Afterflash
Proposal for the 2019 National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources, Implementation Grant Dene Grigar, Principal Investigator; Professor, WSUV Holly Slocum, Project Manager; WSUV Nicholas Schiller, Consultant; Librarian III, WSU Libraries, WSUV Dragan Espenschied, Consultant; Preservation Director, Rhizome Greg Philbrook, Technical Support; Technical and Instructional Support II, WSUV List of works we propose to preserve: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1REFxZ71i851zX8m3Yso5n1jc1bpPQXZSDK9Dy9q9SD8/edit?usp=sharing Video clips of the process and animated gifs of a few examples of Flash works: https://vimeo.com/channels/1476957 Abstract By the end of 2020 Adobe will discontinue its support for Flash. Already it has stopped supporting Shockwave. This means that all born digital literary works that used these software programs to create participatory, interactive,…
The Saga of Cleaning NES Consoles
This guest post is by Greg Philbrook, the Instructional and Technical Specialist for the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. He also serves as the tech guru for the Electronic Literature Lab and oversees our Games Library. –Dene Grigar ——————————————————————- Summer is a great time for taking inventory, and the ELL game library is no exception! We recently received some NES consoles as donations. Upon inspection, however, all three were giving a dreaded red blinking light, typically indicating that their lockout chips had failed. The lockout chips (meant to stop reproduction games from playing) are notorious for going bad over time. They send a signal…
Finishing Up the Grant to Preserve Flash and Shockwave E-Lit Works
Since late April I have been working on a grant submission that would provide funding for the ELL Team to use Rhizome.org’s Webrecorder to preserve electronic literature works produced with Flash and Shockwave from 1996-2016 that are archived in the 12 journals, anthologies, and showcases held in the ELO Repository. WSUV gave me seed funding so that during the month of May, the ELL Team could inventory the 12 publications to determine an exact list of works produced with Flash and Shockwave, figure out the level of complexity each entails, and conduct timed runs of the process. We identified 447 works in need of preserving, else they will all be inaccessible…
Project Update
With Holly and Kathleen finalizing the list of 447 Flash and Shockwave works held in the ELO Repository and Greg finishing up the copying of the 75 Voyager CD-ROMS that Bob Stein shared with us during his visit in March, the ELL Team is turning its attention to the completion of several other projects. They include: Photographing the packaging of all Voyager CD-ROMS Putting the final touches on the videos for the NEH grant Finishing our book about the 2018-19 Traversals, entitled Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 2, so that we make the August 15th deadline Getting the next two collections of the ELO Repository online––that is: The Stephanie Strickland and…
Data Collection, Final Results
After spending the month of May identifying works as Flash and Shockwave works from the 12 collections from the ELO Repository that relate to journals, anthologies, and showcases for the grant, ELL Team Members Holly Slocum and Kathleen Zoller painstakingly revisited them last week to fine tune the dates and software versions. They then reviewed the information and re-categorized them, if needed, by the level of difficulty of preserving them with the WebRecorder. Here is final count of the works we will be including in the grant: There are 445 works of Flash and Shockwave e-lit and other interactive media forms in need of preservation in the ELO Repository. They…
Data Collection, Week 4
We are at the end of our data collection in preparation for writing the grant. Kathleen and Holly double-checked the publication dates and software types and versions on the spreadsheet where we have listed all of the works we plan to record. Mariah double-checked if the works are accessible as local files or via a link to an external site, like the artists’ site or the Wayback Machine. Andrew worked on fine tuning the date of publication. And finally, Moneca produced videos of the test runs that we held on Wednesday and created still photos from the footage. We plan to include in the grant application a short video trailer…
Week 3 Data Collection: The 1st Trial Run
Week 3 of our data collection in preparation for the grant saw the ELL Team continue to fine tune the list of Flash / Shockwave works to include in the project and engage in a trial run of the steps for preserving these works. After eliminating redundancies in the list since some works were published in several different venues, it now includes 477 and features many of the most important Flash / Shockwave e-lit published in the seven journals, three anthologies, and two showcases that the ELO has collected for its repository. Fine tuning also saw us revisit all of the works and, then, categorize them by level of complexity…
Preparing to Preserve Flash / Shockwave Works, Part 2
Week 2 of our data collection for the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant saw the ELL Team hone in on an exact number of Flash and Shockwave works currently held in the ELO Repository. This meant we had to examine over 1500 works in the various collections held by ELO, identify those that were produced with Flash and Shockwave, and determine the versions of these software used to produce them. We then had to cross reference the works with the files held on the server to make sure that we had the local files for all. In total, we found that we have 487 that can be included in…
Preparing to Preserve Flash E-Lit
We kicked off Week 1 of our data collection for the “Preserving Flash Works” project with a tutorial on Rhizome.org’s Webrecorder by Dragan Espenshied, Lyndsey Moulds, and Anna Perricci. For those of you who do not know, Webrecorder is a tool that records a website in a way that allows for its full interactivity and performability. Essentially, it captures the traffic for one complete work, offering a selection of browsers with which to access works once they are recorded. It was funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and developed by Ilya Kreymer for Rhizome’s digital preservation program led by Dragan. Because it has been created to record dynamic web content by emulating a…
New ELL Trailer
We are pleased to present the new trailer for the Electronic Literature Lab, created by Moneca Roath and Mariah Gwin.
