Today I borrowed a CD with some old software1 out from “my” library so that I can mess with it for emulation’s sake. Not super unusual for me, but acquiring this specific copy is something I had already tried and failed at… Back when I was an undergrad I did a Digital Preservation 101 paper and Patchwork Girl came up in my research, so I tried to get it, but whoever fielded my question that day couldn’t track it down, so I wrote the rest of my paper and assumed the library had purged their really old CDs or something.
Today all I had to do was go to the front desk armed with the call number, where I got the ear of a staff librarian. He lead me to the ‘multimedia collection’ (a beige, waist-high, metal storage cabinet that has stored CDs in a corner for forty years) and thanks to his help, we quickly picked it out of the stacks. I had found the Patchwork Girl, and her digital body shall be dissembled once again for scholarly examination.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say after my summer course ends and once I get to sit down and play with things – I have a second CD out that I also want to look at and may post about later. It’s a collection of computer science conference proceedings on HyperCard with sound, video, and captions(!) but ripping and emulating it is going to be a little tougher.2
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, a work of electronic literature on Apple HyperCard from the early 90s. There’s already quite a bit of information out there on it since it’s part of the whole hypertext/e-literature milleau, but I want to mess with emulating the Windows rerelease, which AFAIK was a port using the Storyspace software. ↩︎
I could give many technical reasons for this, but also generally I suck ass at Mac emulation. ↩︎