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• 1 2023-07-07T20:53:29+00:00 Documentation as Research Value 1 plain 2023-07-07T20:53:29+00:00 In the Traversals book, Grigar and Moulthrop explain "We come at our work in digital preservation with the idea that 'nothing comes from nothing' (ex nihilo, nihil fit). Every artifact has a context: a past, present, and intended future [...] These innovations don't come from nowhere. Directly or indirectly, they belong to a history of artistic development" (229). Each artifact contains a whole process as well as that each artifact is but one step in a bigger process. Élika Ortega comments in her book review of Pathfinders that the learning process of the project is visible in the book. When I bring this up during the interview, Grigar explains that she always wants cameras and cables to be visible rather than hide the technical aspects of the work and as they are part of the reality of the process. The book, then, is the material manifestation of the culmination of all the research, including technical decisions and influences. Di Cresce notes that projects like Pathfinders demonstrate how much information there is around cultural objects that place it in contexts. This "web of material" can be hard to replicate. She later argues that Scalar effectively represents this complexity through the visualizations tool. She explains that humanities scholars "know that there is information all over the place that are all related to the same thing and you're going to make those connections". The visualizations tool as well as all the internal and external links to source material, then, represents thinking in networks and "new ways of navigating through it".
    
  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.

  Analogies

  Although my reader traversals show the readers' first encounter with Pathfinders, they naturally have prior media experience that they use as their lens to navigate and interpret the book. As a reader, Ceuterick situates Pathfinders as a DH project as it combines both digitized and born-digital materials. When watching the readers' Traversals, she assesses "so, it's a database, right, (…) that gathers experiences" and while watching a reader's Traversal she notes that it reminds her of the streaming platform Twitch. Although initially disappointed to not experience the original works by themselves, she thinks other fields could both take inspiration from both the structure of the work as well as the Traversal practice in which you can see other people experience artworks. Van Vark also makes various unprompted analogies throughout her reading, including that it is "like a hub", "like a maze", and "like a candy shop where you can just pick things and continue on exploring and reading". In addition to these analogies, the present article also provides a parallel for readers to make sense of the Pathfinders book through the Scalar platform and Traversal method. Additionally, my video documentation also situates this article in the context of COVID-19 restrictions as I visibly use Zoom rather than visiting the participants. These parallels in understanding the Pathfinders project reflect the main value of documentation, the storing of relevant information across various media.