Monthly Archives: June 2015

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I am very excited to learn that Pathfinders has been selected as the Editors’ Choice at Digital Humanities Now. As the site states, “This content was selected . . . by Editor-in-Chief Lisa Rhody based on nominations by Editors-at-Large Catelynne Sahadath, Bobby Smiley, Christopher Lao-Scott, Matthew Lincoln, Merisa Martinez, LauraAnne Carroll-Adler, Alyssa Reil, Ernesto Priego, Sasha Frizzell, and Grant Glass. All of us who worked on the project are honored by this.

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Stuart and I are taking a short break from the multimedia book to write a series of critical essays about Malloy’s Uncle Roger, McDaid’s Funhouse, Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, and Bly’s We Descend based on the information we learned from conducting the traversals and interviews with the authors for Pathfinders. The book, entitled Traversals: Digital Preservation for Early Digital Literature is under contract with The MIT Press and is planned for a 2017 release.

Here is the abstract for the project:

Born-digital electronic creations, constituted as databases, hypertexts, or multimedia simulations, pose a challenge to cultural continuity. Dependent on outdated platforms, these works are jeopardized by obsolescence; yet their contributions often inhere in the way they interpret and configure their particular technical systems. In our research project Pathfinders (2013-14), supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, we introduced a method of preservation based on recorded user experience, which we call traversal. We set out to preserve a small set of important works that are rapidly becoming inaccessible, introducing a new strategy for preservation. Our effort implied a second phase, in which we would investigate the uses of this form of preservation. The proposed book investigates what knowledge of late-20^th-century experimental writing is gained when we are able to examine early digital literary works in their intended context, through recorded encounters with the texts using original equipment. We offer four extended readings of works featured in the Pathfinders project, where interpretation is based upon traversals, author interviews, and related research material. These chapters are framed by a Foreword and three contextual chapters that relate our work to the study of experimental writing, electronic art, and most crucially, the digital humanities.

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The Pathfinders multimedia, open source book is ready. You can read it here. Included in the book are 104 videos, 204 color photos, and 3 audio files.

The launch has been successful. As of this moment, we have been live for 51 hours and have seen 1293 visitors on the site. That is about 25 hits an hour. 81% are new visitors. 75% of our visitors stay on the site, with close to 30% lingering in some cases over an hour. Some of the universities and libraries that visitors come from include:

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