preservation

William H. Dickey, who died of complications from HIV in 1994, was born in 1928 and brought up in the Pacific Northwest. He published fifteen books of poetry, including Of the Festivities, which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1959, More Under Saturn, which was awarded the California Silver Medal for Poetry in 1963, and The Rainbow Grocery, which won the Juniper Prize in 1978. In the Dreaming: Selected Poems was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1994, and The Education of Desire appeared posthumously from Wesleyan University Press in 1996. 

While a professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University in the 1980s, he became interested in the potential of early personal computers to expand the boundaries of poetry. The California Association of Teachers of English cited him as "Friend of the Machine." 

Beginning in 1988, Dickey used the HyperCard software on his Macintosh SE to compose what would become fourteen "HyperPoems." Integrating images, icons, animation, and sound effects with typography and text, the HyperPoems address many themes critics acknowledge as central to Dickey's print oeuvre: history, mythology, memory, sexuality, the barrenness of modern life, and (over and under all of it), love and death. But they also represent an important technical progression of his poetics, one with clear roots in the ideas about poetry he had forged through decades of mindfulness about the craft. 

Three of the poems (those in Vol. 2) may fairly be called erotica, and represent unique documents of gay life in San Francisco at the height of a prior pandemic. They are certainly some of the very earliest (and most explicit) digital creative works by an LGBTQ+ author. 

None were ever published in his lifetime. Plans for a posthumous edition (prepared for publication on floppy disk with technical and editorial assistance from Deena Larsen) ultimately went unfulfilled. In the summer of 2020, however, the HyperCard Online emulator at the Internet Archive (in Dickey's own home city of San Francisco) finally offered us a platform. This panel discussion will mark the first public presentation of Dickey’s innovative HyperCard poetry to the electronic literature community. Panelists will include: 

Matthew Kirschenbaum (Chair), Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland. Kirschenbaum led the effort to recover the poems from older storage media and migrate them to the Internet Archive. 

Deena Larsen, the original technical editor for Dickey’s HyperPoetry. Larsen will walk us through one or two poems in detail, discussing both poetics and the nature of her posthumous editorial interventions. 

Andrew Ferguson, lead for the HyperCard Online emulator. Ferguson will discuss technical challenges involved in migrating thirty-year-old HyperCard stacks to a browser-based environment. 

Susan Tracz, Professor Emerita and the California State University Fresno and Dickey’s literary executor—and long-time friend of the poet. Tracz will fill in the human story behind the poetry and the computers. 

References: 

https://archive.org/details/william_dickey_hyperpoems_volume_1https://a… 

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.

Though not an ideal solution, lyric reflection can be a significant method of preserving electronic literature. Having lost Flash, one solution is mimetic: a technical project resulting in a faithful copy of the original work, allowing the work to be experienced in all its particularity and interactivity. Failing that, footage, screenshots, and thorough, plainly descriptive writing can make a long-term accessible record so that at least that space in the genre’s history can be seen and understood by future generations. What happens, however, when a work a work features elements of ephemerality? On a computational level, this can happen to a far greater degree than with a traditional print book. Outside of rare tragedies, we can retrieve an old text from the archives, but we cannot retrieve the experience of, for instance, Multi-User Dungeons in the late 1990s. Lyric recollection, however, provides a literary model for securing something very close to the experience of the work.Two particularly notable sources here are William Wordsworth for an early example and Indra Sinha for a specifically elit example. In his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility … the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” The poem, therefore, is not located in the original experience nor is it trying to be a mimetic copy of it. In the tranquil reflection, however, the poet is able, ideally, to capture the process of remembering so clearly that a new instance of the original type of emotion is actively produced by this new virtual encounter. In a similar way, Sinha records 1990s MUDs in his 1999 memoir The Cybergypsies, carefully shifting between forms to recreate the imaginative depth of the experience. We might also imagine a lighter form of this in the wild success of Façade – which parallels something of the social, writing-based experience of MUDS – on YouTube.Pavel Curtis suggests in 1997 that “it is difficult to properly convey the sense of the experience in words. Readers desiring more detailed information are advised to try mudding themselves” (124-5). Writing such as Sinha’s presents a model for how we might preserve important elements of generational and platform-specific electronic literature for future personal, authorial, and scholarly consideration. Such writing about personal online experience was popular around that time. In 2020, Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley and Joanne McNeil’s Lurking indicate a return to this more broadly. Among more formal archival efforts, in imagining a long literature history of elit for the future, lyric narratives – particularly in incorporating instances of the computer text as in Sinha – will inevitably play a significant role in how future generations ephemeral and social elit works.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

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.

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

Astrid Ensslin (University of Alberta), offers a critical examination of concepts relating to canon, preservation, and access. Adopting an essentially critical outlook on canonization as a process of scholarly and social elitization, she argues that material (financial, geographic, and technological) access has always been a discriminating, regulatory factor in canon development, even if we assume a dynamic concept of canon (Ensslin 2007) or a crowdsourcing, emergent approach (Rettberg 2013) that align with contemporary, fast changing technological developments. Ensslin’s paper focuses on the ​Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext ​(​EQRH​), published in two volumes between 1994 and 1995, which has been largely neglected by digital fiction scholarship, mainly because of incompatibility and obsolescence issues. Two of the works contained within this early, e-literary journal are highlighted in Grigar’s presentation. ​EQRH ​offers an interesting case study of a publishing strategy that combined primary material with authors’ own reading notes, thus anticipating the highly accessible preservation efforts made by the ​Pathfinders​ project (Grigar and Moulthrop 2013-2017)

Eastgate’s project did not live up to its own aspirations, arguably due to rapid technological changes and the costly adaptations needed to meet the expectations of today’s digital fiction audiences. Because, currently, a media archaeological approach is required to read and analyze the texts published in ​EQRH​, Ensslin demands a scholarly initiative to collaborate with the publishers on updating the series for web browsers and making it accessible as downloads, to allow for broader scholarly engagement with this important yet inevitably sidelined series of artefacts.

(source: ELO 2018, panel, speech)

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.