Major New Research on ADVENTURE

Just a post to draw attention to a major new piece in the current issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (a venue which you all should be keeping tabs on anyway) on Will Crowther’s original ADVENTURE (aka Colossal Cave).

In his “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky,” Dennis Jerz offers an archeology of the work’s source code alongside of an exploration (photo-documented!) of the actual Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.

Scholars routinely mis-cite information as fundamental as ADVENTURE’s date of composition, the kind of carelessness that reinforces the view that electronic objects exist outside of material histories and are impossible to take seriously as cultural artifacts. Jerz sets the record straight with rigorous textual scholarship based (in part) on the work’s original magnetic back-up tapes, which is personally responsible for recovering.

Absolutely essential reading.