Building ‘The NEXT’ archive for born-digital art and literature

As the Information Age advances, a unique repository at Washington State University Vancouver is proactively archiving and publicizing creative digital works that were crafted with technologies now obsolete or discontinued. The NEXT is a museum, library, and preservation space for born-digital art and interactive literature created between the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s through the early 2000s.

"The NEXT is a virtual space for objects that I call 'P.I.E.' - participatory, interactive, and experiential," said Dene Grigar, professor and director of Creative Media & Digital Culture at WSU Vancouver. Grigar's research encompasses the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of born-digital media.

Since its inception in 2018, The NEXT has operated with the idea that just as physical paintings and printed books have dedicated spaces for acquisition and storage, there should also be dedicated space for virtual, multimodal electronic artworks.

A typical example of the works housed in The NEXT is Sarah Smith's "King of Space", a 1991 publication that uses hypertext and minigames to create a story with multiple paths and endings. The full archive features over 3,000 works from internationally renowned born-digital artists and authors, including Mark Amerika, Judy Malloy, Erik Loyer, Nancy Buchanan, Michael Take Magruder, Marjorie C. Luesebrink, Richard Holeton, Stuart Moulthrop, David Kolb, and others. Many are pioneers of early hypertext systems like HyperCard and Storyspace, while others experimented with works on Flash, Shockwave, and Visual Basic.

"These objects aren't flat. There's movement and participatory actions. They're very interactive, and there's a liveness to those works," Grigar said.

Alongside the original electronic artworks, The NEXT also features the Visualization Space, which catalogs real artifacts used during the creative process or included with the art. Richard Holeton's hypertext novel, "Figurski at Findhorn on Acid," was adapted for stage performances using two beach balls marked with prompts from his novel. Holeton would toss these beach balls to the crowd, who would read out one of the written prompts, and then he would perform the selection on stage. Those beach balls and the prompts have been uploaded as 3D models for modern viewers to interact with and explore. Additional artifacts from other works have also been rendered as 3D models, and can be explored via web browser or experienced in virtual reality. Future plans include diversifying the collections to include more non-English virtual works originating from Latin America, francophone Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.

One particular issue that arose in the early days of The NEXT was how to catalog and inventory the virtual works being archived. While libraries have utilized systems like MODS for print archives and the Dublin Core vocabulary for painting and graphics data, there was no standard organizing system for many of the attributes associated with the virtual creations held at The NEXT.

"Since our archive includes 3-D modelingand other features not associated with books or paintings, we had to innovate our own metadata schema," said Grigar. Her team looked at the modern library equivalent, the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), and augmented the system to include more descriptive controlled vocabularies and additional fields, calling this new schema Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema, or ELMS.

This archival framework lists information on the born-digital works, including the authoring platform, software dependency, computer languages used and potential sensory sensitivities such as flashing images, color contrasts, or audio issues.

Grigar, who was featured in a BBC article this May about preserving outdated technology, is optimistic about the growth of The NEXT archive. "A lot of people are into retro technologies, and, yes, we probably have the best collections of retro Macintoshes in the Western United States, save for the Apple Museum in Cupertino," she said. "But that's not all we're doing here. The retro hardware is there to serve the art and preserve those works of human creativity. We need the hardware to access the software."