New Challenges for the Archiving of Digital Writing

In his article "New Challenges for the Archiving of Digital Writing" Heiko Zimmermann discusses the challenges of the preservation of digital texts. In addition to the problems already at the focus of attention of digital archivists, there are elements in digital literature which need to be taken into consideration when trying to archive them. Zimmermann analyses two works of digital literature, the collaborative writing project A Million Penguins (2006-2007) and Renée Tuner's She... (2008) and shows how the ontology of these texts is bound to elements of performance, to direct social interaction of writers and readers to the uniquely subjective reading process, and to real-time access to data. Zimmermann posits that these features of the digital text pose further challenges for digital archiving and libraries. Heiko Zimmermann, "New Challenges for the Archiving of Digital Writing" page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.5 (2014): Special Issue New Work on Electronic Literature and Cyberculture. Ed. Maya Zalbidea, Mark C. Marino, and Asunción López-Varela