Considering the short length of time many digital projects remain accessible much less remembered by the public, it is a pleasure that “Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature,” produced by Stuart Moulthrop and me over a decade ago, was recently selected for Reviews in Digital Humanities, Vol. 5, No., 12 and reviewed by Hannah Ackermans from the University of Bergen.
“Pathfinders” was funded in 2013 by the National Endowment for the Humanities and released as an open-source multimedia on the Scalar platform in 2015. Two years later, it formed the foundation for our print book, Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Digital Writing published by The MIT Press. While this output shows the value the project brought to Stuart’s and my research, it also has continued to play a significant role in the work my team and I do in the Electronic Literature Lab.
Frankly, it helped to grow the lab and shape the direction it has gone, particularly with the creation of The NEXT. It would not be wrong to say that there would be no The NEXT without “Pathfinders.” Certainly, there would not have been the other books we have produced, such as the Rebooting Electronic Literature series and the Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction (Cambridge UP 2024) and its accompanying OER by the same name. We probably would not have gotten involved in reconstructing born-digital literature, art, and games, much less restoring any of it. The debt we owe to “Pathfinders” is immense. So, it is always interesting to look back at the serendipitous way the project had come about.
I had just opened the doors to the lab in 2011 as a reading and study room for myself and other scholars at the time Anne Balsamo visited WSU Vancouver to give a talk at Research Showcase at my invitation. In these early days, the lab was hidden away on the second floor of the building where the College of Business was located. My collection of computers was relatively small––just 16 dating back to the late-1980s. My personal collection of born-digital literature was likewise small, limited mostly to pre-Web hypertexts I had collected since graduate school in the early 1990s. Anne, who had worked at Xerox PARC but at the time was teaching at USC, came to my lab during her visit and was very complimentary about what I was doing and recommended in writing to the university that I be encouraged to write grants in support of its research potential. Fast forward a year or so, and she was in Santa Cruz at an event with Stuart and the NEH funding officer for the Digital Humanities, Jason Rhody. There she and Stuart discussed collaborating on a project involving my lab and writing a NEH Start-Up grant in support of it. Soon after, Anne had to drop out of the project, and Stuart invited me to serve as co-PI with him. We did indeed get the grant. In fact, Jason made the announcement during the exhibition at the Library of Congress that I co-curated with Kathi Inman Berens in April 2013.
Stuart and I started work on “Pathfinders” that May, and for the next four years I lived and breathed the project. To be honest, looking at my work over these past 11 years, I never stopped breathing it. It is still my touchstone project and one that has led to everything we are doing in ELL today.