"Pathfinders Methodology for Documenting Born Digital Media"
Dene Grigar, Director & Professor, Creative Media and Digital Culture
Washington State University Vancouver
Dec 14 2016, 12:30 - 14:20 pm, SFU Surrey Room 3310
About the talk:
How can we best capture for posterity a digital work that features user interaction, media rich experiences, embodied action, and frequently accompanying physical components (e. g. diskette, controller)? This is the question that Pathfinders seeks to answer. A digital preservation project, Pathfinders pioneers a methodology involving processes like the Traversal––that is, this is audio and video recording of demonstrations performed on historically appropriate platforms––as well as photographs of the material artifact, detailed descriptions of accompanying material artifacts, sound files, among other items, all published as a multimedia eBook on the open source platform, Scalar.
This presentation discusses Pathfinders, providing details of its methods and processes used for documenting works of electronic literature and ways it can be used for other born digital media like video games and interactive art.
About Speaker:
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Dene Grigar is Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver whose research focuses on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of Electronic Literature, specifically building multimedial environments and experiences for live performance, installations, and curated spaces; desktop computers; and mobile media devices. She has authored 14 media works such as “Curlew” (2014), “A Villager’s Tale” (2011), the “24-Hour Micro E-Lit Project” (2009), “When Ghosts Will Die” (2008), and “Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts" (2005), as well as over 50 scholarly articles. She also curates exhibits of electronic literature and media art, mounting shows at the Library of Congress and for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA), among other venues. With Stuart Moulthrop (U of Wisconsin Milwaukee) she produced a digital preservation project that culminated in an open-source, multimedia book entitled Pathfinders and a forthcoming book of media art criticism, entitled Traversals (The MIT Press, spring 2017). She is President of the Electronic Literature Organization and Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews. |