Alejandro traversing Whispering Galleries, with Ryan handling the video camera
I’ve been at DHSI 2017 at the University of Victoria for the past week teaching the Pathfinders methodology in a course called “Documenting Born Digital Creative and Scholarly Works for Access and Preservation.” The participants include librarians, archivists, and literary and history scholars interested in finding ways to preserve video games, electronic music, apps, electronic literature, and interactive web-based projects.
Lori photographing Chessbard announcement card
The end result of the week of reading and discussing theoretical works that underpin the approach, experiencing works already obsolete (or on the way to that state), and working with tools for documenting works is fairly substantial body of output by five teams of participants. The projects include:
- A multimedia book of videos, photos, and descriptive writing built on the Scalar platform for Brian Eno’s “Bloom” app
- Entries in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, the Electronic Literature Directory, and Wikipedia; and a multimedia book of videos, photos, and descriptive writing built on the Scalar platform for the electronic literary work, “Whispering Galleries” by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse
- A multimedia book of videos, photos, and descriptive writing built on the Scalar platform for a student made video game that critiques The Stanley Parable
- Entries in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, the Electronic Literature Directory, and Wikipedia; and a multimedia book of videos, photos, and descriptive writing built on the Scalar platform for the electronic literary work, “Chessbard” by Aaron Tucker
- A multimedia book of videos, photos, and descriptive writing built on the Scalar platform for an interactive environment called “Enchanting the Desert,” by Nicholas Bauch
Julia interviewing “Chessbard’s” Aaron Tucker
Teams undertook Traversals and Interviews and learned, in some cases, how to prepare media for publication. Working with me has been Ryan House, my research assistant in the Electronic Literature Lab. To UVic we brought equipment like a light tent, lighting, cameras, and video cameras for use by participants for documenting their work. Here is a link to their projects.
This course has made it clear to me that the Pathfinders methodology is effective and can, indeed, be used for a broad application to wide variety of born digital media.
Participants in the course working on their documentation projects
