Preservation

Strategies and practices used to ensure the long-term accessibility and integrity of digital works, addressing challenges such as technological obsolescence and format compatibility
Richard Snyder 2026-04-15

Explication

The distinct materiality and media-specificity of born-digital artifacts pose significant challenges for preservation, which must address the long-term integrity of works in storage as well as changing hardware and software standards.

For works distributed on floppy disks and CD-ROMs—for example the digital poetry found in the French journal Alire—preservation involves dealing with the degradation of physical media. Even when located on relatively more stable and safe media, files can go missing or succumb to bit rot. Because digital works are highly modular (Manovich 2001), even seemingly minor issues with one or two files can impact a work; web-based pieces are especially susceptible due to link rot. The best practice is to hold and routinely back up the full set of files for a work in a single location.

Obsolescence affects a work when hardware and software standards shift, leaving it inaccessible and/or significantly affecting its intended functionality. Storyspace and Adobe Flash are two examples of popular authoring software programs that are now unsupported on modern devices, leaving many works inaccessible without direct intervention. Likewise, preservationists must grapple with long-term software challenges related to platformization. Works created with and distributed by popular platforms, such as xtine burrough’s igotup2020, pandemic edition (2021) on Instagram, are vulnerable to removal of support and/or loss of authorial control as terms and conditions change.

Changes to hardware standards – while less frequent – can have drastic consequences for access as well. For example, the punched-card style batch processing hardware needed to experience The House of Dust (1957), a text generator, is completely inaccessible, as is the experience (Montfort 2024). Another recent example is CD-ROM drives and 3.5mm headphone jacks, which are no longer being offered in most computing devices.

It is desirable for artists creating born-digital works to address preservation ahead of publication. Since the early 2000s, solutions have involved advising authors on best practices for making hardware and software choices, documenting their works, and storing them securely; this is the approach taken in two early pamphlets from the Electronic Literature Organization on the topic (see Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin 2004; Liu et al. 2005). Many of the advice therein remains relevant today, ensuring longer life for works and easing the hardships associated with preservation down the road.

When works do become inaccessible or non-functional, scholars have developed several methodologies for intervention. These included collecting and maintaining legacy hardware/software to experience obsolete works, as well as emulation and migration (Liu et al. 2005; Paul 2007). Collection has proven to be an important strategy. While collecting and using legacy hardware/software may seem impractical for most (Paul 2007, 269), one intervention harnesses the benefits of large collections like those held at the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) for broad distribution to those who are not themselves collectors. This is the “traversal” method, developed by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop (2015, 2017) in their Pathfinders preservation scholarship and subsequently utilized in Grigar et al.’s Rebooting Electronic Literature book series (2018 to present), among other projects hosted at ELL. Traversals are “video and audio recordings of demonstrations performed on historically appropriate platforms, with participation and commentary by the authors of the works” (Moulthrop and Grigar 2017; see Joyce 2021).

Compared to the recorded experience of the traversal, emulation and migration require more direct intervention. Emulation involves programs that re-create (to some extent – see Grigar and Pisarski 2024: 12-13) the original hardware and software conditions within which the work was experienced, while migration attempts to “upgrade” (Paul 2007, 269) a work to an entirely different, current code base (see, e.g. Tabbi 2003).

Surveying the implementation of these methods over time, Grigar and Pisarski (2024) suggest we think about such preservation efforts as acts of media translation. Preservation must take into account not only code, hardware, and software conditions, but other aspects that inform a multisensory user experience (15, 28), such as publication materials. The strategies of collection, emulation, and migration, mentioned above, belong to a “continuum of interventions” that results in either restoration (low-level media translation) or reconstruction (mid- to high-level media translation) (71). A restoration involves modest intervention into “portions of the code…and/or aspects of the work’s functionality,” as exemplified by the hundreds of Flash works Grigar and her team at the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) have now restored (Grigar et al. 2021: 71, emphasis in original). A “reconstruction,” on the other hand, constitutes a “complete rebuild” of the work for modern devices (71, emphasis in original). Grigar and her team at the Electronic Literature Lab LL have completed several full reconstructions of Storyspace hypertexts suited for modern web browsers (see Holeton et al. 2021; Moulthrop et al. 2022; Kolb et al. 2022; McDaid et al. 2023; Bly et al. 2023).

As hardware and software standards continue to change, and change rapidly, it is crucial that creators, users, and scholars of born-digital narrative embrace the challenges and opportunities of preservation to ensure long-term access to important works of cultural heritage. Moreover, preservation of born-digital works is valuable not only because it ensures long-term access for future generations, but because it highlights the material conditions of born-digital narrative, both today and in the past.

Works Referenced

Bly, Bill, et al. We Descend: The Complete Edition. The Electronic Literature Lab, 2023, https://the-next.eliterature.org/works/2422/0/0

burrough, xtine. “Today’s Instagram Lit | #TIL | #FilterIssue1 / I Got Up 2020, Pandemic Edition/ “Late start. Tequila last night.” / Part 1 of 11-part series excerpted from @igotup2020…” Filter Insta-Zine (@filterinstazine) no. 1, Oct. 15, 2021. “https://www.instagram.com/p/CVDNzLUrGn_/”

Electronic Literature Lab. The NEXT, 2025. https://the-next.eliterature.org/

Electronic Literature Organization. e(X)literature: the Preservation, Archiving and Dissemination of Electronic Literature, 2003, https://eliterature.org/exlit/

Flores, Leonardo. “Third Generation Electronic Literature,” Electronic Book Review, 7 April 2019, https://doi.org/10.7273/axyj-3574

Grigar, Dene, et al. afterflash. Virtual exhibition, The NEXT, 2021, https://the-next.eliterature.org/exhibition/afterflash

Holeton, Richard, et al. Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, Version 7.0. The Electronic Literature Lab, 2021, https://figurskiatfindhornonacid.com/

Joyce, Michael, Mariusz Pisarski, Astrid Ensslin, and Dene Grigar. “Traversal of Michael Joyce’s ‘Twilight, A Symphony’.” YouTube, uploaded by Electronic Literature Lab, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWB7GElIJDk.

Kolb, David, et al. Caged Texts. The Electronic Literature Lab, 2022, https://the-next.eliterature.org/works/2085/0/0/

Liu, Alan, et al. Born-Again Bits. Electronic Literature Organization, 2005.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001.

McDaid, John, et al. Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse. The Electronic Literature Lab, 2023, https://the-next.eliterature.org/works/2458/0/0/

Montfort, Nick. “Memory Slam 2.0: Batch-Era Text Generation.” 2024. https://nickm.com/memslam/

Montfort, Nick, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Acid-Free Bits. Electronic Literature Organization, 2004.

Moulthrop, Stuart, and Dene Grigar. Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature. Nouspace Publications, 2015, https://scalar.usc.edu/works/pathfinders/title-page?path=index

Moulthrop, Stuart, and Dene Grigar. Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing. MIT Press, 2017.

Moulthrop, Stuart, et al. Victory Garden. The Electronic Literature Lab, 2022, https://the-next.eliterature.org/works/1999/0/0/

Rhizome. Artbase. 2025. https://artbase.rhizome.org/wiki/Main_Page

Tabbi, Joseph. “Stephanie Strickland’s True North: A Migration between Media.” Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature, edited by Jan Baetens and José van Looy, Leuven University Press, 2003, pp. 27-38.

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Snyder, Richard. "Preservation." The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative, 2026. https://glossary.cdn.uib.no/terms/preservation

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Preservation

Explication

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Preservation

Explication

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