{"id":1724,"date":"2009-09-03T07:30:50","date_gmt":"2009-09-03T14:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=1724"},"modified":"2009-09-03T00:47:13","modified_gmt":"2009-09-03T07:47:13","slug":"what-were-we-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=1724","title":{"rendered":"What were we thinking?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Preservation is a branch of library science dedicated to the maintenance of physical artifacts. Digital preservation, its modern offspring, concerns itself with the preservation of digital artifacts such as documents, movies, audio recordings, etc. But the challenges of digital preservation are complicated by interactivity characteristic of many digital artifacts. It’s not enough to save the bits, if the goal is to understand the experience of using something in its original form. I have in mind such things as interactive fiction, video and computer games, and other similar artifacts.<\/p>\n

Cathy Marshall and I wrote a paper<\/a> a few years ago about some pragmatic strategies to consider when thinking about the preservation of hypertext fiction. We focused on interaction and attempts to preserve the reading experience. Megan Winget<\/a> has been looking at the preservation of video games, including the processes used to create them<\/a>. Here, even more so than for hypertext, the issues of hardware emulation become important if one wishes to re-create the experience of playing one of the old arcade games.<\/p>\n

Our conversations about her work let me to reflect in a rather naive way on what other digital artifacts are being created these days that might be interesting to preserve so that in the future, people would have an reasonable idea of what we were up to, rather than having to resort to inferences, as described here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So here’s a short list. I am sure others have thought of these (and many other) things before, but it seems like a place to start:<\/p>\n