Introduction to Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media Volume 1

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.