Project
Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature

Project Directors
Dene Grigar, Washington State University Vancouver
Stuart Moulthrop, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Project URL
https://scalar.usc.edu/works/pathfinders/  

Project Reviewer
Hannah Ackermans, University of Bergen

Project Overview

Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop

Co-authored by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop, Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature is an open-source book built on the Scalar platform that documents four important works of born-digital literature published between 1986-1997. The book — a component of the Pathfinders project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2013-2015 — enacts an innovative methodology for preserving pre-Web hypertext fiction and poetry produced with, and for, obsolete software, hardware, and formats. 

At its essence, Pathfinders responds to a key challenge for digital humanities scholars: “How to transmit the heritage of a culture whose objects are multiplying not simply in mass of items but also in types of system or interface — and where the nature of those varying interfaces greatly complicates the task of identifying, collecting, and otherwise treating the object” (Moulthrop & Grigar 236). 

Works featured include: 1) Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger, programmed in Applesoft BASIC on three 5.25-inch floppy  disks for the Apple II and published on the WELL from 1986-1988; 2) John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, created with Hypercard 2.0 and published originally on five 3.5-inch  floppy disks by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1993; 3) Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, produced with Storyspace and published originally on one 3.5-inch floppy disk by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1995; and 4) Bill Bly’s We Descend, created with Storyspace and published originally on one 3.5-inch  floppy disk by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1997. 

The project answers the question: “How can we make an interactive, multimedia work of born digital media created on outmoded hardware and software accessible to today's readers in a way that preserves the experience of that work?” To that end, the Pathfinders methodology involves detailed documentation of the work, including photographs of the physical media and  interviews with the authors to capture the lore of its  production, along with video recorded author-reader performances of a single path into the work using time-appropriate hardware and software, a process Grigar and Moulthrop call a “traversal.” Following the Pathfinders project, the two co-authors published a print book, Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Digital Writing (The MIT Press, 2017), that “explore[s]” and “learn from  what [they have] discovered, both about the texts [they] have tried to preserve and the work of  preservation itself” (Moulthrop & Grigar 10). 

The project and book frame essential questions about digital preservation: For what kinds of digital objects is one approach more desirable than another? How can differing approaches be combined or coordinated to best serve the interests of future scholars? What can researchers working on one sort of digital production (electronic literature, for instance) learn from those concerned with different but related areas (e.g., video games, digital writing more broadly conceived, or social-network discourse)? How, in other words, can researchers approaching the posterity of digital texts from diverse directions benefit from exchange of perspectives and  results?

The Pathfinders book has had more 57,130 visits. It was reviewed by Élika Ortega for Digital Literary Studies and has been cited in essays by Jeneen Naji, James O’Sullivan, Anastasia Salter, and John Murray, and others. It was awarded an honorable mention in 2018 Open Scholarship Awards by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute. The methodology has been adopted by scholars, such as Agnieszka Prybyszewska for documenting “The Breathing Wall” by Canadian author Kate Pullinger, and by Mariusz Pisarki, for Twilight, A Symphony, by American author Michael Joyce.

References

Moulthrop, Stuart and Dene Grigar. Transversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing. MIT Press, 2017.

Project Review

Hannah Ackermans

The born-digital book Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature offers a multifaceted documentation of four classic works of electronic literature that have otherwise become largely unavailable to the public due to technological obsolescence. The strength of Pathfinders lies in its contextualizing method. Each section includes an artist statement, author and reader “traversals” (filmed walkthroughs) and interviews, photographs of physical materials combined with ekphratic descriptions, a versioning history, and a short essay. As such, the kaleidoscope view of the artifact places context at the center of the documentation. This humanistic research publication enables readers to further research the documented works in a myriad of directions.

The book was created in Scalar 2, a platform developed at the University of Southern California to accommodate humanities research. Its features include “pathways” that encourage multilinear readings, hyperlinks to internal and external content, a visualization tool, and embedded media pages containing source files and metadata. The platform allowed for the novel multimedial approach of documentation and publication in multiple media while maintaining a sense of “bookishness.” Through its paratextual elements, Pathfinders emulates characteristics of a physical book.

Pathfinders’ mission to rescue classic electronic literature works seems to have succeeded. Its contextualized nature offers a hand to those unfamiliar with electronic literature as an art form. The number of visits far exceeds the size of the electronic literature community (although we don’t know how long visitors stick around) and when searching for images of individual works online, Pathfinders documentation is among the top results. The documentation can also be used in a teaching context when students are unable to access the original work. As such, the traversal and other documentation has, in a sense, become a primary reference to works that would otherwise be unavailable for reading and teaching.

A main drawback of the documentation is the lack of captions and transcripts on the video and audio content. This would have made the content available to deaf/hard of hearing people as well as more approachable to English language learners and novices in the field. As it is, citation and research on the sources is more cumbersome for future researchers as well. For example, it is at times unclear whether the author or reader is reading aloud or commenting during the traversal. Grigar confirmed that captions and transcripts were left out due to a lack of funding.

As implied in Grigar’s project overview, it is difficult to consider Pathfinders in isolation. It was an early point on a timeline of projects, followed most directly by Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 1-4 and The Next by Grigar and her team, as well as Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives (Moulthrop and Anastasia Salter). Broadening this practice helps diffuse the canonical position the original works were placed in due to the necessity of choosing four works to document over others. Pathfinders’ value lies not only in the documentation of these particular four works, but also its status as a media artifact itself. It demonstrates a compelling prototype to consider the ephemeral nature of electronic literature, which was fine tuned in later projects.