UC Berkeley Library

The library exhibition No Legacy || Literatura Electrónica at the University of California, Berkeley (March-September 2016) showcases eighteen works of electronic literature in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and English, along with rare print works from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal. To address the unique challenges of exhibiting vintage interactive digital works on this scale in the century-old Doe Library, we collaborated with a team including members from ten campus units, with broad national and international support. In this poster we will illustrate how we forged new communities across the digital humanities to install an exhibit that bridges print and digital literary histories.

The University Library selected and prepared print works for the exhibit, coordinated the digital user experience, upgraded facilities, provided IT support, and co-designed the exhibit with faculty curators from UC Berkeley and the University of Kansas. The Berkeley Center for New Media brought in a visiting artist to teach the course Archive, Install, Restore in Fall 2015 where undergraduate and graduate students designed and fabricated furniture to house the exhibit computers. To revive a work from a twenty-five year old 3.5” floppy disk the Digital Collections Unit in the Bancroft Library performed digital forensics and built a custom PC to meet the outdated system requirements in an exhibit-safe environment. The exhibit team also worked closely with the artists and authors to maintain the integrity of works that were originally created for a networked environment that no longer exists.

The poster was presented at the Digital Frontiers conference in Houston in October 2016, the DH Faire at UC Berkeley in April 2017, and the Digital Initiatives Symposium at the University of San Diego in May 2017.

http://nolegacy.berkeley.edu