Debate

Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
Archiving digital narrative: New Media Technologies
18(2) 121-125
Some issues ª The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1354856511433687
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Tom Abba
University of the West of England, UK

Abstract
The complexities of archiving digital content, particularly those story forms reliant on multiple
platforms, highlights technical, cultural and curatorial issues that remain difficult to reconcile
coherently. Seeking to frame the issues within this special Debates section, this essay outlines
issues facing the field of digital storytelling; examining narrative form, instantiation and subsequent
archival.

Keywords
Archiving, curation, experience design, new media, story

Within an interdependent media ecology of websites, applications, smartphones, walled gardens of

content and proprietary platforms, the half-life of digital content becomes shorter by the year.
Debating the longevity of videogame platforms has become a pastime for academics and game
designers, while emulators recapture the mechanics and affordances of early Atari consoles, Sega
devices and arcade machines and text adventures constantly rerun under new operating systems
and browsers. Nevertheless, the experiential affordances of digital storytelling are at best preserved
on an ad-hoc basis. While the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (Internet Archive, n.d.) pre-
serves the web as best it can on a rolling month-by-month basis and the British Library has begun a
project to archive the UK web as a deep archive (UK Web Archive, n.d.), preservation and curation
of digital content for future generations of scholars and readers remains a secondary concern for
most content developers.
Considering digital storytelling as a subset of the broader emergence of online content, the
landscape looks even more haphazard. Amongst the earliest examples of standalone hypertext
writing (as distinct from commercially constructed hypertext packages) Geoff Ryman’s 253
(Ryman, 1997) is captured as a crawled archive by Wayback and referenced (but not archived in its
own right) within UK Web Archive content, but not curated in any cogent manner. That Ryman’s

Corresponding author:
Tom Abba, University of the West of England, Faculty of Creative Arts, Kennel Lodge Road, Bower Ashton, Bristol BS2
3JT, UK
Email: thomas2.abba@uwe.ac.uk

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122 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 18(2)

own website remains online is of considerable value to researchers; however, relying on the
ongoing largesse of a single author facing annual hosting fees for a work that brings in no revenue
in itself is a dangerous policy for the digital writing community to pursue. 253 has been the subject
of academic articles (a number are collected in Close Reading New Media, see van Looy and
Baetens, 2003) and regular commentary from writers since its completion, but this ancillary
content – arguably necessary for scholars to appreciate the significance of Ryman’s writing – is
only apparent after a process of considered investigation and independent research. 253 may
remain for future generations a powerful example of hypertextual fictional form, but is unlikely to
be considered as such without the curation of both those materials exploring its significance, and
preservation of the website itself.
The Transcriptions Project (2005) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, seeks to
‘transcribe’ between past and present, integrating new media technologies into what has tradi-
tionally been a humanities discipline. The most impactful output of the Project to date is arguably
the archive built around William Gibson and Denis Ashbaugh’s Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
(Gibson and Ashbaugh, 1992). This most impermanent of web artefacts is designed to obsolesce
upon reading (the diskette containing Gibson’s poem destroys the file as it is read, Ashbaugh’s
etchings were intended to be printed in ‘disappearing’ ink) rendering preservation of the experi-
ence of reading the complete text an apparently impossible challenge. While a ‘hack’ of the
original poem provides a recreation of the poem’s self-destruction (the precise nature and timeline
of the hack itself is also documented within the Transcription archive), the experience of viewing a
video of a piece of software intervening in the reading process perversely serves to remind us of the
distance between the archive and the original experience. Derrida describes archives as possessing
an ontological referent (1995: 2), returning us to the original form of an object, denying its
recontextualisation in a contained, preserved form and directing us back to the nominative
instance. In the specific case of Agrippa, it is impossible to re-experience that first moment, even as
an archived remediation, so bound in time, place and now outmoded technology is the artefact
itself. The Transcriptions archive for Agrippa is staggeringly complete; a resource documenting
the release of the book-box, the public performance (by Penn Jillette) of Gibson’s poem, and scho-
larly texts examining the phenomenon from haptic, digital and historical contexts; all of which
draw attention to the empty vessel at its centre – the book cannot be experienced in retrospect.
This single example might call into question our strategies for archiving digital material in all
its forms.
At a technical level, an alternate reality game (ARG) might comprise a series of interconnected
websites, emails, tweets and physical objects. The experience of playing an ARG though, can be
likened to storytelling as archaeology, asking players to reassemble extant material and determine
meaning from that process. Addressing Espen Aarseth’s (1997) exploration of ergodic literature, one
might find respite in Umberto Eco’s description of ‘works in movement’ (in Aarseth, 1997: 52) being
those objects in storytelling that ‘consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units’ (in
Aarseth, 1997: 51). Despite Eco’s dismissal of transitory experience as possessing value (Eco suggests
that despite the text of Marc Saporta’s 1963 Composition No.1 ‘promising to yield a different story
every time it was shuffled’ its ‘only validity lay in its construction’ – in Aarseth, 1997), digital
narrative has, to date, drawn on the experience of immediate moments for its impact. Bob Hughes
describes interactive media as possessing pico-narratives – the ‘way things respond to the user’s
actions’ (1997), a subjective methodology he applies to the analysis of programming emergent story
experiences. Hughes goes on to describe how we process narrative as a spatial experience, employing
physical metaphors to make sense of digital terrain that is anything but physical in its design.

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Similar thinking can be brought to bear on the curation of experiential story, if we return to the
example of an ARG that begins with a call to action by email and proceeds through items posted to
players. Phone messages and online fora populate content and deepen the core ‘story’, after which
in-game websites reveal themselves and provide platforms for the next stages of story to be uncov-
ered. A live event punctuates the fragility of the online space, requiring players to organise and
role-play alongside actors playing improvised roles in an emergent narrative. All of these ele-
ments featured in the narrative arc of Meigeist, authored by Hazel Grian and Jonathan Williams
in 2007 (and regrettably unpreserved in any coherent form). The story arc was planned and
authored in a largely conventional manner; plot reveals, reversals and cliffhangers designed into
an emergent story experience. The nature of emergent story, whether such exists as a digital or
conventional artefact, is to persuade each player/reader that their experience of the story is not
only unique, but that they possess agency within the narrative arc. This manifests as relating a
series of linear encounters within an unlinear narrative landscape, each participant assigning a
scale of significance to pico-narrative moments according not only to each moment’s authorial
provenance, but also by a measure determined by their personal interpretation of the emergent
framework. The immediate problem facing the digital archivist is that recreating those personal
interpretations in an archive cannot be achieved by simply preserving the base material itself.
Too much of the emergent experience is contingent on having participated in the story as it was
released and managed; in order to curate an archive of ARG material, a spatial metaphor, trans-
posing the terrain of digital content to something resembling the troughs and peaks of Hughes’
narrative landscape might offer a working model for curators.
ARGs are by no means the only problematic case study though. Considering a taxonomy of
digital content, one finds the territory littered with story forms and devices requiring particular
attention. Hypertextual narrative objects such as 253 are largely built on an html platform, and
easily preserved; Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, a Story (1987) requires proprietary software in order
to be read (the same is true of Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, 1992, Shelly Jackson’s
Patchwork Girl, 1995 and other titles authored in publishing house Eastgate’s Storyspace).
Projects conceived in Macromedia’s Director have suffered mixed fortunes; at the time of writing a
revised edition of Chris Marker’s landmark Immemory (Exact Change, 1997) is readable on a
contemporary Macintosh platform, but no Windows or Linux versions exist. The programming
environment has been revived by Adobe, but sadly remains a CD Rom platform in a cloud-
computing world. The Electronic Literature Organisation’s (ELO) Preservation, Archiving and
Dissemination (2003) project (now largely inactive) sought to address the preservation and cura-
tion of digital works, whether from proprietary or open source platforms, eventually publishing
two framework documents which despite providing a rigorous and well-argued foundation have
achieved little traction in the field. Ebooks, whether as enhanced versions of print titles (some with
video and audio additions tightly bound to text content) or digitally native applications closer to the
App model offered by The Wasteland (Faber & Faber, 2011), are bound to devices (iPad, Kindle,
Android tablets) whose longevity is subject to commercial market forces and changing trends. In
20 years’ time, will designers build iPad and Android OS emulators for the very same purpose
Atari emulation exists on the web today? Umberto Eco sounded a familiar note in 2011: ‘modern
media formats quickly become obsolete. Why run the risk of choosing objects that may become
mute and indecipherable?’ (Eco and Carrière, 2011: 31).
Writers and designers, contrarians to the last, continue to explore new forms and structures for
telling stories and engaging their audiences. Digital technology expands the problem of archiving,
compounds the difficulty of curation, but will continue to do so, despite efforts to rein in its excesses.

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124 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 18(2)

In this special Debates section, Kamilla Pietrzyk addresses the instability produced by
contemporary society’s drive toward technological acceleration. Within this short framing essay
I have focused on the imperative to preserve, alongside introductory illustrations of the specific
issues facing curators and archivists when dealing with digital stories. Pietrzyk’s essay addresses
the socio-cultural framework in which curation takes place. A companion document to the ELO
reports, Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature and Born-Again
Bits: A Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature, her closing observation that a slow
crawl toward digital amnesia is entwined in our reliance on electronic platforms speaks to specific
misgivings about cultural shifts toward born-digital works.
James Newman’s contribution, an examination of Sonic the Hedgehog, demonstrates the effect
of platform technologies themselves on the user experience. Emulation is a common and ably
executed strategy by which to demonstrate obsolete games. Newman draws out the materiality of
each iteration of the game itself though, speculating that the fluidity of coding tweaks necessary to
recreate prior experiences remove the nature of a game as a single object capable of preservation.
These short essays reflect current concerns regarding the role of the researcher exploring digital
platforms and content. The mutability of content; the ephemerality of momentary, personally
moderated narratives; device specific story forms: each provide the writer with a new set of tools
and the promise of new forms and shapes with which to tell stories. What seems certain is that the
problem of archival and preservation of digital story is far from solved. The issues raised in this
Debates section nevertheless begin to outline the oft-neglected complexity inherent in digital
archival initiatives, pointing toward a more comprehensive examination to come.

References
Aarseth E (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Derrida J (1995) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Eco U and Carrière JC (2011) This is Not the End of the Book. London: Harvill Secker.
Gibson W and Ashbaugh D (1992) Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). New York: Kevin Begos Jr Publishing.
Hughes B (1997) Landscape as Narrative. Lecture at MENO Conference on Hypermedia and Narrative,
Brighton UK, April 1997. Available at: http://www.dustormagic.net/NasL.html (accessed 13 January 2012).
Internet Archive (n.d.) Available at: www.archive.org (accessed 11 January 2012).
Jackson S (1995) Patchwork Girl. Watertown, MA: Eastgate.
Joyce M (1987) Afternoon, a Story. Watertown, MA: Eastgate.
Marker C (1997) Immemory. USA: Exact Change.
Moulthrop S (1992) Victory Garden. Watertown, MA: Eastgate.
Ryman G (1997) 253. A Novel for the Internet about London Underground in Seven Cars and a Crash. Avail-
able at: http://www.ryman-novel.com/ (accessed 13 January 2012).
Saporta M (1963) Composition No.1. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Transcriptions Project (2005) Available at: http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/ (accessed 13 January 2012).
UK Web Archive (n.d.) British Library. Available at: webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/ (accessed 13 January 2012).
Van Looy J and Baetens J (eds) (2003) Close Reading New Media: Analysing Electronic Literature. Leuven:
Leuven University Press.

Biography
Tom Abba is a lecturer in Media at the University of the West of England, UK. A specialist in narrative the-
ory and practice, he works within interactive media, and across film and television. His practice and research
addresses the convergence of new and traditional storytelling platforms. In 2011, he wrote and distributed a

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digital narrative experiment to an audience of publishers, writers, games developers and academics, merging
physical and virtual narrative structures, exploring the possible shape of a born-digital novel. He maintains a
research blog at www.tomabba.com/otherthings/ and is a member of UWE’s Digital Cultures Research Centre
(www.dcrc.org.uk).

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