GISST System Wins Best Paper Award at iPRES 2024

Dr. Eric Kaltman and collaborator Dr. Joseph C. Osborn of Pomona College have won the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) 2024 in Ghent, Belgium. Their paper, "The Potential of Cited Executable State for Software Object Access, Validation, and Research: A Preview of the GISST System," was selected from a shortlist of papers that received exceptional reviews.

The paper explores how the GISST project enables researchers to create persistent, citable references to specific moments in emulated software and games running in web browsers. By allowing executable states and input recordings to be embedded directly within scholarly works, GISST opens new possibilities for software-based research and digital preservation workflows.

The award was sponsored by NESTOR and presented by Marco Klindt (ZIB) during the conference awards ceremony. This recognition highlights the growing importance of innovative approaches to digital preservation and the potential for executable citation to transform how scholars access and reference historical software.

The work was made possible by funding from the US National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant.