documentation

Following the increasing hypertext practice in digital culture over the past decades, reinventing the medial mode of academic publication becomes desirable to open up new research practices and knowledge production. New digital platforms are taking practice-based steps towards more multimodal publications. This paper examines the born-digital book Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop which was published in the humanities publication platform Scalar. In Pathfinders, four classic works of electronic literature are documented using a combination of Traversals (filmed walkthroughs by authors and readers), filmed interviews and carefully described and photographed physical materials. As such, Pathfinders is positioned as a DH practice to "rescue" early works of electronic literature from both technological obsolescence and oblivion.

Using the ‘Follow the Thing’ method, I trace the various stages in the publication to induce the themes that are important for born-digital publications. The first stage is the technical platform Scalar and its technological affordances. The second stage is the scholars’ adoption and appropriation of the platform for their own purposes. The third stage is the media text, the born-digital book publication, and its media-specific arguments. The fourth and final stage is the reader’s experience of the multimodal book.

Through a combination of interviews (with author Dene Grigar and two readers), textual analysis, and literature review, I distill the themes that are key in this publication. The first theme is platform adoption. Here, I focus on the technological affordances of Scalar in relation to the use of Scalar by the authors and readers of Pathfinders. This includes a discussion on software sustainability in terms of labor as well as a media analysis on the 'bookishness' of the work. A second theme that arose is the implementation in institutional and academic publication structures. Previously mainly researched in the context of digital pedagogy, I take this to a new level by considering how Pathfinders has fared as a seminal publication in the field of electronic literature and the role of accessibility in its functioning as an academic resource. Third, I focus on the technological context, which includes a reflection on the embedded media as an iteration of the metainterface paradigm and the role of documented physical materials in the understanding of early electronic literature. Finally, I discuss the theme of documentation and publication as a research value. Pathfinders is a prime example of the argument the documentation needs to be at the center of research on ephemeral media, using the platform's tool and functionalities to highlight this in the book.

My video presentation and article provide a nuanced understanding of Pathfinders, using video clips from the various interviews. I take my analysis into a broader perspective by considering how this understanding can be extrapolated for other born-digital publications.

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.

Since the emergence of photography in the 19th-century, ‘technical images’—which media philosopher Vilém Flusser defines as images constructed through the use of an ‘apparatus’— have replaced traditional images (sketching, drawing, painting, etc…) as the principal mode of objective documentation for mapping and representing reality. In fact it is this perceived objective character of the medium that has historically problematised its classification as an accepted artform. As a reaction, artists have long explored methods for circumventing the overriding social status of photography, by developing practices that operate to undermine its primary existence as strict documentation. Historical examples of this include, the photomontage of the early 20th-century by Dada artists (eg. Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield), who spliced together images from mass media in order to construct new aesthetic scenes, and The Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 80s (eg. Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince), who utilised methods such as staged and found photography in order to question the long embedded interpretation of the medium as that which is simply a transparent window overlaying the world. In more recent years we have seen the appearance of many artists deploying glitch techniques as a means of probing the limits of digital objectivity in contemporary image culture. Technically referring to an unexpected error that occurs within a machinic system, encounters with glitches have become much more prominent due to the increasing prevalence of computerized technologies. Caleb Kelly has argued that artistic practices that explicitly attempt to exploit and utilize glitches for aesthetic purposes, ‘became popular in the late twentieth century’ and are ‘a key marker in the development of digital arts practices.’ This turn towards harnessing the artistic potentiality of the glitch has been described by Kim Cascone as part of the ‘postdigital aesthetic,’ which developed from immersion within ‘environments suffused with digital technology’. Constant envelopment within these spaces has made us more attuned to the ‘“failure” of digital technology’, resulting in a growing awareness of the presence of errors that exist within all computational systems. This paper will explore what happens when technologies of representation break down, through an analysis of the concept of the glitch as utilised within photographic artworks. The central aim is to highlight how the dominant social construction of the technical image—and its historically indelible relationship to the real—is undermined by instances of glitch art, by problematising its claim as objective document of reality, and via an extension of the aesthetic possibilities of machinic agency through its foregrounding of (non-human) noise and error. Through an articulation of the inherent presence of randomness and non-objectivity in the technical image, the indeterminate and speculative dimension of the medium will be discussed as that which is not simply a trait that should be ignored, but instead one which forms a necessary condition of its perceptual existence.

The field of Electronic Literature comprises new forms of literary creation that merge writing, computation, interactivity, and design in the creation of writing that is specific to the context of the computer and the global network. While electronic literature is a field of experimental writing with a history that stretches back to the 1950s, it has grown most expansively in the late two decades. Forms of electronic literature such as combinatory poetics, hypertext fiction, kinetic and interactive poetry, and network writing bridge the 20th century avant-garde and practices specific to the 21st century networked society. Yet electronic literature has faced significant hurdles as it has developed as a field of study, related to the comparative instability of complex computational objects, which because of their formal diversity are often not easily accommodated by standardized methods of digital archiving, and are subject to cycles of technological obsolescence. Rettberg's presentation will address efforts to disseminate, document, and archive the field of electronic literature. After providing some examples of genres of electronic literature, Rettberg will discuss projects such as the Electronic Literature Collections, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, and the Electronic Literature Repository that seek to preserve a corpus of work and criticism for the future.

The aim of PO.EX: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature (http://po-ex.net/) is to represent the intermedia and performative textuality of a large corpus of experimental works and practices in an electronic database, including some early instances of digital literature. This article describes the multimodal editing of experimental works in terms of a hypertext rationale, and then demonstrates the performative nature of the remediation, emulation, and recreation involved in digital transcoding and archiving. Preservation, classification, and networked distribution of artifacts are discussed as representational problems within the current algorithmic and database aesthetics in knowledge production.

(source: abstract DHQ)

Funkhouser describes the PO.EX’70-80 project and highlights several elements of the database, praising the taxonomy and preservation/representation of works.

A letter of support of the PO.EX’70-80 project research proposal

An exercise in reclaiming electronic literary works on inaccessible platforms, examining four works as both artifacts and operations.

Many pioneering works of electronic literature are now largely inaccessible because of changes in hardware, software, and platforms. The virtual disappearance of these works—created on floppy disks, in Apple's defunct HyperCard, and on other early systems and platforms—not only puts important electronic literary work out of reach but also signals the fragility of most works of culture in the digital age. In response, Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop have been working to document and preserve electronic literature, work that has culminated in the Pathfinders project and its series of “Traversals”—video and audio recordings of demonstrations performed on historically appropriate platforms, with participation and commentary by the authors of the works. 

In Traversals, Moulthrop and Grigar mine this material to examine four influential early works: Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger (1986), John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse (1993), Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) and Bill Bly's We Descend (1997), offering “deep readings” that consider the works as both literary artifacts and computational constructs. For each work, Moulthrop and Grigar explore the interplay between the text's material circumstances and the patterns of meaning it engages and creates, paying attention both to specificities of media and purposes of expression.

(Source: The MIT Press catalog copy)

This work is an introduction to the book Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media. It has three parts: an introductory section, “Expanding the Pathfinders Methodology: Capturing Live Stream Traversals & Social Media Conversations”, and “About the Electronic Literature Lab and Its Library of Electronic Media.” The introductory section gives a brief overview of the texts selected for the project, the methods of documentation, and the research team. “Expanding the Pathfinders Methodology” details the ways in which Grigar and Moulthrop’s Pathfinders methodology was extended for this project. The extended methodology includes real-time streaming of Traversals and audience engagement through social media. “About the Electronic Literature Lab and Its Library of Electronic Media” gives an overview of the lab and how it came to be. The ELL houses obsolete hardware and software to facilitate access to born digital works so that they can be experienced in the format in which they were produced. All of the sections included images with accompanying source files and metadata.