Technological Context
Various elements of the technological configuration of Pathfinders have already come up throughout this article. Rather than a self-contained book, the media are embedded from different platforms such as Vimeo and SoundCloud. Di Cresce's initial navigation is a good example of the bricolage of media included in the book. She investigates the book's pages and media files and determines that the videos are hosted on Vimeo. Additionally, she ends up on various external websites by using the hyperlinks, which allows her to see more information, but raises the issues of getting back to Pathfinders again when she leaves the book.
In the opposite direction, people can also encounter parts of the book outside the context of the book itself, for example because images show up prominently in search engine results. The whole work is published under the Creative Commons (Attribution Share-Alike) license and as such anyone can use the embedded media. Although all publishing scholars must engage with open access choices – whether it is picking an open access journal, having the institution or researcher pay for the open access rights, or accepting the article is limited in availability – the case of layered media in a born-digital project adds an urgency. When premium accounts on platforms are used to embed videos, these accounts can be linked to institutions or individual researchers. Although not the case for Pathfinders or the present article, neither of which use institutional subscriptions for video publication, this could affect the intellectual property if accounts become unavailable when subscriptions run out, for example when researchers switch institutions. Keeping a work alive, the main objective of the Pathfinders project, then, becomes increasingly urgent with layering and embedded media from different platforms and accounts. The Pathfinders book is, then, best understood through the concept of the "metainterface", which "concerns the ways in which the interface reflects new perspectives as well as new ways of perceiving, organizing, and thinking brought about by media technological changes" (Andersen and Pold 23). Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold explain that
There is a plurality of interface layers available in Pathfinders which together affect the conception, media text, and readership of the book.This metainterface paradigm was not at hand when the four works of electronic literature in Pathfinders were created. In fact, Grigar and Moulthrop explain that "a Traversal must take place on equipment configured as closely as possible to the system used to create the work or on which the work might have been expected to reach its initial audience" (7). This type of fidelity no longer exists in the same way as pieces of media are often made specifically to function on many different machines. The responsiveness of Scalar 2 is a prime example. The embedded fidelity in the layered interface of Pathfinders creates a new type of source for reading electronic literature that provides a rich context for historical works while utilizing the contemporary characteristics of the metainterface.One may argue that the layered structure of the computer (from assembly language to graphical user interface) makes any interface a metainterface, but what is specific about the current interface paradigm is the universally dispersed, omnipresent nature of this. As such, it is an interface to the many hidden interfaces and clouded exchanges of data and signals in a series of platforms that connect the everyday use of apps on a smartphone to large-scale, globally networked infrastructures. (10)
The works discussed in Pathfinders were part of an explicit "rescue mission" to make the works available. Grigar recounts a story of Shelley Jackson's hesitation to participate in the project to demonstrate how the rescue mission brings up questions of the author's views on preservation. Regarding the videos as preservation assumes the videos have a certain status as a source. When asked if the project is a primary or secondary source, Grigar explains that it started out as being a secondary source, but over the years, the continuation and development of Traversals has "taken an art form in and of itself", explaining "I don't mean to step on the artist, but I think it has taken its own art form. It is performative art, and specifically the Traversal". When the work is potentially available, Grigar hopes that it will draw more readers to the original works. Ceuterick imagines that Pathfinders will be read both by researchers and by readers who want to know more about their favorite work, and she regards it a secondary source. I have also assigned the Traversals to students of electronic literature courses when the work was not readily available to them. This fits within the larger conversation in the field of electronic literature in which documentation of works becomes a primary source when works become unavailable. Van Vark comments: "I might prefer not to see it as primary/secondary at all, but if I had to choose one it would be primary". She regards as reading Pathfinders is "a hub, a sort of point where all things connect, can you then think of primary and secondary?" Di Cresce as well sees this combination, with the Pathfinders author Traversals and interviews as primary sources and the accompanying text as secondary. Through the variation in media, Pathfinders combines the clarity and systemic approach of a database with a cacophony of voices that give a mosaic impression of the works.
Documented Experience
In addition to the videos, Pathfinders contains pages of photographs of all the physical objects of works. These material carriers are essential to understand how people encountered the work when they were first created in their technological context. Each photograph is accompanied with an ekphratic description of the subject. Blind or low vision readers as well as younger (and future) scholars can benefit from the descriptions of the technologies. As a younger scholar myself, I value the descriptions of, for example, Hypercard, which which I do not have any experience.When asked to look at the page "Photos of the Box, Floppy Disks, CD and Other Contents for John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom House[sic]" at the end of her Traversal, Ceuterick initially exclaimed:
It's funny because I wouldn't expect that kind of documentation for an electronic literature work, but I guess there is a CD there but there is a whole lot of manuscript and handouts, and even a book, is it a book? It looks like a traditional book. I mean, it's a bit like music albums, they have also this documentation that we look at – well, when we had music CDs.
Seeing the page, then, immediately brought up surprise as well as her own memories with physical media carriers. While reading the introduction of the page, she stumbles upon the word "registration card". Surprised, she scrolls down though the images until she reaches a photo of a card that reads "Please Register Here" and she reads the accompanying text under the heading of "Registration Card, Back" to find out why it was used. When asked, she explains that the documentation is valuable to make it possible to "imagine the full experience". Van Vark is initially surprised by the details of the descriptions, such as the price tag on the box, but then reflects that "if the media also contributes, if that all makes up for the story and the work, then that does matter". Similar to Ceuterick, she says "it's nice that it's so detailed, like every step of the experience".
The four works were released in various versions due to artistic and technological updates. The authoritative version of Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger, the first case study in Pathfinders, was published on the WELL. Yet in total, there are six versions identified on Pathfinders which includes for example the web-based version still available today. Grigar explains that there was even an earlier physical version that she identified after Pathfinders was published. On Pathfinders, the versioning is represented textually in lists on the pages of each work, but also made it into the video fragments in which we see Grigar asking the authors pointed questions about the exact versioning and volumes of the work, ending with "I just wanted to get that down and I definitely want it on video" in "Bly Interview, Part 6, "We Descend's Impact"". This highlights that versioning the works is a research activity in itself.
The use of links and multimedia in the present article also demonstrates the functioning of the metainterface. For example, I chose YouTube as my video platform specifically to be able to add responsive closed captions, and I was lucky that Scalar embeds YouTube videos with the captions. My videos show a layer of documented experience with the Pathfinders book itself, highlighting the role of reader experience in academic texts. Additionally, I added external links when available for the ease of the interested reader. Together, the technological aspects of Pathfinders show that documentation is a research value.
