The New Media Reader (MIT, 2003): Overview of Migration Strategies

Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Creative Writing Fellow, Brown University) Nick Montfort (Ph.D. Student, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania)

Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort will describe the motivation behind the New Media Reader, a book and CD, and the scope of that project. They will discuss how putting together the CD component of that work brought them into contact with issues that PAD and others seeking to preserve e-literature will also encounter. Particular new media works that were made accessible to some extent by documentation, porting, reimplementation, the use of new interpreters, and the use of emulators will be shown; the benefits of these different approaches in different cases will be discussed as well. The focus will be on electronic literature works, but some other new media objects will be discussed as well, since the techniques used to present these can apply in preserving e-literature. Finally, the two will describe how many efforts on the part of both authors and software developers made the CD possible.