December 28, 2005
MLA 2005
I delivered my paper, “New Media and the Forensic Imagination” downtown at MLA today, as part of the above session (the panel was chaired by Kate Hayles with super smart co-presenters Mark Hansen and Rita Raley). We had an excellent turn out and I think all three of our papers fit together well. My talk was a teaser from Mechanisms, my forthcoming book.
Tomorrow it’s back downtown again for a full day of panels plus an ELO happy hour at 5:00 in the lobby bar of the Marriott. Join us if you like, there’s going to be a surprise announcement related to ELO’s future. Tomorrow evening you’ll likely find me at one of several parties in departmental suites, including Maryland, UCSB, and Minnesota.
Posted by mgk at December 28, 2005 07:58 PMMatt, great talk today -- I'm fascinated by your project, and I had a couple of questions that I didn't have time to ask at the end of the session. Where did you come across the Mystery House disk/disk image in the first place? What other images have you scrutinized?
I wonder how difficult it is to grab a "cassette image" from what was my first data storage system: the TRS-80 Color Computer, which wrote onto and read from cassette tapes. I used to write and rewrite over the tapes with the silly little basic programs I wrote, and I wonder what kind of forensic traces I left behind all those years ago.
And one last question: is anyone making any kind of systemmatic effort to preserve disk images of old programs rather than simply archiving the source code itself?
Posted by: Mark Sample at December 29, 2005 01:08 AM | Link to CommentHi Mark,
Thanks very much for the kind words. I'm not sure how you would go about obtaining an image from your TRS-80 tapes. The basic procedure for creating a disk image involves using a serial line or a modem to move the data on the disk from the original Apple computer to a PC, with the aid of an appropriate software utility. A good emulator will allow you to create a new disk image by putting a blank disk into its virtual drive and formatting it with DOS 3.3 or ProDOS, just as it would have been formatted using the original hardware. So bottom line is you need both the software utility and the hardware to effect the transfer.
I got the disk image from an anonymous FTP server that warehouses such things. Disk images themselves are created primarily to serve the emulator community, not new media theorists ;-) But there are many hundreds out there.
Nick Montfort first turned me on to this, over burritos in College Park.
Hope to see you at the ELO happy hour later today.