Hi All,

Doug Reside (NYPL) will be giving a lunchtime talk at NYPL Labs this Friday:

“How Do You Document Real Life”: A tale of RENT, Jonathan Larson’s floppy disks and digital forensics

http://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2012/02/03/rent-jonathan-larson-floppy-disks-digital-forensics

A NYPL Labs lunch talk with Doug Reside
On February 4, 1992, Jonathan Larson saved a Microsoft Word document that grew, over four years, to become the musical RENT. Although Larson saved and resaved the file multiple times, at least some of the earlier drafts can be recovered thanks to Larson’s personal archival practices and a feature called “fast save” that was embedded in his copy of Microsoft Word 5.1. In this talk, Doug Reside, Digital Curator at the Library for the Performing Arts, will discuss the process he used to recover these early drafts and what his process suggests for the work of curators, scholars, and archivists in the future.

Free and open to the public. Bring lunch!

Speaker
Doug Reside became Digital Curator for the Performing Arts at New York Public Library in 2011 after four and a half years on the directorial staff of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). He has been the director on multiple theater library projects including Music Theater Online, and the Shakespeare Quartos Archive. He is currently editing the Musical of the Month blog at NYPL which makes available, in various ebook formats, one pre-1923 libretto each month. He is currently writing a book about the ways in which digital technology has changed the creation and production of musical theater.

Hi All,

Doug Reside (NYPL) will be giving a lunchtime talk at NYPL Labs this Friday:

“How Do You Document Real Life”: A tale of RENT, Jonathan Larson’s floppy disks and digital forensics

http://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2012/02/03/rent-jonathan-larson-floppy-disks-digital-forensics

A NYPL Labs lunch talk with Doug Reside
On February 4, 1992, Jonathan Larson saved a Microsoft Word document that grew, over four years, to become the musical RENT. Although Larson saved and resaved the file multiple times, at least some of the earlier drafts can be recovered thanks to Larson’s personal archival practices and a feature called “fast save” that was embedded in his copy of Microsoft Word 5.1. In this talk, Doug Reside, Digital Curator at the Library for the Performing Arts, will discuss the process he used to recover these early drafts and what his process suggests for the work of curators, scholars, and archivists in the future.

Free and open to the public. Bring lunch!

Speaker
Doug Reside became Digital Curator for the Performing Arts at New York Public Library in 2011 after four and a half years on the directorial staff of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). He has been the director on multiple theater library projects including Music Theater Online, and the Shakespeare Quartos Archive. He is currently editing the Musical of the Month blog at NYPL which makes available, in various ebook formats, one pre-1923 libretto each month. He is currently writing a book about the ways in which digital technology has changed the creation and production of musical theater.

[Bob Kosovsky]

It was a very nice talk. It showed how a digital archive can (sometimes) reveal much more information. And it also suggested that with so much more information, scholars will need to develop new ways of studying and understanding such a multi-layered archive.

[Matthew K. Gold (he/him)]

I was really sorry to miss it, Bob, but I couldn’t be there. I’m going to see whether we can bring Doug in to do another version of it in a CUNY DHI session this Spring. Thanks for the report.

Best,

Matt

[Bob Kosovsky]

Fortunately Doug has made available an audio recording of the lecture. Listen or download here: