Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing by Stuart Moulthrop, Dene Grigar (review)

It is difficult not to think of these famous lines of Horace, written more than 21 centuries ago and still readable, even in their original language:

Exegi monumentum aere  perennniusregalique situ pyramidum altius,quod non imber edax, non  Aquilo impotenspossit diruere aut innumerabilisannorum series et fuga temporum.

I have finished a monument more  lasting than bronzeand higher than the royal structure  of the pyramids,which neither the destructive rain,  nor wild Aquilois able to destroy, nor the countlessseries of years and flight of ages.

(Odes 3: 30, lines 1–5, published 23 BCE)

The very classical, perhaps eternal, topic of the author speculating on, daydreaming about or boasting of the afterlife of her or his works, is something that the successive new media revolutions of the past decades are forcing us, as readers as well as writers, to reconsider in radical ways (the authors take as their starting point the early 1980s—that is the years of the emergence of the home computer—but they could have worked also on more recent or older case studies). True, the loss of literary and other works is far from a new phenomenon (most works are almost immediately forgotten; many works are destroyed, by accident or on purpose; still others simply get lost), but the issue of their technical accessibility is becoming one of the major problems of our contemporary electronic culture. More and more it becomes clear that most electronic works are extremely vulnerable to technological obsolescence and can no longer be read when the software and hardware that was used for their production is no longer in use or supported. The life span of these works no longer depends on their inherent qualities (“good” works having more chance to survive than “bad” works, at least in general) but merely on the life span of the technology that made them possible—and that they helped explore and develop at the same time (Eastgate Systems, Inc.’s Storyspace is a good example of the simultaneous and reciprocal development of a writing space software and the actual production of real works, in this case the perhaps bizarrely named “serious hyperfiction”).

If one decides that just moving ahead in order not to miss the next new thing and that just forgetting about the past is what matters, then technical obsolescence is not a problem. But if one believes instead that “we must struggle never to forget” (p. 237, last words of the text), then the situation becomes quite different (it should be reminded here that in cultural semiotics, as illustrated by the School of Tartu of Yuri Lotman, culture is defined as “nonhereditary memory”). The keyword of this book’s subtitle is therefore twofold: It is about preservation but even more about the use of preservation, a way of saying that it should be read as a double warning: first, against the illusion of the very possibility of such an enterprise (nothing can be “really” preserved—what is being preserved is always only a certain form or version of it); second, against the confusion between material conservation (which is a necessary step in the larger process but nothing more) and preservation in the broader sense of the word (which refers to the need of making meaning of the object of preservation, here and now but also in the future).

Traversals is the answer two pioneering creators and scholars in the field of electronic literature, authors Stuart Moulthrop and Dene Grigar, offer to the most urgent practical and theoretical debates on how and why preserving works that can no longer be read (or that it was no longer possible to access before an “updated”—and thus inevitably different—version was launched, as in the case of Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, recently reissued as a USB stick). The authors address the issue in two ways, since their book tackles a wide range...