Documentation as Research Value
In Traversals, the authors explain that "we are haunted by a condition we call the Sappho Syndrome: the disappearance of literary works to the extent that all that remains are fragments and references to them by others." (23). The Pathfinders book and all the Traversal practices afterwards can be understood as a way of countering this Sappho Syndrome, as Grigar exclaimsin our interview: "we don't know, we have no video capture of [Sappho] performing! But we do have video of Bill Bly performing We Descend".
Some of the videos also go beyond just documenting the individual work and seem to document the early electronic literature community. This conversational style of hearing authors talk about their fellow writers gives an impression of the early community and in doing so aims to counter the pitfall of canonization through documentation. Although choices need to be made about which works to include, this informal approach resonates Grigar's adamance not to be elitist or a gatekeeper. Readers have varying responses to these videos. To Ceuterick this conversational nature does not add enough value. Because we have grown "used to content that moves fast and interviews and things that have a lot of content in a short period of time", she explains unless she "was a researcher really interested in that kind of work, I would probably not go through all the interviews". Van Vark has the opposite experience, reflecting on the "coziness" of the conversational videos, because "definitely, it gives you a sort of feel for a thing, sort of a context in a way, context by minor details that might not mean that much. Although, if you write a traditional book, I think you would not put this in, but it gives more flair, more, what do you say, it gives more character to what you are reading". Prior experiences with the medial modes, then, attach expectations to the types of information in the book. In Pathfinders, foregrounding the documentation process as a research value provides potential counter-narratives to the history of electronic literature by showing what might have been left out in other publications.
Although it has become a household name, Pathfinders is by no means an island. Since the book was published eight years ago, the Pathfinders methodology has become a pillar of its own. The Traversal practice combined with interviews has been developed further in the born-digital book series Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Digital Media, by Dene Grigar et al on Scalar. The practice then transformed into live Traversals with an audience present, during various conferences. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice has turned digital, with public Traversals on Zoom in which anyone can join in the audience. Now that people cannot be brought into the lab to use the original machines, Grigar acts as the "secretary" who does what the artist asks. Grigar must wear a face mask at her institution, but she keep her camera off in the recording to prevent it from being "marked" as a "COVID book". Overall, the practice now includes characterizing social and performative aspects that foreground the documentation process as an important research value.
When asked about the influence of the Pathfinders, Grigar tells that "just this week" someone had contacted her about doing a crawling of Turbulence and someone wanted to do an analysis of Flash. Élika Ortega is also doing research on the manual included in electronic literature works, as "the manuals tell a story" of what people's horizon of expectation was when the work was first published. The extensive, 'agnostic' approach to documenting seemingly minor details provides a wealth of sources for other researchers.
