Traversals

Preserving the Human Experience of Early Electronic Literature

Live Stream Traversals

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?

That was the question driving Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop's research with their Pathfinders project. They answered this question by developing the Pathfinders methodology that included detailed documentation of the work focusing on the Traversal process—video recordings of author-reader performances of a single path into the work using time-appropriate hardware and software. We expanded upon their Traversal process by streaming performances live and by engaging the audience in real-time social media channels, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube Chat. We did so in order to experiment with reaching a larger audience and provide an opportunity for that audience to participate in real-time in the Traversal experience. To date, we have preserved 18 e-lit works using this expanded Traversal process.