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Problems of Preserving Electronic Literature

Problems of Preserving Electronic Literature. Electronic Literature Organization Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard. Simpler than Electronic Literature: The Wordstar Problem. Problems Particular to Electronic Literature.

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Problems of Preserving Electronic Literature

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  1. Problems of Preserving Electronic Literature Electronic Literature Organization Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard

  2. Simpler than Electronic Literature: The Wordstar Problem

  3. Problems Particular to Electronic Literature • Disappearing software • Enormous number of elements can, at times, be very important to preserve (randomness, interactivity, pacing, color, format, original artifact, elements used to construct the artifact) • Pieces and Boundaries • Recontextualization (Postmodernism)--which rendition to save? • Dynamic & Lack of Fixity (evolving works) • Historical context • Difficulty of authentication over time • What Really is the Work?-

  4. LeWitt: Wall Drawing 340

  5. Installing LeWitt

  6. LeWitt Install Directions

  7. The Short Life of Digital Info: Digital Longevity Problems • The Viewing Problem • The Scrambling Problem • The Inter-relation Problem • The Custodial Problem • The Translation Problem

  8. What can we do specific to Electronic Literature? • Works themselves may no longer even exist; in many cases, what we can save amounts to forensic evidence • Enormous number of elements can, at times, be very important to preserve (randomness, interactivity, pacing, color, format, original artifact, elements used to construct the artifact) • Too complex to save every one of these aspects for every type of material • Importance of saving pieces, representations, and documentation • Involve the authors to capture their intentions • Importance of Standards • Familiarize ourselves with recent conservation developments (Guggenheim Variable Media, Who Knows?, TechArcheology, Tate, IMAP)

  9. Things that can be done • Save documentation about the work and its context • Save interviews with readers/viewers about the experience • Construct repositories that save software, works, hardware, and engage in ongoing emulation • Encode authors intentions- • Adhere to non-proprietary software/standards as much as possible-

  10. Authors Intentions: Kendall Example

  11. Tensions around StandardsFollow Standards (No Owl, Hypercard, DHTML, Flash, …) • innovative, new functions

  12. Problems of Preserving Electronic Literature Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Longevity/ http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard http://www.oclc.org/digitalpreservation/presmeta_wp.pdf http://www.oclc.org/research/pmwg/contentinformation.pdf http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/us-interpares/ http://www.diglib.org/preserve/ejp.htm http://www.longnow.com/10klibrary/TimeBitsDisc/ http://www.archive.org/

  13. Standards for encodingartists intentions(group efforts w/i Cult Heritage community) • Artists Interviews Project, Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage 1998-1999, Modern Art: Who Cares (http://www.icn.nl/english/6.4.2.html) • TechArcheology: A Symposium on Installation Preservation (SFMOMA) • More recent SFMOMA/Tate collaborations • IMAP • Guggenheim’s Variable Media

  14. Structural Metadata Standards for Encoding Multimedia-(no time for details) • SMIL • MPEG 4

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