Afterword

This chapter concludes by raising the issue of the Sappho Syndrome, whereby whole works disappear and only are known through fragments and references to them. In doing so, the chapter provides a call to action for Digital Humanities to take on the task of preserving the cultural heritage reflected in born-digital media through a multi-faceted approach involving not just emulation and migration of media but also collection and documentation.

Coelacanth History: Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse and the Cybertext of Things

This chapter reflects on John McDaid’s author traversal of his 1993 hypermedia novel, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, a groundbreaking work not just for its comprehensive exploration of Apple’s HyperCard authoring system, but also because of its principle of “modally appropriate” presentation, involving non-digital artifacts as well. Built around the science-fictional notion of time travel and multiverses, the Funhouse thus invites consideration of his own curious history, in which it figures as a kind of broken time machine. Comparing McDaid’s work with later, similar projects from the video game world, the chapter argues for an understanding of digital culture that moves beyond the harsh binaries of obsolescence. As McDaid says: “We win by losing.”

The Many Faces of Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger

This chapters challenges the accepted view that Judy Malloy produced four versions of her pioneering work of electronic literature, Uncle Roger, showing through material uncovered from archival research, interviews, and Traversals, that there are instead six. Through a close reading of each version, the chapter also reveals subtle as well as significant changes the author made to the work during its 30-year history.

Entity and Event: Electronic Literature in Context

This chapter reviews several definitions of electronic literature (“born digital,” digitally mediated, post-literary, radically computational), settling on a criterion in which the text features more as “event” than “entity,” operating in opposition to assumptions of integrity (“the textual whole”). Various instances and examples are discussed, from Christopher Strachey’s love-letter generator (perhaps the earliest example of digital composition) to Michael Joyce’s “novel of Internet,” Was. The chapter also frames this book’s investment in early digital productions and explains “traversals” and their motivation.

Introduction

This chapter explains the occasion for the book, the threatened obsolescence of key works from the first modern generation (or “Golden Age”) of digital writing. The authors attempted to preserve not just the material form of the works, but the experience of their operation or performance, recording encounters with the works on vintage equipment. Traversals represents a second stage in this process, reflecting both on insights gained in the preservation effort, but on the interventions themselves and the cultural meaning of obsolescence.

The Archives Pertaining to Bill Bly, Curator and Translator

This chapter provides a reexamination of Bill Bly hypertext We Descend. Previously criticized for its quality as a work of hypertext fiction, the work instead is recast as a hypertext archive, a compilation of texts relating to four distinct time periods held together through a focus on the character Egderus. Hypertext functions, the chapter argues, as a mechanism for moving through multiple disparate storylines chronicled in “generations of historical documents” and collected over a long period of time. At the heart of We Descend lies the nature of truth and what constitutes authenticity, particularly when evidence itself is questionable and controlled by a political agenda.

Monsters and Freaks: Patchwork Girl and the New Unreadable

This chapter is informed by Shelley Jackson’s author traversal of her hypertext fiction, Patchwork Girl, and her subsequent interview. Jackson’s re-working of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been well explored, but less has been said of the second influence-text for Patchwork Girl, L. Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz. Resonances from that text suggest a radically different way of valuing difference and rebellion, under the sign of the “freak” instead of the “monster.” The chapter relates this difference to structural aspects of the hypertext exposed in Jackson’s traversal and interview, particularly the fragmentary and elliptical part of the design called “Broken Accents.”