[-empyre-] accessing and upgrading

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

I thought I'd relate a couple of anecdotes concerning recent experiences of
the arhiving/updating-upgrading process.

Recently I came upon two 5.25" floppys that (we hoped) contained Apple Basic
kinetic poetry, a sequence of kinetic poems called "First Screening",
written by the Canadian experimental poet bp Nichol for the Apple IIe back
in the mid eighties. Lionel Kearns of Vancouver loaned me the floppys. On
the hard disk of an old Mac (a Mac classic or something) Lionel played me a
Hypercard version of this same work that an academic had made, years ago,
from bp's initial Apple Basic version of "First Screening".

Lionel and I are working toward a net-based project that lets people
experience "First Screening" by bp Nichol.

I gave Computer Services at the University of Victoria in Canada the 5.25"
floppys; neither Lionel nor I had a 5.25" floppy drive to retrieve the files
with, but the people at Computer Services did. Lo and behold, they were able
to retrieve the files from the floppys!

So now we have both the original files and a Hypercard version.

It is possible to download from the net, for free, an Apple IIe emulator
that runs on PCs, which we have done. The Apple Basic files run very well in
this emulator. So we are able now to let those who have PCs experience
"First Screening".

However, there is no emulator, that I know of, that will let those who have
Macs experience "First Screening" via the Apple Basic files. Also, it isn't
clear to me what it would take for those with Macs to run the Hypercard
version on their machines. I still have to look more into that. If anyone
has info on either an emulator of the Apple IIe for the Mac, or info on
running Hypercard on current Macs, I'd appreciate that.

The above circumstances suggest that those who archive (Lionel in this case)
need not only to archive, but to make the source code available to those
interested in periodically upgrading the work (as Lionel did by giving me
the floppys).

The moral of a second anecdote is much the same.

I created some DHTML animisms (kinetic poetry with soul) between 1997 and
2001 at http://vispo.com/animisms/SeattleDrift.html ,
http://vispo.com/animisms/enigman , http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts , and
http://vispo.com/animisms/timesuite/MilleniumLyricIntro.htm . At the time,
creating cross-browser, cross-platform DHTML was either hard or impossible,
depending on the functionality, because browsers hadn't really standardized
concerning their DHTML functionality. Most of my DHTML pieces ran only on
Internet Explorer for the PC.

Which of course was a concern not only because it limited the audience but
because such work might not be suitable for future browsers.

Not long ago, Marko Niemi of Turku/Helsinki translated most of this work
into Finnish and updated the code so that these works now run on both Mac
and PC and on IE, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. Browsers are now
much more standardized in their DHTML functionality. It turns out that, for
the most part, the changes necessary were small to upgrade the code to
contemporary DHTML standards. Marko is a savvy poet-programmer of
contemporary DHTML.

His Finnish translations provided me with the code to update the English
versions and also the Chinese versions (some of these pieces were
translated, earlier, into Chinese by Dr. Shuen-shing Lee from Taiwan).

The DHTML source code is of course available very easily to anyone who surfs
to the pieces (right click and select 'view source').

So here we have a case of the upgrading being done, once again, by a
technically savvy artist interested in the work. Not by an archiving
organization. This is not to criticise archiving organizations. They would,
for the most part, simply archive and supply access--hopefully via the
Web!!! The actual work of upgrading, which would have to happen
occassionally, will probably not be done so much by staff of archiving
organizations as by artist-programmers/whatever who want to preserve the
work and use it in any one of a variety of ways. If the world has access to
the work then the possibility of upgrading it is vastly increased.

ja
http://vispo.com
http://vispo.com