Besser--ELO 4/6/02 1 Problems of Preserving Electronic Literature Electronic Literature Organization Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 2 Simpler than Electronic Literature: The Wordstar Problem

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 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?-

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 4 LeWitt: Wall Drawing 340

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 5 Installing LeWitt

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 6 LeWitt Install Directions

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 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

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 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)

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 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-

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 10 Authors Intentions: Kendall Example

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 11 Tensions around Standards Follow Standards (No Owl, Hypercard, DHTML, Flash, …) _ innovative, new functions

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 12 Problems of Preserving Electronic Literature Howard Besser UCLA School of Education & Information

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 13 Standards for encoding artists intentions (group efforts w/i Cult Heritage community) _ Artists Interviews Project, Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage , Modern Art: Who Cares ( _ TechArcheology: A Symposium on Installation Preservation (SFMOMA) _ More recent SFMOMA/Tate collaborations _ IMAP _ Guggenheim’s Variable Media

Besser--ELO 4/6/02 14 Structural Metadata Standards for Encoding Multimedia- (no time for details) _ SMIL _ MPEG 4