text is divided into seven sections, one for each of the train’s cars, which are further subdivided into passages, one for each of the 252 passengers and its driver. Two years later, a print version of the novel was released as 253: The Print Remix. The print version maintains the same structure, but uses an index to mimic the hyperlinking used in the original. Although the two texts are otherwise identical, they were not equally reviewed by readers, as many found that Ryman’s narrative fell flat in print; as Robert Kendall (2000) writes, “though the book was generally well received, some reviewers complained that it suffered from the loss of its interactive element.” Others more harshly criticized the print version as “an example of form obliterating content” (Mitchell 1998), while at the same time praising the hypertext version as a “curiously addictive form of storytelling, relying on both the illusion that the reader is shaping the story though choosing which links to follow, and the voyeuristic joy of finding out what people really think on the tube.” That these two texts, which share the same restrictions on form, were reviewed so differently reveals the necessity of investigating platform effects. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s theories of neurosis and perversion, this paper examines how the two texts produce different forms of enjoyment that contribute to their disparate reviews. The change in platform, as I argue, does not only alter the text’s signification (Grossman 1997), but changing how readers navigate the text alters the voyeuristic fantasy conveyed by its narrative that promises to permit readers to peer into the lives of the strangers around them.Although Ryman’s text is now 25 years old, it has been chosen in part as an opportunity to reflect on how audience’s thinking about electronic platforms has since shifted. 253 was once notable for its release on two platforms, though this practice is commonplace today. It was also fairly recently that Ryman’s novel disappeared from his website, ryman-novel.com. According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (archive.org) and corroborated by websites that maintain records of domain registrations, Ryman’s ownership of the website ended in 2018. In its place, the website appears to have been taken over by so-called domain squatters and currently contains a number of short articles about Ryman, but its links now redirect users to more dubious sites. The challenges of preserving and archiving digital literature are well-known (see Abba 2012, Dene 2018, Schrimpf 2008), but thankfully 253 remains accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which last produced a snapshot of the novel on August 5th, 2017. In analyzing this novel, this paper makes a case for its continued relevance to discussions of new media platforms in a contemporary context.

In an effort to preserve works of electronic literature, ELO has developed the ELO Repository that collects and/or manages online journals, works of electronic literature, community archives, and other digital materials for other organizations and makes them available to the public.  The development process, tools used, and the aims and purposes of the project were discussed.

Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 2 is an open-source, multimedia book that documents seven pre-web works of electronic literature held in the Electronic Literature Lab's (ELL) library at WSUV. Written and produced by the 2019 ELL Team—Dene Grigar, Nicholas Schiller, Holly Slocum, Mariah Gwin, Kathleen Zoller, Moneca Roath, and Andrew Nevue—the book features Traversals of Kathyrn Cramer's "In Small & Large Pieces," Deena Larsen's Samplers, Richard Holeton's Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, Tim McLaughlin's Notes Toward Absolute Zero, and Stephanie Strickland's True North. Released December 2019.

Source: Dene Grige's website nouspace.net

From the ELL Website:

Written and produced by the Electronic Literature Lab Team––Dene Grigar, PhD; Nicholas Schiller, MLIS; Vanessa Rhodes, B.A.; Mariah Gwin, Veronica Whitney, B.A.; and Katie Bowen––Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Born Digital Pre-Web Media provides scholars with access to fragile, seminal works published on floppy disks and CD-ROMs between 1986-1996, including:

• Sarah Smith’s science fiction hypertext novel King of Space (1991)
• David Kolb’s hypertext essay “Socrates in the Labyrinth” (1994)
• J. Yellowlees Douglas’ hypertext narrative “I Have Said Nothing” (1994) 
• Thomas M. Disch’s text adventure AMNESIA (1986)
• Rob Kendall’s hypertext animated poem A Life Set for Two (1996)
• Judy Malloy’s generative hypertext narrative its name was Penelope (Version 3.0, 1993)
• Mary-Kim Arnold’s hypertext narrative poem “Lust” (1994)

The book features 85,000 words of artist biographies, descriptions of media, and critical essays; 350 photos of artists, works, and their original packaging; and 55 videos of artist readings and interviews and Live Stream Traversals.

Critical essays include:

• “Contextualizing Sarah Smith’s King of Space“
• “Untangling the Threads of the Labyrinth in David Kolb’s ‘Socrates in the Labyrinth'”
• “Saying Something about J. Yellowlees Douglas’ ‘I Have Said Nothing'”
• “Remembering the 1980s with Thomas M. Disch’s AMNESIA“
• “Love and Loss in Robert Kendall’s A Life Set for Two”
• “On Memory, the Muse, and Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope“
• “Repetition in Mary-Kim Arnold’s ‘Lust'” 

It also offers scholarly resources and versioning and publication information about each work.

Erik Loyer is an awarded author of digital works based in California (USA). In this interview, he talks about digital writing tools, the use of visuals and gaming features in his works as well as important issues like preservation of digital works and the restrictions of digital rights management (DRM).