Poetry in Flash in the Anthology of latin american and caribbean electronic literature: archive issues

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Vinícius Carvalho
• Data de Publicação: 2024
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Acta Scientiarum. Language and Culture (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/ActaSciLangCult/article/view/65240
• topic: Flash poetry; Antología LitELat; digital literature; metadata; preservation.; poesia em Flash; Antología LitELat; literatura digital; metadados; preservação.

We herein describe how Flash poetry is archived in the Antología LitELat – v.1, one of the main archives of Latin American digital literature available online. As Flash poetry is one of the most popular genres among authors in the field in the continent, we investigated recurrences in the metadata of the 19 works of this genre archived in the anthology, as well as the strategies adopted by the editors to preserve and publicize this material, especially because Adobe discontinued its support to Flash on December 31st, 2020. As to the metadata of the works, the plurality of authors and nationalities that make up the collection of Flash poetry in the archive is worthy of attention. Data referring to the year of publication also allow us to make inferences regarding the different versions some of these works had in various media/technologies (printed book, GIF, LED screen, Flash, CD-ROM, HTML5, etc.), also considering the development history of Flash itself as a multimedia tool that gradually incorporated more functionalities. As for the strategies adopted by the editors of the anthology to preserve and publicize this material after the obsolescence of Flash, the corpus shows that the most frequent strategies are to redirect the reader to external pages where the works are available in their ‘original’ format or emulated in Ruffle. As planned obsolescence is a risk to which any work of digital literature made using proprietary technologies is subject, studies like this must be replicated and improved, with a view to mapping good practices and challenges for literary archives of this nature.