Introduction
All these elements might influence your expectations and evaluation of this article, before you even consider the content. Chances are that you have some experience with born-digital media in academia, whether it is reading academic blogposts or participating on social platforms used for conversations, self-presentation, and networking. All of these bring different affordances and challenges. N. Katherine Hayles' conception of "media specific analysis" has become a staple in the analysis of digital creative artifacts. Positing to "explore the dynamic interaction between the artifactual characteristics and the interpretation that materiality embodies" (72), Hayles uses media-specific analysis to interrogate the materiality of literary hypertext. But how are academic publications taking shape in born-digital formats?
Although we tend to think about digital humanities as the application of quantitative methods to digitized material, other digital practices can impact scholarship considerably. There are a variety of born-digital platforms and publications which all require their own specific analysis. The 2013 born-digital book Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Electronic Literature (Grigar and Moulthrop) has become a canonical source in the field of electronic literature, which makes it especially fit for analyzing its production, circulation, and readership. The book was published on the platform Scalar and documents four classic works of electronic literature using a combination of what the authors have termed "Traversals", filmed interviews, and carefully described and photographed physical materials. Traversals are the method of filming authors who read their own work to provide context as well as readers going through the work while verbalizing their process of choices and interpretation. Afterwards, Moulthrop and Grigar also authored the print book Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing in 2017 which connects strongly to Pathfinders. Pathfinders is positioned as a DH practice to "rescue" early works of electronic literature from both technological obsolescence and oblivion. They focus, then, on both the nature of the research subject and the research method. As such, the use of multimedia documentation is not decorative, but rather formative in the research project, which makes the born-digital publication necessary.
