0.18 Urban renewal: some lessons for hypercities from the preserving  (Page 3/4)

Of course it’s particularly apt to be discussing these issues here at Virginia. As a graduate student I would sit in a cubicle in the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, where as the Blake Archive’s project manager I would manually stitch together SGML files arriving via email and FTP from the archive’s various editors—distributed across three other institutions—fuse them to image sets that were snail mailed to Virginia from Chapel Hill on CDs, tidy and groom the whole package for the dictates of the Institute’s closed source DynaWeb publishing system, and then finally “make book” (as the UNIX command line process was known) to create an electronic edition that would be added to the virtual shelves of the William Blake Archive by way of manual HTML links. Los at his forge this was not, but at various times I still wondered whether anyone else could follow the exact same sequence of hacks, workarounds, kludges, and tweaks I used to get the system to work.

Which brings us to the overarching concern of this gathering: sustainability. Indeed, I would argue that for an enterprise such as HyperCities, sustainability is a moral and ethical imperative as well as a fiduciary and academic one. If we take seriously the claim that the Tehran materials represent “one of the largest existing documents of the election protests in Iran,” then we have a responsibility to think about how it will be preserved and accessed as part of the historical record for many years to come.

These issues have been raised before of course, including here at Virginia a decade earlier under the auspices of one of the first data curation studies with a specific focus on humanities content of which I’m aware: the Supporting Digital Scholarship project, also funded by the Mellon Foundation. The final report is available here: (External Link) . Among SDS’s accomplishments was an exploration of the “significant properties” of several first-generation digital humanities projects developed at IATH (the Rossetti Archive and Salisbury Cathedral) as well as experimental mapping of those projects to METS representations and ingesting these into a Fedora repository. SDS, however, dealt with relatively homogeneous collections of files housed on a common server. In the case of HyperCities, the two most salient points are these: first, that it is a platform, that is a piece of software; and second, that broad swaths of its content are distributed across the Web.

Recently I have been part of a project that has addressed these matters in the neighboring domain of virtual worlds and video games. Virtual worlds, unlike virtual globes, do not traffic in real world geospatial data. Second Life is the archetype, but examples of multi-user persistent virtual spaces go back to the late 1970s, with the multi-user dungeons (MUDs) that followed directly from the archetypal storyworld, Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure. It’s also worth noting the increasing prevalence of virtual worlds in serious humanities research: Virginia’s own Rome Reborn might well be the most prominent example, but IBM Interactive’s Beyond Space and Time, a MMORPG-style recreation of the Forbidden City, is also worth mentioning. (External Link) . Earlier forays into scholarly “virtual reality” at IATH include VRML renderings of Rossetti’s Cheyne Walk studio and a visualization of Dante’s Inferno. For my purposes today I want to focus not on the dungeons and dragons trappings of such things, nor their status as popular culture commodities—Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is at $250 million in annual revenue and climbing—but rather ways in which the explorations of the Preserving Virtual Worlds (PVW) project illuminate issues of software preservation as well as the collection and curation of distributed user-generated content.