“Collecting and hoarding, it turns out, are very important activities, since too few of our cultural institutions and repositories are yet engaged with acquiring and saving the rich and various creative legacy we have inherited from the first generation of personal computing.” (About the DLC)
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
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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