Scalar

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 his essay, “The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It?,” Scott Rettberg discusses the impact of hypertext fiction before the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web, arguing that the "link and node hypertext" approach represented by early stand alone software like Storyspace was “eclipsed . . . by a range of other digital narrative forms” (Rettberg, “The American Hypertext Novel”). His essay goes on to reference important examples of hypertext fiction––Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (featured in Chapter 1 of this book) as well as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden. Of these, both Joyce’s and Jackson’s novels are still accessible to the reading public; Moulthrop’s is not. As a digital preservationist of interactive media whose mission it is to maintain public access to our literary and cultural heritage, the question this essay asks is, “Has the lack of accessibility to Moulthrop’s novel affected research about it?”

M. D. Coverley’s Califia is an interactive, hypertext novel that experiments with multi-vocal storytelling. The first of two major novels by the artist, it was produced in 2000 on the Toolbook 2.0 platform and published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. for the Windows operating system on CD-ROM. It tells the story of three people whose lives, intertwined by various family connections and location, search for the fabled Treasure of Califia. A major theme driving the narrative is The American Dream, or rather the stuff such dreams the three main characters––Augusta Summerville, Kaye Beveridge, and Cal (Calvino) Lugo–think it should be made of rather than what it really ends up to be.

This essay is a study of six of the 13 editions of Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story that shows a significant number of structural changes relating to work’s hyperlinking strategy and choices over paths to follow that affect the reader’s experience. 

This essay introduces Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 3 that documents born-digital literary works published on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other media formats held among the 300 in Dene Grigar's personal collection in the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver.

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.

This workshop invites participants to consider the possibilities for their work of emerging forms of digital scholarship. Participants will consider how digital platforms permit them to create media-rich and interactive publications that bring scholarly analysis and visual media together in lively and engaging ways. At the heart of the workshop is a hands-on introduction to the digital authoring platform, Scalar (http://scalar.usc.edu), a project funded by the Mellon Foundation as part of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)