digital artifact

This paper shares the story of the rise and fall of The Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT), a Pascal-based design system written in 1987 by David Malmberg, based on Mark J. Welch's 1985 Generic Adventure Game System (GAGS). It was the leading platform for parser-based interactive fiction in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with Text Adventure Development System (TADS) as its upstart competitor. The use of these early (pre-Graham Nelson’s Inform 6) parser-based interactive fiction platforms was supported by an annual AGT contest, and a design community that stayed in touch through BBS-communities, the largest of which was Compuserve’s Gamer’s Forum. Malmberg ceased to support AGT in 1992, (the final release was AGT 1.7) but the contest continued until 1994. The competition was rebranded under new management, and with an expanded community and continued on as the Interactive Fiction Competition, (which has been run since 2016 by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation). A game that I wrote for the AGT contest in 1992, CosmoServe, featured a simulated DOS environment, featuring the frustrating use of dial-up software and the aesthetic of CompuServe screens from that era, as well as the more visceral experience of BBS communication -- wailing modems, paying by the minute, long download times and corrupt files, hard-drive destroying viruses etc…). Ironically, this game is now all that appears to be left of CompuServe's rich gamers’ and game designers’ lifeworld. A collaboratively written work of IF that I organized, Shades of Gray: an adventure in Black and White, written in AGT, was designed and coordinated in a CompuServe Gamer’s Forum private room, and represents the heyday of bulletin board IF collaboration. When CompuServe died in the mid-1990s, after having been assimilated in a borg-like way by its longstanding and hated rival, AOL, nothing of CompuServe remained to be archived digitally, except what individual users might have downloaded to their own computers and backed up on floppy disks. I will soon be launching, through IFTF, a crowdsourced “Digital Archeology” project asking old users of CompuServe Forums (chiefly Gamers and Science Fiction forums, the two places that gamers and game designers hung out), to go into their own basements and see what they can find of media they might have downloaded from CompuServe in its final years. This includes transcripts of conferences, listings and files from libraries, public postings and private email. I will share the history of AGT as a e-lit platform, its code, games, contest, and disappearance from the scene and describe the CompuServe Gamer’s Forum Digital Archeology project, particularly as our finds shed light on the life and times of writers of e-literature and interactive fiction who used early platforms, like GAGS, AGT, and TADS to write and share their work, uploading and downloading it to and from BBS-services. It is a world that has vanished from the digital record – in this paper, and the project it describes, I'm hoping to bring some of it back.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

The central objective of this paper is to provide a new conceptual theoretical framework starting from the role of new new media in shaping a new kind of literature, which I call Cosmo-Literature. Towards this, I start working from Levinson’s differentiation among old media, new media, and new new media to arrive at the difference among the variable types of media. Next, I address the role of new new media in establishing world democracies and changing the social, cultural, and political world map. After that, I investigate the terms of “global village” and “cosmopolitanism” in relation to literature. To clarify what I mean by Cosmo Literature, I will investigate two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel by the Moroccan novelist Abdel-Wahid Stitu, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel by Neil Gaiman, to infer the characteristics of Cosmo literature in general and Cosmo narration in particular.
What I mean by Cosmo-literature is all forms of literature produced by the capabilities provided by new new media. These include digital works but also examples where the digital artifact is printed or presented in other media.
Cosmo literature is derived from the political, social, and cultural context that the whole world lives in nowadays. Appiah’s cosmopolitanism as “universality plus difference” is the most significant term to refer to the pluralistic and universal society of today. Respecting diversity, caring about each other, and kindness are the moral principle of the cosmopolitan society according to Appiah. My project builds on Appiah to argue that digital media facilitate the cultural co-existence of the peoples of the cosmopolitan society. As long as such a society has its own morals and identity, it is logical to have its own literature, which I believe to be Cosmo-Literature.
The investigation of two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel, has shown many features of Cosmo-Literature in its relation to cosmopolitanism. At the heart of these features are interactivity, multilingualism, multimediality, suspense, new literariness, blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional, and creating new dimensions of time. Those features also play as the characteristic features of the group identity of the universal society of today.

Devoted to the study and retrieval of those artifacts of the past for which a disruption in the continuity of preservation occurred, archaeological sciences operate with – and against – historical and cultural fractures. Likewise, computer forensics provides assistance whenever a need to recover data in the event of a hardware or software failure occurs. The textual shifting from page to screen experienced in the past twenty years represented both a cultural fracture (a call for paradigmatic changes in preservation which archival sciences themselves were not prepared for) and an opportunity to test computer forensics practices on text-based digital artifacts (software and hardware failures being named, in this case, “obsolescence”). Our paper draws attention to the fact that both digital archaeology and computer forensics, however, no matter how useful in shaping the current preservation practices and methodologies adopted by scholarly communities operating in the digital field, cannot replace or do without the extensive scholarship developed in disciplines that have traditionally dealt with textual preservation in situations of cultural continuity. Whereas the appearance of digital textual objects is also a cultural fracture itself (because it shatters the binomial construct content/device upon which library systems have traditionally been organized – see Michael Gorman), the ambiguity of the term “digital artifact” contributed to the prevalence of computer science approaches in record management. The term digital artifact can, in fact, refer to a computer system, a storage medium as well as to an electronic document or even a sequence of packets moving over a computer network. The strength of an archival perspective is the key concept of digital artifacts’ “records continuum” which implicitly calls for a concept of preservation orderliness very different both from network-oriented randomness and the archeological dynamics of discovery and retrieval. As Maria Guercio observes, “rather than saving the ‘bits flow’ defining a specific artifact, it is crucial to save information making its representation and its links in the documental system explicit.” (119) In other words, the possibility to carry on future research on e-lit digital artifacts is contingent on the preservation of information concerning their production contexts together with actual content – such information is not to be intended only as metadata dealing with description of technological features but must provide “context and structure, which gives the information real-world meaning. Context includes metadata and answers the questions of who, what, why, when and where.” (Draft Electronics Records Policy – Utah State Archives and Records Service). In the absence of such information (caused by a future cultural fracture or any another kind of dissociation between content and context), an e-lit artifact such as Nick Montfort’s ppg256-1 (based on a few lines of code), for example, is destined to be misinterpreted as far as the relationship between available technological resources and literary/artistic choices are concerned. As Alan Liu remarks in Born-Again Bits, “much of the confusion now surrounding digital preservation stems from uncertainty about what is the proper object of preservation (the ‘work,’ a ‘version’ or ‘state’ of a work, a work’s constituent files, the original ‘reading experience’)” but the crucial contribution of the archival science perspective is to guarantee the preservation of all such aspects in order to secure the historical depth of our digital memory. As Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin remark in their “Acid Free Bits”, “Authors should take the initiative now; other institutions will certainly need to be involved in the long term.” A compelling question is to ask what kinds of institutions are most suitable to work side by side with ELO in the effort to preserve digital literary artifacts. An archival science approach offers the possibility of envisaging, as a more stable preservation system, a third part institution that must demonstrate that has no interest in altering the preserved documents and that is able to preserve all the above mentioned information components, i.e. that is even above specific scholarly interests. We are going to use the preservation history of Michael Joyce’s Afternoon’s Italian edition, issued in a double-package together with Lorenzo Miglioli’s hypertext narrative Ra-Dio by the small publisher Human Systems (now closed) in the series Elettrolibri, as an exemplary case of digital preservation failure both within traditional institutional systems and the on-line environment. We are interested in showing how such failure concerns, rather than the actual content, the lack of systematic context information – which is currently available only through forms of information retrieval nearer to the serendipity of web surfing than to the accuracy of academic research.