Pathfinders

Visitors in ELL for launch of Pathfinders

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:

Stuart and I are excited to announce that after two years of development, we are releasing the Pathfinders open-source, multimedia book. It features 173 screens of content, including 53,857 words, 104 video clips, 203 color photos, and three audio files. Also, we are hosting a Pathfinders gallery show at Nouspace and throwing a book launch on Friday, June 5 at 6:30 p.m. Invitations by our various social media channels will go out at the end of the week.

We are proud to announce that Pathfinder’s research assistant, Madeleine Brookman, was awarded a WSU Summer Undergraduate Research Grant for hr work with the project.  Her project will be to continue to develop the open-source, multimedia book that contains all of the materials for Pathfinders on the Scalar platform.

Madeleine explaining Pathfinders to visitors to her poster at SURCA

Madeleine Brookman and I are in Pullman, WA to show the work that Madeleine has done on the Pathfinders multimedia book to hundreds of faculty and students at WSU’s main campus.  The event is called SURCA (Student Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity) showcase. We have hauled iPads, a pedestal, laptop, and copies of Patchwork Girl, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, and other works of early e-lit to show to the audience.  With 102 videos and other media already organized into the Scalar environment, the book is looking robust.  Her work will be evaluated by judges and could possibly win an award––a Crimson, if it wins 1st place, or a Gray if it wins 2nd place.  She has also applied for a CAS Summer Mini-Grant and another Auvil Fellowship for next year to continue her work on the project.

The open-source, multimedia book created in Scalar that we are making for  Pathfinders is almost ready.  It will be comprised of 102 videos of authors’ and reader’s traversals and interviews + commentary by Stuart and me for each work + images and documentation about each work.  So much credit goes to my research assistant Madeleine Brookman, who edited a lot of the video, uploaded them all to Vimeo and then arranged them in the Scalar structure that Stuart and I produced. It was a very pleasant shock to realize yesterday that we are so close to completing this first phase of Pathfinders.

I am also pleased to announce that Madeleine has been invited to talk about her research with Pathfinders at the 2015  Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities at WSU Pullman at the end of March.  This is a highly competitive event and one that results in prizes for the best projects.  Needless to say, I am very proud of her.  Madeleine is a recipient of a 2014 Auvil Scholars Fellowship and has applied for the 2015 fellowship as well.  Her work on Pathfinders shows that she is very adept at independent research.

Finally, Pathfinders has been featured in the university’s Research Now! publication.  Here is a link to the article.

While we may have been quiet lately, rest assured much has been done on Pathfinders.  

First, Stuart and I are planning the next round of traversals and have received permission from Michael Joyce and MD Coverley to include their work in the project.  The inclusion of afternoon: a story and Califia, respectively, are important additions to our research.  Joyce’s hypertext novel is one of the most cited in literary scholarship and Coverley’s is one that uniquely uses Toolbook and a PC for its production.

Adding two traversals to Pathfinders means we have been busy writing grants to support our work.  To date, we have written five grants in support of the project, with the target of having enough material in the open source multimedia book to pursue a larger foundation grant.  We are getting pretty close . . .

Other good news:  Pathfinders is referenced by noted e-lit scholar Leonardo Flores in an interview for the journal, E-Literatura by Karla Guadalupe Gonzales Nino and Monica Nepote.  The interview focuses on “the creation of the first [e-lit works] in the eighties to boom years new works were developed from  programming, special software and the proliferation of random write on social networks.”  The journal is sponsored by the Centro de Cultura Digital, in Mexico City, Mexico.

I will be giving a talk, entitled “Paths to PAD:  Saving the Legacy of Early Electronic Literature,” to scholars involved in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria on January 22, 2015.  The presentation argues that while digital preservation has centered on emulation and migration, the Pathfinders project has made it clear that the 3^rd and least popular method of preservation––collection––though challenging to undertake, provides essential information about a work that may be lost. Ultimately, the work Stuart and I have done with the traversals of five different works of e-lit has led us to encourage preservationists of early digital literature to pursue all three methods. I will be looking specifically at Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger in this presentation in order to underpin my argument.

I thank Dr. Ray Siemens for this invitation and for the opportunity to visit the ETCL.  While I am there, I will be able to observe the work the lab is doing with Wikipedia, something I am very interested in.

Animated gif from Eastgate’s website

Eastgate Systems announced this week that it is releasing Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl on Flash Drive, for Macs.

We have posted the interview and traversal that Jackson gave us for the Pathfinders project on our Vimeo channel.

I have ordered two copies for my archives and an additional floppy version to supplement the one I already own.  It will be interesting to compare these two versions along with the CD version to see if there are any variations and how the platform affects the cultural context of the work.

Stuart and I have been invited to give a talk about Pathfinders at the 2015 International Narrative Conference, taking place at Swisshotel in Chicago, Il from March 5-8, 2015. We were invited to present on a panel created by Eric Dean Rasmussen that also includes Bernard Gervais, Ariane Savoie, and Ed Finn.  My particular talk is entitled, Uncle Buddy and an Argument for Collection.”

Here is the abstract:
In order to experience John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, one of the finest examples of early electronic literature and an early experiment with multimedia storytelling, readers need access to a Macintosh computer, circa 1992, running Hypercard 2.0­­––for reading and seeing the words and images––and a cassette player––for hearing the music. Because these technologies are no longer easily accessible, this important cultural work is not well known today by a new generation of literary scholars.

There are countless other Uncle Buddy’s out there, works published by Eastgate Systems, Voyager, and other prominent publishers of the early to mid 1990s. This presentation argues for collection as a method of conservation of digital literature, focusing on examples of early literature that are now impossible to read or gain access to and processes those involved in collection use for introducing a contemporary public to this important literary work.

I want to thank Eric for organizing this panel and giving Stuart and me the chance to talk about our work.