I was going through my electronic editions the other day, and was surprised how many I had--some quite old fashioned looking now, admittedly--from 1997~1999. Many of these are now out of "print" and, I would guess, unlikely to be "reprinted" in their original form due to subsequent changes in technology.
In some cases, copies are likely to be found in libraries around the world, so preservation for those is probably less of an issue. But some of the really early html/flash/etc ones in my collection were far more informally published. In some cases, I just have a disk from the author.
The editions I have are internet age incunabula and are not yet obsolete from an operating system perspective. But of course editions and digital projects go back much farther--hypercard, dos, unix programmes, etc.
Does anybody know if anywhere is actively collecting/preserving this kind of material? Obviously the Oxford Text Archive does collect texts--but in the pre-internet and early SGML days, you also had information machines where content was very closely associated with software (for a discussion of one famous case see: http://www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/7/ecolumn.html).
-d
Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
Does anybody know if anywhere is actively collecting/preserving this kind of material? Obviously the Oxford Text Archive does collect texts--but in the pre-internet and early SGML days, you also had information machines where content was very closely associated with software (for a discussion of one famous case see: http://www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/7/ecolumn.html).
Internet Archive (proprietors of the Wayback Machine) is universally interested in what is and was on the Internet, whether incunabula or not, and one can upload all kinds of material--text, images, audio, video. The "item creation" page is at http://www.archive.org/create/ Archive has racks of terabyte boxes--that is, plenty of space. The trick is to identify the material properly so that it can be located, if necessary, by filename alone (the format is http://www.archive.org/details/YourIdentifierName). As at most digital libraries or repositories, cataloging info or metadata may be sparse and, even then, not readily findable. Longterm accessibility is a big problem if the material exists but can't be located.
Archive suggests going to Creative Commons and using the ccPublisher tool to add a license to the material. (In brief, "Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. [The] licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a 'some rights reserved' copyright.") http://creativecommons.org/learnmore
If you acquired some public domain text from a long-defunct computer source, you can generally pass it along as such. But if, say, you have a translation or transcription in a WordStar doc acquired from a colleague now dead, some investigation and negotiation would be in order. All such resource recovery efforts are praiseworthy!
Cheers, Al Magary
Daniel, that article in Heroic Age is really first-rate: an excellent presentation which everyone in our field should read.
As one who wrote for a very specific and now practically non-existent system (PLATO) -- I don't mind so much that the cAI has gone, but 6-8 years of my research went down the tubes and had to be re-constituted. I think I have finally caught up, but it was exhausting. But I do want to say that all the caveats you presented about writing and presentation in your article apply to humanities computer-aided research as well.
Well thanks for the compliment. But it is this kind of thing that I'm wondering about. It's almost worth keeping a bunch of old machines running in a library somewhere.
-d
On Fri, 2006-07-04 at 19:32 -0500, Norman Hinton wrote:
Daniel, that article in Heroic Age is really first-rate: an excellent presentation which everyone in our field should read.
As one who wrote for a very specific and now practically non-existent system (PLATO) -- I don't mind so much that the cAI has gone, but 6-8 years of my research went down the tubes and had to be re-constituted. I think I have finally caught up, but it was exhausting. But I do want to say that all the caveats you presented about writing and presentation in your article apply to humanities computer-aided research as well.
Digital Medievalist Project Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org Journal (Spring 2005-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist@uleth.ca dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
Alas, with PLATO you'd have to find a Control Data mainframe somewhere: CDC machines, developed by Seymour Cray, had 64-bit variables..... the whole thing got re-jiggered to run on IBM mainframes, then PC versions were developed, but my research stuff was not in any of that, not being owned by PLATO as part of its teaching materials. (I have no idea what if anything happened to my Chaucer and History of English lessons.)
It's almost worth keeping a bunch of old machines running in a library somewhere.
Dan,
The Electronic Literature Organization has been pondering more or less the same thing. Their PAD (Preservation, Archival, Dissemination) project
"seeks to identify threatened and endangered electronic literature and to maintain accessibility, encourage stability, and ensure availability of electronic works for readers, institutions, and scholars. PAD seems to supplement and contribute to the efforts of other projects aimed and preserving digital media, and other projects dealing with textual materials, by focusing on the particular problems of electronic literature, which can combine the complexity of a multimedia compter program with the demands of a literary text."
Maybe it would be worth talking to them?..
http://eliterature.org/programs/pad/
-Vika
-- Vika Zafrin Director, Virtual Humanities Lab http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/vhl/
Brown University Box 1942 Providence, RI 02912 USA (401)863-3984
On Sun, 2006-09-04 at 09:53 -0400, Vika Zafrin wrote:
Dan,
The Electronic Literature Organization has been pondering more or less the same thing. Their PAD (Preservation, Archival, Dissemination) project
Doesn't surprise me. Obviously the issue is a big one and one sees more and more librarians on digital projects for exactly this reason, I think.
I will confess my thoughts were prompted by paging through some of the more rare items in my collection and some work a colleague of mine is doing on interfaces: many things done on personal computers from the early 1990s onwards might still be recoverable and storable and of interest to members of this community if there were collected on a server somewhere. I was thinking how need it might be if we had a library of some of the older, out-of-print disks and floppies available to members of DM. Obviously copyright issues would need to be dealt with, but it seems to me an author deposit system might work well, and to the extent that presses are involved at all, they could probably be convinced to give permission, since the technology in many cases would be obsolete by now.
Really just a synapse firing. The U of L is suddenly awash in surplus servers (all quite low end) and I was wondering what I could do with one or two.
"seeks to identify threatened and endangered electronic literature and to maintain accessibility, encourage stability, and ensure availability of electronic works for readers, institutions, and scholars. PAD seems to supplement and contribute to the efforts of other projects aimed and preserving digital media, and other projects dealing with textual materials, by focusing on the particular problems of electronic literature, which can combine the complexity of a multimedia compter program with the demands of a literary text."
Maybe it would be worth talking to them?..
http://eliterature.org/programs/pad/
-Vika
-- Vika Zafrin Director, Virtual Humanities Lab http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/vhl/
Brown University Box 1942 Providence, RI 02912 USA (401)863-3984
Digital Medievalist Project Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org Journal (Spring 2005-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist@uleth.ca dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
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Al Magary -
Daniel O'Donnell -
Daniel O'Donnell -
Norman Hinton -
Vika Zafrin