The DLC site has more detail about how the collection came to MITH, and Larsen’s artist statement. Another page is devoted to Larsen’s important work Marble Springs. The page includes a video of Marble Springs running on modern computing equipment via an emulator program. The bulk of the site, though, is given over to a growing catalog of the collection. At this writing there are 114 photos of DLC contents, including the Mac Classic II Cozy, the previously mentioned shower curtain (below), and a cover shot of Brendon Towle’s paper “Towards a Prescriptive Theory of Hypertext Fiction“.

The on-line catalog is great, giving a sense of what the collection contains. However, I will admit to feeling teased by it, like a kid outside a candy shop with a closed sign hanging in the window.

The fact that the catalog represents a fairly small portion of collection has everything to do with resources. “We don’t have the institutional resources,” MITH Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum notes. At this point, Kirschenbaum is the only MITH staffer assigned to the DLC, and they are currently without an intern.

Further, Kirschenbaum, while he would like to begin digitizing items in the collection, pointed out some of challenges to fully digitizing the contents. In good archival practice, items need to have full metadata applied. Then, the collection is not limited to Larsen’s output, so there are concerns over intellectual property and copyrights. And while we can create digital representations of textual documents easily (given the time), the collections more interesting electronic literature pieces present complex problems. Should we try to emulate or migrate Marble Springs and other hypertexts (if we can get permission)?

Finally, I asked Kirschenbaum about separating the intellectual content of the work from the physical artifact. “My own intellectual training,” he answered, “and my convictions are that the materiality of the artifact is essential to its identity, and one should not separate those things. I think Marble Springs is a particularly powerful example of that because Deena I think had very clearly a sense of the computer itself as part of the environment of the work.” Kirschenbaum went on to say that it still may be useful to try to migrate works like Marble Springs, into perhaps HTML, if we can maintain the primary functionality, but that would depend on audience need. “I don’t think you can be a fundamentalist about those things,” he added.

So while there are significant difficulties to full digitization of The Deena Larsen Collection, there are a few steps that could be taken in the short term, to give distant researchers greater access. Papers, such as Larsen’s 1992 Thesis, Hyperpoems and Hyperpossibilites (below), could be scanned and made available to read on-line or via download. Currently, the catalog has a picture of the cover page, and a few interior pages. Making the thesis digital would give hypertext researchers an interesting pre-World Wide Web view.

As the collection contains hundreds of articles about computers and the development of Web culture, a linked bibliography of Larsen’s clippings could be created. Such a bibliography could help to contextualize Larsen’s thoughts on, and practice in, hypertextual works with the wider computer culture. Further, it could be a useful tool for researchers.

Larsen attended a number of conferences over the past two decades, collecting conference materials. Perhaps MITH could work out an arrangement to share links with the organizations that sponsored the conferences and the DLC, perhaps attracting more traffic and interest to the collection.

The DLC could also produce some original works based on items in the collection. Larsen met hundreds of people, and apparently was an avid business card swapper, as stacks and stacks of them are now in the collection. A visualization of e-literature, hypertextuality, and computer social networks based on these cards could be revealing…or just neat to look at.

There is a great potential for making certain aspects of The Deena Larsen Collection available electronically rather easily, given time and human resources (not a given). There are also sizable challenges to making the most interesting parts of the collection available via the web; some technological in nature, others legal. Since the DLC staff would like to make more materials available to researchers, hopefully resources can be found to do so. Hopefully too, as its curators see the DLC as a research test bed, the work of researchers utilizing the collection can address some of these challenges, and the output can be incorporated into The Deena Larsen Collection.

The Deena Larsen Collection is nearly as much about the hypertext community of the late Twentieth Century as it is about the works of Deena Larsen herself. It will likely need to be a community effort to expand the reach of The Deena Larsen Collection.

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I would like to thank Matthew Kirschenbaum and all the folks at MITH for the opportunity to post on a collection to which I feel such a deep connection.

I would also like to thank Deena Larsen for her encouragement as I study her work.

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Want to schedule a visit to the DLC? Use the form at http://mith.umd.edu/larsen/contact

Citations:

Quotations from MITH Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum are from an interview with the author conducted April 15, 2011, at MITH, unless otherwise noted.

Image credits:

The Deena Larsen Collection Web site. Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. http://mith.umd.edu/larsen/

Deena Larsen, “Marble Springs Shower Curtain,” in The Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Item #42, http://mith.umd.edu/larsen/items/show/42 (accessed May 10, 2011)

Deena Larsen, “”Hyperpoems and Hyperpossibilities”: Deena Larsen’s M.A. Thesis,” in The Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, Item #161, http://mith.umd.edu/larsen/items/show/161 (accessed May 17, 2011).

Leighton Christiansen is pursing his Master’s of Library and Information Science Degree at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and threatens to catch that degree any time now.

You can reach him at leightonlc@gmail.com, or @purpleleighton on Twitter

The post Accessing the DLC from a Distance? appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Before opening the display cases, you will be shown to the three-ring binder with The Deena Larsen Collection Finding Aid, if you haven’t already accessed the electronic copy (scroll down to “The Collection Finding Aid” heading). The materials are inventoried in a spreadsheet of 18 tabs with categories such as “Authors,” “Manuals,” “Hardware,” “Articles,” “Correspondence,” and “Course Materials.” Many of the tabs relate to a specific archival box or set of boxes in the cases. There is also a separate finding aid spreadsheet for the 800+ (and growing) 3.5 inch floppy disk agglomeration that represent the most numerous single media item in the Deena Larsen Collection (DLC).

The finding aids are vital to the researcher first coming to the DLC. Once you begin to crack open the boxes and binders on the shelves, you are confronted by the broad scope of the collection. The Deena Larsen Collection contains nearly 400 articles clipped from various sources, known and unknown, with another 150+ printed from various Web sources; materials from a dozen conferences; a hand-full of bound computer manuals from the days before everything was electronic PDF files; and the boxes of disks containing work from Larsen and many other e-literature authors, in various drafts and stages of completion.

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum expects that most researchers will be drawn to the DLC for the array of e-literature to be found here. The disk boxes include hypertexts produced in HyperCard, StorySpace, and HTML. The authors represented include Stephanie Strickland, Judy Mallory, William Dickey, Bill Bly, and many others.

The collection also has disks with purchased and pirated copies of software. These may be useful as DLC researchers begin trying to access the files on the disks, if for instance, a dedicated work-station were loaded with the software of the era utilized by Larsen: HyperCard, MacWrite, MacPaint, Photoshop 4, etc.

As I noted in an earlier post, I was able to find a number of working versions of Marble Springs, Second Edition in the disk finding aid. However, some of these disks were not in the boxes. I searched through the boxes, and did not find them misfiled. Kirschenbaum told me that the MITH staff was able to successfully disk image about 70 percent of the 800+ disks cataloged. The remaining disks presented problems, either due to physical problems with the adding diskettes, or due to software incompatibility.

As I was working with the disk boxes, I thought that perhaps each box should have a box inventory sheet and an inventory control sheet, which would record instances of materials being checked out for research or preservation use. I have worked with such systems in other special collections, and have found it useful.

While each disk has been cataloged, the description is at the disk level, meaning that the description in the finding aid is based on the information on the label. The MITH staffers have yet had the time to do a file level description of the contents of each disk. This task is of course made more difficult by the fact that the Mac operating systems of the time did not always record the source program for files. So there is no telling if the “doc” files on a disk were created in MacWrite or Microsoft Word. (Although, when I queried Deena Larsen via email during my visit to MITH she told me they were likely MacWrite.)

And while each disk has been assigned an identifier, the same cannot be said for the articles and correspondence in the DLC. I think the Correspondence box could be improved with an ordered inventory and an identifier for each document. It may also be useful going forward to add a DLC identifying tag to materials, so it is clear where it came from. I am thinking here of the occasional document that gets left on the photocopier or scanner. A simple ID tag with the prefix “DLC” and the unique identifier would help the materials get returned to their proper home.

Cabinet and shelf numbering would also be helpful to future researchers. In my exuberance to look through the collection, I pulled out more than one box at a time, and found myself looking at the pictures I had taken to make sure I got things back in their proper places. (And that was after thesis advisor Jerry McDonough tweeted back to Kirschenbaum to make sure I tidied up after myself.)

The broad range of media types in this hybrid collection does present organizational challenges. The shower curtain, for instance, is too large to be stored in the display cases as they now exist. And the collection is growing. While I was there, I was allowed the chance to look through a box that Larsen had recently deposited. There are likely to be many more to come.

The DLC staff has a great start on collection organization, and with more use it can be made stronger for future researchers.

Up next: Accessing the DLC from a Distance

______________________________________________________________________

Want to schedule a visit to the DLC? Use the form at http://mith.umd.edu/larsen/contact

Citations:

Quotations from MITH Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum are from an interview with the author conducted April 15, 2011, at MITH, unless otherwise noted.

Image credits:

The_Deena_Larsen_Collage.png, Leighton Christiansen, April 14, 2011

DLC_discs_01.png, Leighton Christiansen, April 14, 2011

DLC_disk_find_sample.png, Leighton Christiansen, May 16, 2011

Leighton Christiansen is pursing his Master’s of Library and Information Science Degree at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and threatens to catch that degree any time now.

You can reach him at leightonlc@gmail.com, or @purpleleighton on Twitter

The post Hands on the DLC: Finding and Finding Aids appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

When you come to visit The Deena Larsen Collection (DLC), you will be shown five well organized glass cases, containing vintage Macintosh computers, archival storage boxes, books on hypertext and new media, and a smattering of old computer peripherals.

Your guide will likely also point out the famous “Marble Springs Shower Curtain.” The shower curtain attempts to graphically illustrate, with printed screen shots and colored thread, the linked associations enlivened by authoring a hypertextual work to an audience in the pre-Web browsers days of the early 1990s.

As Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum notes, The Deena Larsen Collection is “a true hybrid collection,” containing both analog and digital materials. Besides the specimens mentioned above, there are e-literature works from numerous authors, sometimes in draft and finished form, as Deena is a keen collaborator, always happy to “read” rough drafts. Larsen, Kirschenbaum remarks, is “also somebody who is broadly interested in computer culture.” The DLC contains many newspaper and magazine articles and clipped comics on issues such as Internet privacy, the growth of email, law and the Internet, and the frustrations computing tools can bring to the average user, among others. “I think,” Kirschenbaum adds, “the collection has some value as a cross section of a certain moment in popular computer history as well from roughly 1985 to 2000.”

One great aspect of the DLC, is researchers are encouraged to dig into the collection’s many artifacts. “We offered to take

The post The Deena Larsen Collection as a Research Test Bed appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

In mid-April I had the distinct pleasure of visiting the hoarder’s paradise that is The Deena Larsen Collection, housed—physically and electronically—at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).

I drove to College Park from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to visit the DLC for a couple of reasons. The immediate matter was to review the DLC in fulfillment of an assignment for the Digital Humanities course, taught by GSLIS Dean John Unsworth. Further, I was curious to see if the DLC housed changing versions, programming notes, original image files, etc. for Deena Larsen’s important—and unreleased—hypertext work, Marble Springs, Second Edition which is the focus for my Master’s Thesis, guided by Prof Jerry McDonough. (I was not disappointed!)

(A brief aside: The DLC website on Marble Springs focuses on Marble Springs, First Edition, produced in Apple’s HyperCard software and published by Eastgate Systems in 1993. Marble Springs, Second Edition—expanded with new content added by Deena and contributed by a dozen additional authors—was prepared for publication in 1997 by Deena and programmer Carlos Boutran.

Sadly, MS2 was not released, although MS1 is still available from Eastgate.)

I spent two days at MITH, exploring the DLC, talking with the MITH staff (a shout of thanks to Director Neil Fraistat, Dave Lester, Seth Denbo, Christina Grogan, James Neal, and Alex Quinn) and interviewing Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum. Everyone made me welcome. And as I was the first external researcher to utilize The Deena Larsen Collection, I felt like a bit of a celebrity: Matt even Tweeted about my visit.

At right, I am exploring the box with the paper version of Marble Springs; Deena’s 1992 Master’s Thesis, Hyperpoems and Hyperpossibilites, and other analog treasures.

While talking about the DLC with Neil, he was nice enough to invite me to post to the MITH blog about my experience at MITH. I happily accepted. So this will be the first of a short series of postings highlighting The Deena Larsen Collection. The posts will include what is special about the DLC, issues facing the collection, and notes on my interactions with the collection, including suggestions to aid future researchers.

I hope that you will find these posts useful and will make time to visit The Deena Larsen Collection at MITH soon.

Up next: The Deena Larsen Collection as a Research Test Bed

______________________________________________________________________________

Want to schedule a visit to the DLC? Use the form at http://mith.umd.edu/larsen/contact

Image credits:

The_Deena_Larsen_Collection.png, Leighton Christiansen, April 14, 2011

Marble Springs, Second Edition, cover card, MS2_001_01.png, screen capture, Leighton Christiansen, January 10, 2011

DLC_Tweet.png by Matthew Kirschenbaum, 04/14/2011, screen capture Leighton Christiansen

Leighton Christiansen is pursing his Master’s of Library and Information Science Degree at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and threatens to catch that degree any time now.

You can reach him at leightonlc@gmail.com, or @purpleleighton on Twitter

The post Visiting the Deena Larsen Collection appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.