e(X)literature: Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination of Electronic Literature. University of California, Santa Barbara, April 3-5 2003. Sponsored by the University of California Digital Cultures project and the Electronic Literature Organization.
This was in many ways a perfect meeting, from the size (40-50 attendees at the public sessions, around 20 at the planning meeting), to the setting (seaside Santa Barbara), to the mix of people present (writers/artists, critics and theorists, technologists, publishers and editors, legal experts). Kudos to all who helped organize: Bill Warner at UCSB, Jeff Ballowe and Margie Luesebrink for the ELO. It was also in many ways the meeting I've dreamed of attending ever since first getting interested in electronic literature around 1994 or so; a meeting where formalism in its various guises (from Landow's post-structuralism to Aarseth's cybertext) gave way to serious and sustained attention to electronic texts as texts--that is, as artifacts with material and temporal trajectories.
To some extent this was preordained, given the meeting's focus on archiving and preservation, but the hidden histories of these electronic objects manifested themselves over and over in surprising ways, as when Geert Lovink, having just spoken to Olia Lialina (not present), corrected a description of the audio in "My boyfriend came back from the war" that had been a crucial marker in the discussions early on. There was a sense that these minute particulars really mattered, and an urgency about seeing the collective memory in the room (and in the community) harnessed and harvested.
On the first day, Jamie Boyle kicked things off with a rousing talk entitled "The Opposite of Property." It was my first good introduction to the Creative Commons project, and he made me a believer. (Sidenote: MT supports the Creative Commons licensing structure, but when I attempted to activate a license for this blog it seems to have fizzled. Anyone know what might have gone wrong?) In any case, the "Get Creative" video is a great place to start. Stewart Brand also keynoted on the first day, spoke a bit about his Long Now and Rosetta Project, and then gave a fairly detailed overview of the Library of Congress's federally funded Digital Preservation initiative.
Other speakers on the first day included Margie Luesebrink (who reminded us of what we were doing and why it mattered), Alan Divack and Howard Besser (who made the problems seem soluable), Julia Flanders and Merrilee Proffit (representing emerging standards such as TEI and METS), and Joe Tabbi (representing ebr).
Still on the first day, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort walked the audience through their New Media Reader CD. The editorial issues were often illuminating: for example, the Eliza emulation they included is actually far from authentic, for the original program returned its output via teleprinter; thus a truly faithful documentary representation of Eliza in its original state might have been a facsimile of a spindled sheet of printout.
The first day concluded with a stunning performance featuring new work from Stephanie Strickland, Lisa Jevbratt, Melanie Weins, the Iowa Review Web, and Jason Nelson.
The centerpiece of the second day were the presentations by the technology panel, introduced by remarks from Alan Liu underscoring the lexical convergence between the humanities and high-tech: mutual dependance on keywords such as interpretation, emulation, and representaton. Specifics of PAD's strategy, which will rely on a layered approach consisting of emulators and interpreters, XML and metadata, and other forms of documentation (screenshots, interviews, bibliography and citation standards, source code, etc.) will emerge publicly over the coming months (watch this space) and so I will not go into further detail here.
Also on the second day: my own talk on analytical and descriptive bibliography (see below); a thoughtful meditation by Geoff Bowker on archives and cultural memory; and a copyright roundtable in which Hollywood entertainment lawyer Harvey Harrison reminded us that sharks patrol these waters. His remarks (and Lovink and Rob Swigart's) were followed by a lively audience discussion in which Jeff Ballowe, in particular, spoke well to the inescapable economies of electronic literature.
Some additional thoughts. Nick Montfort, a key participant in this initiative, talked on several occassions about the interactive fiction community, where, without any formal organization, enthusiasts and hobbyists have volunteered untold hours of their time to write emulators and interpreters to keep the work alive and maintain resources such as BAF's Guide. I think it's vital that PAD allow space for such efforts--it may be that somehwere out there is a 17-year old who wants nothing more than to write, say, a HyperCard emulator. It may be that there's a 17-year old out there who's already doing it. But this also raises the question of why the electronic literature community needs an organized and funded initiative, why it can't rely solely on communal spirit and goodwill to ensure that works persist.
One obvious answer is that interactive fiction's audience has more of its fundamentals in the gaming sphere than in the literary, and that electronic literature (in the narrower sense) still occupies a niche whose closest parallel is the small-press publishing of the avant garde. Still, I suspect there are some who believe that preservation happens in just this kind of Darwinian fashion, and that a community of committed enthusiasts is really all that's needed here. But even a brief reflection on the nature of cultural heritage should instruct us otherwise. It strikes me as ironic, for example, that one skeptic voices his opinion that in the realm of electronic literature "preservation is not a big problem," while only a couple of sentences earlier writing approvingly of leafing through the wisdom of the ancients recorded in the volumes on a shelf in an Oxford library bookshop. By contrast, digital media last forever, or five years, whichever comes first, as Jeff Rothenberg is reported to have said. But while it may be true that we can still read handwritten manuscripts that are 1000 years old, that's largely because they're now kept in climate-controlled vaults with access restrictd to all but a handful of specialists. In the end I agree with Stewart Brand, who opined that preservation is finally a social and not a technological problem. Preservation asks us to acknowledge our own mortality, to participate in a proleptic monologue with the future. Nothing could be more human than that, and the notion that preservation in any sphere is somehow futile, or unnecessary, or inappropriate is one that I find soul-killing.
A final image: after the conference, on the way back East, landing into Phoenix on a gorgeous cloudless day, first spotting the hard blue lines of the aqueducts, then the interstates and subdivisions and downtown core rising out of the desert like a circuitboard, remembering that this was the city that won the first post-9/11 World Series (beating the New York Yankees) and also the home of the virtual University of Phoenix. Seeing Phoenix from the air is like seeing the future on a clear day, and it's not an unfitting interstice for a meeting on digital preservation.
See also: