Visualizing Robert Creeley’s text in WordPerfect for DOS

In January 2024, I started work as a Digital Archivist on a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to process the born-digital archive of the 20th-century American poet Robert Creeley (1926-2005) known for his affiliation with Black Mountain College, and for “a style defined by an intense concentration on the sounds and rhythms of language as well as the placement of the words on the page.” (Poetry Foundation).

Creeley was also an early adopter of computer technology. The born-digital material in his papers at Stanford include computers, floppy disks, CDs, and zip disks containing his writing and correspondence. As the project to process this material was conceived, Curator of American and British Literature, Rebecca Wingfield and others on the project team raised an interesting question: Given Creeley’s concern with layout, font, and appearance of text on the page, how should the library most accurately represent the digital content to researchers?

As we wrestled with this question while preparing a folder of Creeley’s writing and correspondence, a few complicating factors immediately became apparent. First, the file formats were not recognizable by simply viewing them through a file explorer, because Creeley used custom extensions following a period in the file names, usually referring to the content of the file rather than the file type. For example, he labeled and ordered his correspondence using a three-digit number separated from the name of the correspondent by a period, as in BELL.001, and BELL.002, which the file explorer recognizes as “001 File” and “002 File,” rather than the actual file format of a WordPerfect file. We were able to open the files in a text editor as well as in LibreOffice, but we could tell by the uneven justification and variable font type that the text was clearly not formatting as Creeley intended.

The image above shows a letter rendered in LibreOffice. This version places the address at the top right corner, and the type using a sans-serif font is justified with non-breaking words. 

Luckily, we were able to determine most of the file types from a comma-seperated values (csv) report generated by the Siegfried-based characterization tool Brunnhilde developed by Tessa Walsh. Running Brunnhilde over the folder of files we were working on produced a report listing the file formats, format versions, MIME types and last modified dates, among other data. From this report, we learned that most of the files in the folder were WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Okay great! Now all we needed to do to view the files as Creeley created them was run an ancient version of WordPerfect in a DOS operating system. 

Towards that goal, we explored using EaaSI, a library of emulated computers and software led by the Digital Preservation Services team at Yale University Library. EaaSI provided a version of WordPerfect 5.1 running on MS-DOS, but ultimately what we wanted was to be able to open Creeley’s WordPerfect 5.1 files through software he actually used, which included his presets for margins and formatting. Digital Archivist and Creeley Project Manager Sally DeBauche happily located a tool called vDosWP by Edward Mendelson (and based on vDos by Jos Schaars) to run WordPerfect for DOS through a virtual DOS environment on a Windows desktop. We were able to successfully install vDosWP along with a copy of WordPerfect 5.1 from one of Creeley’s computers, and from there could open all the WordPerfect files. Happily, Mendelson’s website provided a link to a WordPerfect for DOS user manual (pdf), which was helpful in guiding use of vDosWP.

This second image shows how the letter appears in vDosWP when opened in WordPerfect for DOS 5.1. Within WordPerfect for DOS, the text and page formatting codes are not rendered on the screen, although the coding itself is visible on the lower portion of the screen. The text is displayed within the application using a generic monospaced typeface font, and the address block is centered around the main body of the letter.

We exported files as PDFs from VDosWP in order to obtain documents we hoped visually represented what Creeley originally intended.

The rendering of the letter in a PDF exported from vDosWP shown in this third image looks different than how it appeared in LibreOffice. The lines of text within the address block don't wrap, and the paragraphs have tighter justification with words breaking with hyphens. By revealing the formatting codes in Creeley’s original WordPerfect 5.1 file, we can confirm that the paragraph formatting is correct, and that character font and size appears to match Creeley's original choice of Times New Roman PS 12pt. Although this process took some experimentation and learning to use new (or perhaps old) tools, we are excited to be able to provide users with a view of Creeley’s work that is as true to how he created it as we can.