Seed Grant Reports: Jacob Gaboury on the History and Contemporary Use of Computer Screenshots
Jacob Gaboury received a BCNM Faculty Seed Grant for exploring the historical and contemporary usage of computer screenshots. Read about the progress of the project below!
The funds for my 2023 Faculty Seed Grant were instrumental in advancing my research into a new manuscript on the history and contemporary use of computer screenshots. I primarily used the funds to conduct initial research on early graphical computing at the Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), focusing primarily on the papers of Adele Goldberg held at the Computer History Museum. Goldberg was instrumental in developing the Xerox Alto computer over the course of the 1970s and its windowed, graphical user interface. Among the materials held in her papers were photographs of the Alto screen taken as its interface and software were developed and refined, which I was able to digitize thanks to the funds made available by the seed grant. This discovery inspired me to begin my own collection of images and hardware, and I have spent additional funds purchasing 1980s screenshot hoods, cameras, and other hardware, as well as actual screenshots taken by amateur photographers from the 1950s through the 1980s. These include everything from television photographs to early video game high score photography, the latter of which has formed the basis for a chapter of my manuscript to be published as an article later this year in the game history journal ROMchip. While there is still much work to be done on this project, the funds of the faculty seed grant were instrumental in pushing my work forward and in establishing the archival collections that I continue to engage.