Save As: Receiving the Larsen Collection

In May of 2007, MITH received the extraordinary gift of Deena Larsen's personal collection of early-era personal computers and software. Deena is an author and new media visionary who has been active in the creative electronic writing community nearly since its inception in the 1980s. In addition to being a writer and thinker, Deena has also been a collector and an amateur archivist (or, as we say of amateurs, a hoarder). 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. The arrival of Deena's collection at MITH furnishes us with invaluable source material which will further both our in-house research in digital curation and preservation, as well as function as a primary resource for researchers interested in early hypertext and electronic literature. This talk will introduce the collection to the MITH community, and discuss future research agendas. We intend a wide-ranging conversation, from the practicalities and ethics of preservation to the implications of born-digital material for textual and editorial theory. This talk will introduce the collection to the MITH community, and discuss future research agendas. We intend a wide-ranging conversation, from the practicalities and ethics of preservation to the implications of born-digital material for textual and editorial theory.