ABSTRACT. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 against the United States were among the first major disasters of the web age. As phone networks failed, many turned to the web and email to ask about the safety and security of friends, family, and colleagues. Office workers, away from television sets, tried to make sense of the day on quickly failing online news sites. In the days that followed, while most Americans primarily consumed news about the events via television, they increasingly turned to the web to make community, set up list-serve, and ensure that their loved ones and friends were safe. Indeed, these changes spurred long-term shifts in American internet use (“One Year Later”).

My paper presents a history of 9/11 through the lens of electronic records produced by Americans during and immediately after the attacks, including emails from the September 11 Digital Archive, official pager messages, and the Sept11Info e-mail list. These records offer diverse perspectives from both direct (those in New York, Pennsylvania, or Washington during the attacks) and indirect participants.

Traditional historiography, which has drawn primarily on oral histories, media reports, and government documents (often through the 9/11 Commission), often overlook these digital narratives and thus predominantly highlight the experiences of direct participants (for example, see Murphy, Graff, and the work of Rivard). In part this is due to the difficulty of accessing digital archives, which were largely generated by participant contributions and thus have uneven metadata. However, by using these born-digital voices, we are able to adopt a broader social and cultural historical perspective.

Given the audience of this conference, my paper will use this as an opportunity to show the benefits of engaging with these born-digital materials, as well as walking the audience through my methodological approach of doing text analysis at scale.

ABSTRACT. In 2001, Melbourne-based collective Metraform presented Symbiosis, an immersive experience combining virtual reality (VR) projections and electroacoustic soundscapes. Founded in 2000, Metraform comprised architect Jonathan Duckworth, artist Mark Gugliemetti and composer Lawrence Harvey. Metraform explored how advanced technologies in the Interactive Information Institute (I-cubed) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia –including Silicon Graphics high-performance computers, stereoscopic glasses and headtracking technology – could create affect and prompt subjective experiences in audiences.

To date, histories of VR and immersive environments – including histories of earlier visual, sound and audiovisual experiences such as magic lanterns, cinema, recorded sound and projections – have employed materials such as photographs, film, sound and video recordings, oral histories, textual accounts and remaining spaces and props to document, interpret and in some instances recreate experiences of designing, building, staging and interacting the work. Immersive multimodal VR environments like Symbiosis present novel technical, legal and conceptual challenges and opportunities. Historians and creators who retain digital artefacts can collaborate to preserve, emulate and restage the work, exploring these questions through practice. But opening and running files in then-rare, now-obsolete hardware and software is technically challenging and legally complex. And as with other time-based performance media, what an authentic recreation would be, how to achieve authenticity, and whether and how authenticity matters are complex conceptual questions to resolve.

In this paper, we reflect on our collaborative experiments in emulating Symbiosis. Combining approaches from material history, games history, curating, the history of technology, music performance, composition, digital design and digital preservation, we extend existing research within archiving, curating, musicology, performance and public history into the born digital realm, and explore emulating complex born digital work as timely and effective practical and conceptual work with born digital cultural heritage.

ABSTRACT. In the era of digitalization, characterized by the 'connective turn' (Hoskins, 2011), individuals' recollection of their 'lost hometown' demonstrates attributes of mediated memories (Dijck, 2008). This study explores the multimodal representation and remembrance of a place across internet platforms, focusing on a town devastated by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China. Based on over 15 years of anthropological research, this investigation delves into the digital memories of the surviving community, whose experiences of the earthquake have long been adopted and interwoven into the Chinese collective memory, but their nostalgia for the lost homeland only shared among small local communities or hidden in reclusive cyberspaces. Therefore, this research examines the 'interactional trajectories' within digital memories with a particular emphasis on analyzing people's discussions while viewing the once serene urban landscape on platforms such as Baidu Tibeba, Bilibili, and Douyin (the Chinese version of Tik Tok). This exploration prompts a reflection on Hoskins' (2017) concept of 'sharing without sharing,' a phenomenon that frequent observed within the new ecology of memory.

The study reveals that the digitized representation of the former Beichuan town, including images, videos, music, and local inhabitants' narratives of their everyday life, evokes and reconstructs place-memories within the local community. For digital tourists who share collective memories of the 2008 disaster but have never personally experienced this town before the earthquake, the vanished landscapes and local dialogues awaken their own nostalgic reflections. This implies that digital memory sharing is not devoid of profound sharing, interaction, and reflection; instead, it intertwines with the framework of collective memory to present a spectrum of connectivity superimposed upon personal experiences' continuity. The witnesses of the fall of Beichuan town, including both nearby and distant observers, all reside within the framework of collective memory due to mass media influence. Although, regarding the specific memories related to this small locality, their memories are clearly not shared, but they can establish connections through the Internet. The emotional impact of the disaster evokes memories of their home for distant witnesses while real and nearby witnesses undergo an opposite emotional process. Moreover, the distinct characteristics of various media platforms significantly affect the depth and scope of the interconnections between individual memories and their intergenerational effects.

ABSTRACT. Mobile applications are rapidly becoming a significant part of digital design heritage, a way of understanding how we navigate our lives with digital culture. Many collecting institutions seeking to preserve this type of heritage are therefore compelled to adapt their processes to this emergent medium, which brings with it both practical and ideological challenges. This presentation will offer an institutional perspective on the challenges associated with collecting and conserving mobile apps, presenting the specific case study of Euki, a US-based privacy-first reproductive health app collected by the design and digital department of a major museum in 2023. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which community actors from which the object and its care emerges enact legislative and ideological frameworks that are not always compatible with the structures of collecting institutions. What communities are involved in the care of apps, and how do their frameworks at times enable, and at other times inadvertently compromise, their care? What communication, translation and expectation management is required to happen between community actors and institutions to navigate some of these tensions?

Many scholars writing on the conservation of complex born-digital objects recognise that the infrastructures and knowledge required to care such objects often go beyond the museum (Falcão 2023; Fino-Radin 2018; Dekker 2018). At the same time, not enough attention is given to the enactment of ideological and governance conflicts that this presentation speaks of, at least not in terms of this emergent format of software. In seeking to contribute to this body of literature, as well as share insights on this tricky medium, the presenters will set out their recommendations based on working with and drawing from communities such as the app’s originators and developers-enthusiasts that create and maintain tools required for its conservation, including emulation.

ABSTRACT. Born-digital and software-based artworks are often incredibly complex and idiosyncratic in nature, requiring an equally idiosyncratic approach to preservation activities and conservation methodologies of care. Given the normalised nature of digital asset ingestion into digital preservation systems, what does it mean to ‘preserve’ a software-based artwork within such structures? At Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Digital Preservation staff are currently evaluating how best to document, structure and map complex software-based artworks from with the Time-Based Art Collection and National Art Archives Collection using a PREMIS metadata framework, including documenting all their associated digital files and folder structures, mapping relevant metadata, and describing the proprietary and customised software environments they operate within. It is hoped that the interrogation of these works using a PREMIS metadata framework will provide a blue-print for ingesting other complex, software-dependent digital objects into the Gallery’s digital preservation system, along with how best to represent this information in the Collection Management System (CMS) and other related inter-dependent systems across the institution.

ABSTRACT. In 2018, the University of Reading’s Museum of Rural English Life (MERL) tweeted a black and white photo of an Exmoor Horn ram alongside the statement “look at this absolute unit.”. This generated a series of memes in response, and is well known as an excellent example of social media content created in the cultural sector. In 2020, a collaboration with a doctoral researcher led to the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM) acquiring a copy as an example of a photographic internet meme.

This acquisition took place before the Science Museum Group (SMG) had any formal digital preservation guidelines or policy. A number of different approaches were considered; the approach selected was to use the Webrecorder tool (now Conifer), to create a WARC web archive file of an individual instance of a set of memes, alongside a series of JPEGs and a CSV file, to be deposited in SMG’s collection. This activity formed the basis for early considerations around what is needed to ensure complex digital objects can be collected by SMG.

In 2023 and 2024, a group formed from the curatorial, corporate records, digital preservation, documentation and registration teams has been working towards defining what is required to fit this type of digital collecting activity within the museum’s processes and systems. Using The Absolute Unit acquisition, the group has been looking at a ‘bare minimum’ approach to designing a workflow for born-digital acquisitions (during the wait to implement a Digital Preservation System). Here the focus has been on MVP, where existing workflows for physical objects are taken as the basis for designing born-digital workflows. This presentation will discuss what is needed for these workflows, what can be replicated from physical object acquisition workflows, and where new activities are required to facilitate the start of SMG’s born-digital workflows.

ABSTRACT. In May 2020, the Electronic Literature Lab launched The NEXT (https://the-next.eliterature.org), a virtual museum, library, and preservation space aimed at making born-digital art, literature, and games accessible to the public. Now four years later, visitors can experience 2375 works held in 41 collections organized around six collection categories with more works coming online monthly.

As a memory institution intent on preserving the creative output from the mid-1980s to the present time as it has been produced with and for computing devices, The NEXT maintains the original files of each work it holds. By presenting each work, individually, in its own exhibition space with screen captures from the work, a detailed description of it, and robust metadata, The NEXT also provides rich documentation content for even those works under copyright that cannot be viewed online from the exhibition space. Looking over the complete archive, The NEXT lays bare the variety of artistic vision and artists’ drive to experiment with forms and platforms while leveraging the aWordances and constraints of the tools available to them.

As importantly, The NEXT also conserves the works it holds. To date, it has preserved over 700 Flash works via RuWle or Conifer; translated files from outmoded formats, such as MIDI and MOV; reworked code to eliminate Java Applets and iFrames; reconstructed works built in outmoded platforms; and other such necessary transformations to keep the works accessible to the public. Built in Semantic Markup and enhanced with ARIA that make assistive technologies possible, TheNEXT also strives to be accessible to people with disabilities and sensory sensitivities.

One other important aspect of The NEXT involves its physical archives. To date, it holds 94 boxes of artists’ papers, notebooks, photographs, and ephemera from performances, readings, and exhibitions related to the born-digital works it exhibits in its virtual spaces. While a future plan is to digitize the paper archives, work has already begun to make some of the more salient pieces––such as folios from early hypertext literature, floppy disks and CD-ROMs, and objects used during performances––accessible to the public through its Visualization space both online and via a VR headset.

Thus, the goals of this presentation include providing the audience with information about The NEXT’s approach to collecting, its eWorts to preserving the works it holds through born-digital preservation, and future innovations for making works accessible to the public in its role as a memory institution for born-digital art, literature, and games.

ABSTRACT. This presentation will discuss ‘enhanced curation’ as an archival approach to collecting, curating and preserving emerging formats at the British Library. Reflecting on the Library’s 2023 Digital Storytelling exhibition, this paper will analyse challenges related to documenting and displaying complex digital publications – such as interactive narratives and mobile apps – and how both collecting and creating contextual information can add research value.

Contextual information may include different types of materials (e.g. reviews, blog posts), which can be acquired through different methods (e.g. web archiving, file transfer). Even when access to the original publication is still possible, a multi-faceted approach to collecting ensures a more comprehensive overview of multimedia works, as well as the ability to address different research interests. Enhanced curation also opens up possibilities for cultural heritage institutions to create these types of materials themselves (e.g. screenshots, interviews, playthrough recordings, documentation).

To enrich the Digital Storytelling exhibition’s interpretation, curators experimented with enhanced curation approaches, recording video interviews with several writers and commissioning playthrough footage of a selection of works. These recordings were displayed alongside related interactive stories in the exhibition, providing instructions for the playable narratives and contextualising the artworks. Within the context of the exhibition, including this footage enabled curators to better understand users’ behaviour and needs when it comes to accessing emerging formats, but these materials also have the potential to become rich resources for future research, as part of the Library’s growing emerging formats collection.

ABSTRACT. Source criticism of born digital data requires investigations into the system environment that produced the data and interacted with them. This, however, is only possible if the historic system is still accessible. The paper proposed here will discuss a case study which deals with historic data that were preserved in their original (now obsolete) formatting, but the historic system and software environment the data stemmed from have not been preserved: Records produced by the US Department of Defence in the context of population control during the American involvement in the war over South Vietnam.

The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) holds an extensive collection of these records which were stored in a format called "NIPS", a file management system development by IBM exclusively for military use. To facilitate access to these sources, NARA's staff has written a software that converts records from their original NIPS format into ASCII rendered files.

The research project "Computing the social" attempts to reconstruct and ultimately reenact the historic data processing system. Thus, it employs reverse engineering of the conversion software to identify and investigate traces of system interaction in the data sets. This enables source criticism such as checking for data integrity and coherence. Based on the migrated data sets and the available paper documentation, the project attempts to mimic historic procedures of data processing to critically examine the specifics, reliability, and epistemic effects of the historic system.

The paper will reflect on the experiences and challenges of reverse engineering and critical system- and software reenactment as methods for dealing with born digital sources and historic data processing systems.

ABSTRACT. Over nearly three decades of web archiving, we have witnessed profound transformations in the landscape: the emergence of different players, practices and processes; the evolution of aims and goals; the recognition of new challenges; and the blossoming of collaborations between archival institutions and researchers. Web archive studies has begun to take shape as a discrete field of research and is itself beginning to be interrogated critically.

We would argue that web archives and web archive studies are reaching an inflection point. After a ‘long process resulting in the consolidation of standards, best practices, shared methods, tools, and knowledge’ (Ben David 2021, 182), there is an opportunity to reevaluate web archiving research and practice and to reconsider the relationship between web archives and their contemporary socio- technical contexts (Schafer and Winters 2021). Web archives are not merely static repositories; they are dynamic entities closely entangled with contemporary challenges. These include ethical approaches to the archiving, preservation and reuse of personal and public data; the environmental impact of digital preservation in the face of a climate crisis; and the requirement to respond swiftly to unforeseen events and crises.

All of these transformations unfold simultaneously within web archiving institutions and in the broader context of changing digital and scientific practice. They affect the objects and subjects of study; methods of data collection and preservation; and the demands and expectations placed on web archives by society. In this roundtable, we will explore the extent to which web archives are both active participants in and influenced by this highly transformative age, and how they are responding to it. We will consider web archives as ‘archives of crisis’; discuss how web archives are (and are not) in tune with these challenging and febrile times; and explore the processes of constant renewal, adaptation and ultimately transformation that have allowed web archives to weather the digital and social storms of the early 21st century. Finally, we will identify current and future challenges that will necessitate continuing adaptation and innovation in web archiving and web archive studies, including artificial intelligence, new kinds of born-digital data, the increasing platformisation of the web, and the importance of transnational studies.

Speakers:

Anat Ben-David is Associate Professor of Communication at the Open University of Israel. Focusing on the intersection between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and New Media, her research explores the interplay between digital platforms, politics and knowledge. Methodologically, she specialises in developing and applying digital and computational methods for internet research. Ben-David is co-editor of the journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Taylor & Francis/Routledge), and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies (Forthcoming, 2024).

Nicola Bingham is the Lead Curator of Web Archiving at the British Library in the Department of Collections. Following BA and MA degrees in History from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Nicola began her archival career at Tyne and Wear Archives Service before joining the British Library in 2002. Nicola manages the Library’s web archiving strategy and the on-going road map for web archiving capability, ensuring that stakeholders across the Legal Deposit Libraries, and other partners, have the necessary tools for curating websites according to their own collection development policies. She is Co-Chair of the International Internet Preservation Consortium Content Development Group.

Sophie Gebeil is Lecturer in Contemporary History at Aix-Marseille University (TELEMME Laboratory, AMU-CNRS). Her research focuses on the study of memorial practices and online social mobilisations, using web archives as a historical source. She is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. At the University of Aix-Marseille, she is Vice-President for Human Sciences and the Mediterranean Region.

Valérie Schafer has been a Professor in Contemporary European History at the C²DH (Centre for Contemporary and Digital History) at the University of Luxembourg since 2018. She previously worked at the French CNRS and is still an Associate Researcher at the Center for Internet and Society (CIS – CNRS UPR 2000). She specialises in the history of computing, telecommunications and data networks. Her main research interests are the history of the Internet and the Web, the history of European digital cultures and infrastructures, and born-digital heritage (especially Web archives). She is a co-founder of the journal Internet Histories. Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Taylor & Francis).

Jane Winters is Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has led or co-directed a range of digital projects, including the Congruence Engine and Heritage Connector projects; the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association network; Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities; and Traces through Time: Prosopography in Practice across Big Data. Jane's research interests include digital history, born-digital archives and open access publishing. She has published most recently on web archives and researcher access, Non-Print Legal Deposit, and born-digital archives and the problem of search.

ABSTRACT. Under the banner of the Archiving Australian Media Arts Project (AAMA), Art Gallery of New South Wales staff identified artist Mike Leggett’s archive as a significant target for preservation and emulation. The archive is a mix of artworks, personal documents, and unidentified content and ephemera. A team comprised of time-based art conservators, digital preservation staff and archives staff have surveyed and imaged the extensive archive, which contains 1990s CD-ROM artworks that have not been seen in decades. The three different but complimentary disciplines/departments came together to work through issues of obsolescence, significance, and how to manage art works within an archival collection context. The team are working toward using the Australian EaSSi emulation platform to provide access to researchers and the public in the Gallery’s onsite reading room.

ABSTRACT. The digital revolution has substantially transformed the movie industry, including production and distribution (Prince, 2004). In recent years, India, which has a rich cultural and cinematic history and is the largest film industry, has gone digital (Meena, 2015). Additionally, celluloid films have become rare today. With digital advancements, a new challenge in the form of born- digital film heritage has evolved. It consists of films entirely produced in digital formats. The preservation and accessibility of digitally born film heritage demonstrates significant issues.

Digital formats are vulnerable to technological obsolescence, corruption of data, and rapid platform transitions in hardware and software (Heftberger, 2014; Hertzum, 2003). The dynamism of digital technology poses a challenge to the accessibility and preservation of born-digital film heritage over the long run (Wengström, 2013). In addition, the absence of standardised digital preservation procedures, limited resources, and insufficient infrastructure in National film archive of India (NFAI) compound these difficulties (Dungarpur, 2014; Kumar, 2016).

This study examines India’s born-digital film heritage, its significance, challenges, preservation and access. India has lost its significant amount of film heritage due to negligiance, improper facilities at NFAI (Dungarpur, 2014; Kumar, 2016). There is lack of research on India’s cinematic heritage. In-depth interviews with film archivists of NFAI, filmmakers, and industry professionals will be taken to understand their perspectives and experiences. This research seeks to contribute to understanding and developing effective strategies for preserving and accessing India’s born-digital film heritage. By examining the challenges, exploring technological advancements, and proposing recommendations, this research will foster the sustainable preservation of born-digital films, ensuring their enduring cultural value.

ABSTRACT. Born-digital archive material carries with it an implicit promise of enhanced access: the opportunity to access everything, everywhere, all at once. Accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the adoption of online delivery of archive material by many repositories, coupled with the increasing role of platforms like Instagram and YouTube to function as unruly quasi-archival spaces, user expectations around access are undergoing significant shifts. Established traditions around the role of the research room as a physical location, and a temporal delay whilst material is produced and made available, are being challenged. If archivists are unable to adequately communicate the reasons for their decisions, we risk being cast back into the role of regressive 'gatekeepers' that the profession has sought hard to shed in recent decades.

Drawing on my experience managing born-digital collections at the National Theatre, UK, and previous work managing born-digital records associated with healthcare and medicine, I will seek to explore the complex technological, legal and resource challenges of making born-digital archive material available. I will identify why some concepts from the analogue and pre-digital environment retain currency when considering access to born digital material and explore ways of communicating these concepts to researchers who may be more familiar interacting with commercial and social media platforms than archival repositories.

ABSTRACT. Though great strides have been made in recent decades, in the United States, the archives profession has been painfully slow to adapt existing workflows and train in arrangement, description, and access for born-digital records. Because focus has traditionally been directed at digital preservation or management of digitized analog records, what processes we have implemented typically adhere to item-level standards and tasks that become unrealistic when scaled up. Twenty years ago, Dennis Meissner and Mark Greene’s “More Product, Less Process,” article changed the way archives practitioners approach arrangement and description of collections to deal with archival backlogs. How can we utilize and adapt those same principles for born-digital processing? Is a format-agnostic approach to managing archives realistic and achievable?

In this lighting talk, facilitators will introduce the topic, utilizing their own institution’s changing workflows to contextualize the questions. They will then ask attendees to contribute to a conversation about what minimal processing of born-digital records looks like in practice. How does MPLP impact the discovery and use of collection materials by researchers or the ongoing preservation of those materials? Facilitators seek to field ideas, discuss drawbacks, and gain insight into national and transnational approaches to processing born-digital archival collections.

ABSTRACT. The UK Web Archive collects and preserves websites published in the UK, encompassing a broad spectrum of topics. The entire collection amounts to approximately 1.5 petabytes (PB) of data, which necessitates the use of machine learning approaches to explore the collection effectively, in addition to the detailed examination of individual websites that the UK Web Archive also facilitates. Moreover, the archive includes curated or thematic collections that cover a diverse array of subjects and events, ranging from UK General Elections, blogs, and the UEFA Women’s Euros 2022, to Live Art, the History of the Book, and the French community in London. We have published a number of our curated collections as data through the British Library Shared Repository. This Lightning T alk runs through what is available and how researchers can access them.

ABSTRACT. The presentation will focus on the roles and transformations of museums as actors of heritage diplomacy in the dynamic conditions of the development of Web 3.0 platforms and technologies. Web 3.0 is defined as a new evolution step in the World Wide Web development, characterised by ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) interventions, machine learning and semantic Web that increase customisation and personalisation of users' experiences online. Web 3.0 also promises a decentralisation through blockchain-based technologies, suggesting a new level of global interconnectivity and even democratisation of digital and data spaces, monopolised by transnational tech corporate actors.

Focusing on born-digital heritage content that emerges to document lived experiences, narratives, and new practices of contemporary artists in Asia and Africa, the presentation will explore Web 3.0 heritage diplomacy as a new way to decolonise live heritage of artistic communities and communicate its value on the global level. Specifically, the presentation will interrogate the potential of blockchain technologies to help local communities in marginalised regions to preserve their tangible and intangible heritage, especially under conditions of limited resources and infrastructure. These models of so called “museums without wall” start to emerge due to—or even despite—the lack of institutionalised interventions and become novel forms of heritage survival that is emerging in more virtualized and hyperconnected environments.

Focusing on two case studies of ad-hoc NFT collectives, NFT Asia and Cyber Baat from Africa, my presentation will identify and critically analyse a new form of heritage diplomacy that possesses an agency but lacks a legal institution in place. The legitimacy of this diplomacy draws on the efficiency of ad-hoc collectives to employ the blockchain technology to navigate the web 3.0 domain to secure economic sustainability and social democratic operational functioning. Stressing the non-digital nature of such a heritage diplomacy, my presentation will question this form of diplomacy and will interrogate its sustainability in the future.

ABSTRACT. This paper delves into the ongoing interdisciplinary effort to create an efficient digital workflow for collecting, researching, and archiving born-digital audio testimonies from the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Originating from a collaboration among institutions in Luxembourg, Poland, Ukraine, and Great Britain, '24.02.2022, 5am. Testimonies from the War' (WARTEST) faced methodological challenges in implementing a unified procedure due to cultural and disciplinary differences, as well as ethical challenges related to the collection and digital preservation of testimonies amidst conflict. The U-CORE project, initiated in January 2024, aims to standardize, consolidate and archive the born-digital data sets of WARTEST to facilitate ongoing and future research.

Using a digital hermeneutics approach, the paper offers an academic reflection on the ongoing key discussions and hands-on solutions related to the synchronization of metadata across the 400 testimonies. Three innovative approaches are presented. First, it includes an experimental research approach to engage with born-digital materials in the form of a preliminary qualitative analysis of the reflection of respondents on the digital display of their born-digital testimonies. Second, it displays a digital workflow developed within the project that guarantees interviewee security during war by means of encrypted recorders, secure external servers, and the two-factor identification media asset management tool CatDV. Third, the author reflects upon the ethical dilemma of compensating Ukrainian refugees for manual transcriptions of testimonies versus using automatic transcription software. Comparisons of AI-driven, manual, and mixed transcription methods are provided.

Lastly, the paper offers an insight into our discussions and negotiations on the final data repository and online platform for the testimonies. We display our experimental transfer of a part of the data to the 'Oral History digital' platform launched in 2023 and reflect upon our ongoing conversations with new Ukrainian digital repositories and platforms documenting the war.

ABSTRACT. Key feminist thinkers such as Judith Butler (1990), Donna Haraway (2016) and Alison Phipps (2020) have – in different ways – used “trouble” as a lens through which to challenge rigid binary frameworks. Meanwhile, Derrida (1995) underlined the ambiguity of the term “trouble” in French, simultaneously signifying difficulty and blurriness, which echoes the ambivalence at the heart of the archive itself: the Greek term arkhḗ denotes both commencement (archive as original source(s)) and commandment (archive as preservation authority) (Derrida, 1995: 11). This paper embraces the ambiguities locked into the born-digital archive and returns to the concept of trouble in relation to the inherently ambiguous transnational web archiving space. It combines contemporary xenofeminist thought (Laboria Cuboniks, 2015, 2022; Hester 2018) with French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s take on “community” (1986) to interrogate the often-overlooked complexities of curating so-called “community” collections and the inevitable ‘entanglements of locations (both on and off-line)’ (Laboria Cuboniks, 2022: n.p.) that occur when dealing with the in-betweenness of the diasporic web. Building on the authors’ lived experience of curating two born-digital diaspora-based collections and on their co-written chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies (Aasman, Ben-David & Brürgger, 2025), this paper explores the trouble with “community” in the context of French and Chinese diasporic born-digital curation and preservation practice, and problematises the concept of “community” within the transnational in-between space. Finally, the paper proposes a xenofeminist antidote to the mal d’archive (Derrida, 1995) that continues to trouble born-digital “community” collections.

ABSTRACT. One of the most fundamental facets of preserving born-digital cultural materials is understanding the data formats in our collections. In contrast to the relatively constrained worlds of metadata and digitised materials, born-digital items can come in a huge range of formats, making format identification a crucial step towards understanding the informational and software dependencies we need to capture to make future access possible.

As part of the Registries of Good Practice project (a collaboration between the Digital Preservation Coalition and Yale University Library), we have been analysing and comparing data from a wide range of format identification tools and registries. As well as providing insight into the design, content and context of each system, this has also enabled the development of new ways to help those tasked with preserving digital materials. This includes a comparative analysis tool that allows those working with born-digital collections to compare their own holdings with the available sources of format information, helping target their limited resources to where they are most needed.

Furthermore, by applying methods drawn from ecological studies of species diversity, we can use the gaps between format registries to estimate the true scale of the format problem. This will be compared against the time and energy the digital heritage community has been able to dedicate to the problem so far, and the consequences of this comparison will be explored. The results of this analysis will also be used to argue that there are serious flaws in our current 'standard' approaches to preserving digital materials, and outline how a more responsive approach would help us cope with the challenge of preserving our born-digital heritage.

ABSTRACT. Starting from an understanding of born-digital fanfiction texts as a form of networked electronic literature that originates on specific platforms, this paper seeks to investigate how the affordances and design of those platforms limit or enable certain types of literary content.

Although fanfiction texts and archives have been lauded for their progressive politics regarding sexuality, they are subject to criticism for their handling of issues of race. From the fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own I have assembled a corpus of 4000 texts written in response to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), which alludes to the Transatlantic slave trade, and its televisual adaptation Black Sails (2014-17), which foregrounds issues of queerness and enslavement.

The corpus will be analysed from two perspectives: network analysis of the metadata accompanying the texts and close reading of a selection of the texts themselves to interrogate the ways in which race and racism are rendered visible and / or sublimated in each.

In this paper I locate and examine a disjuncture between how born-digital fanfiction texts are tagged and categorised, and the subtextual ideas that circulate within them. This is visible in the contrast between metadata as positivist and literary texts as understood as circulating subtextual themes and knowledges.

ABSTRACT. Archive as if the future depends on it.

-Lisbet Tellefsen, Writer and Archivist

Cities in literature can be looked at as record-keepers of major demographic shifts, political and archeological changes, urban planning, ecology, and cultural heritage. Each time our world alters, for any reason be it religion, development, renovation, decay, or disasters, literature becomes our portal to memories and imagination that helps us to remember, rebel, celebrate and rebuild. This approach to study our world through the lens of fiction is often used by educators to bring the “affective” in classrooms, however when it comes to South Asian cities in fiction, there are no digital archives that researchers, curriculum builders or general readers could use as a ready resource.

The Cities in Fiction project is South Asia’s first digital documentation of real-world places in fiction. It collects data from the public and is both a community led and personal archive for readers of fiction. It aims to enable experimental research approaches of engaging with born-digital data, and help educators with resources to teach about cities* through the literary forms of short stories and novels (across disciplines). The project, like the geography of the region, is vast and challenging, especially in its formative years.

This study will reflect on the methodological challenges of data collection for a digital public archive, the question of categorising places and themes, the question of language and archiving in South Asian context, as well as give an illustrative account of how the database could be used as a tool to build curriculums for effective and dynamic pedagogy development.

ABSTRACT. In the latter half of the 20th century, digital art emerged as a revolutionary field of technology and creativity, and many of them are born-digital (Mason 2008). This period witnessed the foundation of the Computer Arts Society (CAS) in London, in October 1968 and active until 1985, which became a global platform for fostering the intersection of technological innovation, digital art objects, and artistic endeavour (CAS 2024). It brought together a growing community of artists, programmers, engineers, scientists, and researchers from different fields of practice through code writing workshops, conferences, talks, exhibitions, festivals and their PAGE bulletin, and CAS contributed significantly towards the development of British digital art and even the field of global digital art (Arreola, Gardner, and Lenz 2024). Revealing how digital art and born-digital art practices were shaped during this foundational period is not only important for understanding the evolution of this field, but also crucial for contributing to the current debates on global networks of contemporary digital art (Shanken 2016; Harris 2017; Zebracki and Luger 2019).

This short paper presents a work-in-progress research to the central question: How do interdisciplinary and global networks influence the digital art practices within the Computer Arts Society (CAS) from 1968 to 1985?

In order to address the question, this collaborative research, conducted between the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum and University College London (UCL), visualises for the first time, the global network of individuals involved within the field, drawing from the V&A’s rich repository of historical materials, which comprises of 287 computational art objects and extensive archives that trace the origins of pioneering figures and movements in digital art.

Figure 1: Network visualisation of the individuals in the Computer Arts Society (1968 – 1985) [see conference poster]

Figure 1 represents a work-in-progress network based on initial data gathered from the archives. The data is incomplete, with more information to be added by May-June 2024 after further archives review. It provides an overview of how 185 practitioners are connected based on their category (including artists, engineers, mathematicians or researchers in academia or industry), medium (including dance, music, sculpture, multimedia etc.) and groups these were associated with (e.g. Grupo de Arte y Cibernética, Bell Telephone Laboratories, etc.).

Findings

The network visualisation reveals, for the first time, a global landscape of CAS with widespread influence and diversity of digital arts practices that were happening muchwider than the territory of the United Kingdom. Specifically, individuals from certain regions, e.g., Austria, Canada, Argentina, played more significant roles in the dissemination and innovation of digital art practices within CAS. We can also see the importance of physical and institutional spaces in the development of digital arts, which aligns with previous discussions, such as in Brown and Gere (2008) and Mason (2008).

This work-in-progress visualisation of previously unstudied archives contributes to the understanding of CAS’s global reach and the history of British digital art and born-digital art for the first time. The emergence of British digital art was not an isolated phenomenon only within the UK, on the contrary, it was linked to the global and interdisciplinary exchanges facilitated by CAS from multi-layered perspectives. These attributes and interactions of individuals were important in fostering a culture of born-digital innovation, where the fusion of computational processes and artistic vision led to the creation of new art forms.

ABSTRACT. PARA SEMPRE [FOREVER] is a research project registered within the ROSSIO Infrastructure - hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University Lisbon - which results from the convergence of missions of two organizations: one aiming to ensure the preservation of the Portuguese web, Arquivo.pt, and another that assumes the role of fostering knowledge and understanding of contemporary Portuguese art, the Art Library and Archives of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

This scholarship, which began in 2020, focused on preserving the born-digital materials available online from various agents of the contemporary Portuguese art scene: artists, gallery spaces, and other relevant cultural initiatives. It involved several phases and tasks, including researching and identifying websites and social media profiles, listing their contents, verifying their navigability, creating metadata spreadsheets, critically analyzing the archived information, and carrying out awareness-raising actions on digital preservation.

Through this effort, a substantial number of web pages were inventoried, which served as a base for an additional data collection, resulting in 2.8 terabytes of safeguarded content. Thus, over the dif ferent periods, circa 175 websites and blogs were preserved. After a few months, the removal or elimination of some URLs was also noted. However, the majority of them had already been preserved, allowing us to continue to access the information hosted on these domains.

This represents a significant step towards preserving the digital memory of contemporary Portuguese art on the web, a vital intangible cultural heritage to record an extremely ephemeral 21st century. Shortly, the project may expand its scope to more accurately reflect the national artistic ecosystem. With this conference paper, the aim is to report on the journey of this digital curatorship plan - the methodologies adopted, the technical and ethical challenges faced, the objectives achieved, the activities carried out, the results, reflections, risks and opportunities.

ABSTRACT. On the morning of March 13, 2013, an email with the subject “Your Papers and Duke's Rubenstein Library” caught my eye. It was from Will Hansen at Duke University, inviting me to consider housing my papers at their prestigious Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

The email read:

"…Stephanie Strickland has mentioned that her papers are housed here, along with those of Judy Malloy and Rob Kendall. We’re interested in discussing whether Duke would be a good home for your papers as well. Duke’s interest in electronic literature stems from work being done in various programs, and your groundbreaking work in electronic literature, Internet art, and poetry would be invaluable for future scholars."

After a period of surprise and reflection, I accepted. This marked the beginning of an archival journey that remains ongoing and spans decades of digital works and communications dating back to the 1990’s. This digital poster captures the evolution of this archival journey, detailing the selection, preservation, and digital revival of digital projects, as well as unique hurdles and breakthroughs along the way - including negotiating institutionalised support and (at times) a distinct lack of it.

ABSTRACT. We have been investigating the archiving of open access books as part of a funded project. We have recently extended our work into the archiving of PhD theses. A complementary work package on the project has also been exploring the publishing of experimental books. This paper will explore the challenges we have identified in archiving experimental works as well as practice-based PhD theses.

Although not necessarily seen as related, both of these types of work are usually not of the “traditional” textual nature. This means that the questions raised around archiving them can actually be seen as related and pose similar challenges to the archiving body.

Questions we will be examining as part of the project include:

• What are the existing workflows and processes for archiving this type of material?

• What are the gaps in the current workflows impacting this type of material?

• How ready are Institutional Repositories for this type of material? Are there differences between specialist institutions and more broad-based institutions?

• Are PhD theses more broadly archived and, if so, how? E-theses are considered as part of the “Published Research Papers” in the DPC Bitlist and marked as “Vulnerable”: https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/champion-digital-preservation/bit-list/vulnerable/bitlist-published-research-papers

This paper will outline our research findings in these areas highlighting individual and institutional challenges and suggest initial recommendations for how these types of material can be successfully archived by institutions.

ABSTRACT. Over its millennium-long history, Delhi has seen the rise and fall of many kingdoms/empires with various cities, leaving behind a rich legacy of cultural heritage. One of these cities is Shahjahanabad, established by Shahjahan in 1648 CE. Designed as a model city in terms of its spatial planning and landmark structures, the city has remained resilient in the face of various turbulent events in its history - invasions, its sack in the aftermath of the Revolt of 1857 and the near-complete desolation after the Partition in 1947. It still remains a living city with signicant built as well as intangible heritage in the form of arts, crafts, traditions and their practitioners.

Research in digital humanities has traditionally focused solely on objects and archives. However, the rise of born-digital cultural materials — originating and circulating across various formats and platforms — presents new opportunities and challenges for research, archiving, and disseminating information. ‘Waqiat-e-Dilli’ – a spatio-temporal web portal for Delhi – exemplifies born-digital cultural heritage’s transformative potential. With a mid-19th century city map as the base, the project aims to visualise Shahjahanabad of those times. It also explores Delhi’s socio-cultural evolution by incorporating historical texts, illustrations and photographs into the places marked on the map. It thus underscores the significance of born-digital formats in reimagining and preserving urban histories and memories and making them accessible to contemporary audiences.

ABSTRACT. In the demo, I will be showcasing the multimodal work 'Milkmaid's pitcher', which explores the intersection of born-digital narratives and artistic forms. This project, part of my wider collection 'The Dystopia of Imitation' (supported by Arts Council England), uses interdisciplinary approaches in sculptural and performative art to examine transformative digital remediation.

Central to the presentation is the virtual exhibition of a 3D sculpture inspired by Johannes Vermeer's 'The Milkmaid'. This work exemplifies how performative actions rooted in conceptual art and traditional sculptural techniques can be documented and enhanced through digital technologies. The project highlights the potential of combining physical, intangible cultural heritage as inspiration within a born-digital object and virtual gallery. I will discuss how the integration of virtual gallery spaces as part of the artistic installation redefines the creative process. Methodological considerations will include the use of digital, qualitative art methods to analyse and create born-digital objects. I will also explore the role of metadata standards and markup languages in born-digital art. By merging virtual installations with AR, the project illustrates a seamless transition from traditional to digital art forms, extending the reach of art to a global audience and democratising the creative process.

ABSTRACT. Archival practice is facing a paradigm shift amidst the deluge of born-digital records, which are outpacing, and often replacing, analog acquisitions in twenty-first century repositories. Accordingly, it is essential that current and future practitioners adapt their skills, tools, and practices to reflect the increasingly computationally mediated world.

This poster will highlight the design, scope, and outcomes of a student internship pilot in digital archives. To meet the demands of modern archival education, the internship utilizes the Computational Archival Science (CAS) framework, combining archival expertise with computational thinking. Under the supervision of special collections staff, the intern performs hands-on laboratory work using forensic hardware and tools to migrate, stabilize, analyze, and preserve born-digital records at scale, primarily from data storage media nearing obsolescence. The internship, hosted by an academic institution, supports the repository’s urgent work to improve digital preservation, decrease the volume of “dark” archives, and create scalable digital processing workflows.

Through sharing this case study, presenters hope to engage in conversation with other conference attendees on related approaches to designing experiential learning opportunities for students in the digital humanities and information sciences.

ABSTRACT. The poster examines the initial phase of a survey of Italian Born-digital Literary Archives carried out by the ALDiNA project (Archivi Letterari Digitali Nativi). ALDiNA was initiated within AIUCD (the Italian Association of Digital Humanities) with the support of CLARIN-IT. The aim is to create a network of researchers who study methodologies, tools, and best practices for handling Born-digital Literary Archives, thereby establishing a community of practice dedicated to the investigation of this specific domain. The first action is to map, through a survey, the Italian institutions that preserve born digital literary materials and obsolete media, seeking to understand whether and how practices for the acquisition, preservation, and access to born-digital materials have been implemented. This first phase will allow for an understanding of the maturity and comprehension of the born-digital issue by Italian GLAM’s Institutions, and the development of common strategies for a shared and collective approach to problem-solving. The poster presents the methods employed to develop the survey, the selection of institutions to which it was sent, an analysis of the data obtained, and the perspectives of the project.

ABSTRACT. Massive amounts of digitally born information are constantly created, shared, and reused on the Web, serving as vital records for future historical study. This born-digital heritage lacks analogue equivalents and established best practices for archiving, access, and long-term preservation, making it especially vulnerable due to rapidly changing technology.

New born-digital collections are being developed using advanced web and social media archiving tools. Multilingual access platforms and APIs ensure these archives are user-friendly and accessible. Within the Belgian BelgicaWeb research project, funded by BELSPO through its BRAIN 2.0 programme, KBR and partners Ghent University and the University of Namur are working to make Belgium's born-digital heritage Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). The goal is to offer high-performance research functionalities that are relevant, comprehensive, and easy to use.

This presentation will demonstrate the technical collection and archiving approaches for born- digital information in Belgium. Additionally, it will show how metadata can be aggregated and enriched using technologies like Linked Data and Natural Language Processing to enhance search options and relevance. An internet connection and projection capability will be needed for the demonstration.

ABSTRACT. When addressing the display and preservation of time-based art, the file is but one part of how people experience the artwork in a museum. How do we best capture the technical information—maps, schematics, colour profiles, pointer files—to ensure the future display of an artwork is considered authentic? Our poster will demonstrate the complex network that takes an artist's digital file to the screen, focusing on Groundloop, 2022, by Lisa Reihana. This single channel digital video work is presented on a state-of-the-art 20m wide x 5m high LED screen, with multi-layered audio played back via a single mono speaker. A QR code next to the speaker syncs the Gallery’s listening App with audience phone/devices to listen to its rich stereo track. Configured as a Notch file at 25Hx 10-bit run via a Disguise Server and mapped to the screen using a Novastar controller, this work has provided the Gallery a pivot point from which to rethink its documentation needs to account for highly specialised technical parameters needed for display. As complex works like Groundloop are highly customised, they need special customised documentation to capture all the elements to ensure the artists intent and conservation and digital preservation needs are met.

ABSTRACT. The tool kit provides information on the creation of datasheets for web archives datasets. The tool kit is composed of several parts including templates, examples, and guidance documents.

The expected outcomes of these workshops are threefold. First, we will raise awareness of the Datasheets for Datasets framework in the web archiving community, providing potential connections and shared concerns of data documentation with fields like machine learning. Second, we generate a better understanding of the types of descriptive metadata web archive experts think should accompany web archive collections published as data. Third, we use this discussion to promote stronger communication between web archivists and research users on priorities for documentation.

ABSTRACT. The Harold Pinter Archive contains correspondence dating from 1977 to 2008, including his e-mail archive. In total, the correspondence strand of the archive contains c.20,000 paper letters and c.3500 e-mails.

This project used data analytics and network visualisation to interrogate the ways in which digital and analogue correspondence function together within a literary archive. The attendant paper reflects upon the methodologies used and what the findings might mean for archivists, curators and researchers working with hybrid correspondence collections now and in the future.

The paper outlines the three major stages of work undertaken for the project:

• Metadata Extraction and Preparation using Python: An analysis of what an email is both materially and functionally – what are its constituent parts and in what ways is it like and unlike a physical letter. How can we leverage the highly structured nature of email data to our advantage using computational techniques, and in what ways are we limited by it?
• Network Visualisation using Gephi: How can we represent this metadata in new ways in order to shed light on the activities it represents?
• Reflection: What do the conclusions drawn from these analyses mean for repositories and researchers collecting and using hybrid correspondence collections?

The code produced for the project is collection agnostic and freely available on GitHub. This means that any collecting repository holding email archives in MBOX format can use it to extract GDPR compliant metadata from their collections and visualise them in Gephi, contributing to a growing body of knowledge on digital correspondence. The paper will outline some examples of ways in which to approach this work.

Note: This project was funded by a Coleridge Research Fellowship. The Fellowship was established in 2017 through the generosity of Professor Heather Jackson and her late husband Professor. J.R. de J. Jackson.

ABSTRACT. Academic seminar posters are valuable born-digital local resources that are imperative for university libraries to collect as part of digital resources. Approximately 70 academic seminars are organized monthly by various schools and departments, encompassing cutting-edge topics across diverse disciplines. The sheer volume of these posters and the absence of domain-specific expertise results in low efficiency and high subjectivity during the metadata tagging them by librarians, particularly when extracting keywords and writing abstracts.

To this end, we propose an automatic meta-tagging framework based on large language models (LLMs). It is noticed that LLMs have shown great potential in information organization and management for libraries. We tested their ability in automatically generating keywords and abstracts for seminar posters by utilizing some LLM tools and different prompts. The quantitative evaluation result of our experiments indicates that through carefully designed and optimized prompts, abstracts generated by LLM, such as ChatGPT, are of better quality than those written by librarians. Moreover, this approach significantly reduces librarians' workload, saving them over 80% of their time. In this presentation, we will share the method and process of utilizing LLM for keywords and abstracts generation with concrete examples.

ABSTRACT. For 200 years, the private archives department of the National Library of Norway has collected and handled manuscripts and letters. Chosen parts of the collection have been digitized in the past 15-20 years. We do not yet have proper solutions for preservation and dissemination of born-digital archives.

We are running a pilot project in 2024 focusing on the email correspondence from the beginning of the 2000s, between theater director Kai Johnsen (b. 1962) and author and Nobel prize laureate Jon Fosse (b. 1959). The project aims to devise a methodology for reception, curation, preservation and dissemination of email archives at the National Library. We have decided to use the ePADD software.

We will present the results of the pilot project. The main output will be a sketch of a workflow for handling email archives in our institution, from the first contact with an archive donor to the emails being available in our reading room for researchers.

The library’s department for private archives will collaborate closely with the digital preservation team2, who will provide guidance and expertise regarding administrative metadata and good practice for preservation of the material, including attachments.

One specific challenge we will face is to adapt the tools to the language of our material. Indeed, the named entity recognition and lexical search capabilities offered by ePADD are tailored to the English language, whereas the email archives we will work with are primarily in Norwegian. With help from our digital humanities department, we will ensure that our workflow supports the two official written forms of the Norwegian language, Bokmål and Nynorsk.

ABSTRACT. Blogging has been at times the only source for knowledge sharing within the web archive community. It is only in recent years that a large body of academic publications has become available. However, blogging is still a popular format for practitioners to share the latest updates on the technical as well as curatorial side of web archiving as well as reports back on web archive related events. In April 2023, the UK Web Archive celebrated ten years of Non-Print Legal Deposit through a blog post that reflected on how that legislation shaped the work we do.

The UK Web Archive blog is an important source for any practitioners and researchers interested in seeing how web archiving in the UK has changed over time. All British Library blogs have been archived by the UK Web Archive and are openly accessible through the UK Web Archive website. In 2018, there was a change to the requirements on how public sector organisations publish on the web in the UK. This change was to ensure that all postings were in line with accessibility guidance. This change to how we publish on the UK Web Archive blog is an opportunity to reflect on what has been previously discussed on the blog. This poster will illustrate what was discussed on the UK Web Archive Blog from November 2011 to December 2018.

ABSTRACT. This poster illustrates some of the key findings of the WARCnet Special Report ‘Scholarly Use of Web Archives Across Ireland: The Past, Present & Future(s’)’ that was published in August 2023. The purpose of WARCnet Special Report was to:

1. Examine the causes for the loss of digital heritage and how this relates to Ireland.

2. Offer an overview of the landscape of web archives based across Ireland, and their availability, and accessibility as resources for Irish based research.

3. Provide some insight into the awareness of, and engagement with web archives in Irish third-level academic institutions.

In this poster we offer an overview of the landscape of web archives based across Ireland. We offer some perspectives which may be useful when it comes to providing support and incentives to assist scholars and educators in the use of the archived web for Irish based research and teaching. This case study will be of benefit not only for web archive users but also the wider web archiving community as many of the challenges faced by the Irish web archiving community, and Irish based researchers will not be unique to Ireland.

ABSTRACT. The paper examines the challenge of managing Born-digital Literary Archives preserved in obsolete media. The nature of these archives is interesting as it reflects changes in writers’ working practices in response to digital technologies, thereby redefining the boundaries of their archives. The main case study of the research is a hybrid archive: the collection of the Italian poet Franco Fortini (1917-1994), preserved at the “Biblioteca di Area Umanistica” of the University of Siena. This collection includes, in addition to papers (correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, prints), also 3.5’’ floppy disks. Some of these floppy disks contains a copy of Fortini’s last computer, including material partially used for the posthumous edition of Un giorno o l’altro (edited by Marianna Marrucci and Valentina Tinacci, Quodlibet 2006), one of the first Italian cases of an edition derived from a hybrid archive. In 2022, a campaign was launched to recover and secure the floppy disks along with other materials from special collections. The recovery activities include bit-by-bit extraction of the materials contained in the floppy disks. Employing forensic methodologies provides a rigorous approach to the study of electronic texts, suggesting a demonstrable materiality (through bits and data traces visible via MFM representations) for phenomena we call virtual. Digital forensics can verify relationships and filiations between different documents, even apparently unrelated ones, as well as highlight an author’s compositional and writing strategies.

ABSTRACT. This study explores the transformative potential of digital journaling combined with visualization techniques, focusing on the curation, preservation, and dynamic reinterpretation of personal journals as digital artefacts. It examines how these tools facilitate deeper engagement with personal history and memory through the lens of narratology, emphasizing the construction and deconstruction of narrative forms in digital spaces.

Digital journaling transcends traditional archival functions as a portal for navigating complex temporal landscapes and reinterpreting chronological records. Unlike maps that depend on fixed points, such as the true north, digital maps utilize visual symbols and hypertext links to help users navigate expansive interfaces. This evolution represents a tool shift and a fundamental transformation in perceiving and interacting with information. Mirroring technological developments, the processes of creating, assessing, refining, and reintegrating digital memories reflect the recursive training cycles of artificial intelligence. Each cycle improves digital archives and influences future content creation and sense-making.

Utilizing tools like Obsidian and its Excalidraw plugin, this research demonstrates how digital environments support the recursive nature of narrative construction. When transformed into data, memories are not just passively recorded as markdown files; they are actively constructed and reconstructed through continuous visual mapping and narrative editing. This dynamic interaction enables individuals to alter their digital past and future projections through recursive interactions with chronological reviews, highlighting the critical role of born-digital memories in understanding how narratives evolve in digital formats.

The study emphasizes the impoance of visual thinking, narratology, and digital tools in understanding how digital environments impact human cognition and cultural memo. It hopes to bring new perspectives to using digital technology to enrich personal memo and community heritage.

ABSTRACT. The practice of recording and uploading folk performances by local YouTubers has become widespread across several districts of West Bengal. As we observed during fieldwork, these YouTubers, who are usually local youth and enthusiasts and occasionally, performers of specific genres, record live concerts or arrange musical sessions with individual artists, document these music-videos systematically with details about the performances and upload them on their channels. This paper examines the character of the digital collections that result from the combined efforts of various actors in the YouTube ecosystem by drawing upon our long-term engagement with Baul-Fakirs and Jhumur singers who variously participate in these networks and the YouTubers who record them.

Being in a “multi-sided market” such as YouTube - viewers who variously function as audience and as resource in the attention economy, advertisers who push revenue to buy eyeballs on an algorithmically controlled platform play a vital role in determining the nature of the collection. For the YouTube channels sharing Bengal’s folk music genres, the role of the content-creators is shared. YouTubers have the stated intention of preservation and dissemination of local cultural heritage as well as the knowhow of recording, editing and disseminating content on digital platforms. They partner with folk performers who lack the technical knowhow of digital platforms but intend to enhance in-real-life following through online dissemination. The performers may or may not receive share of the YouTubers’ revenue. While the content-creators may prioritize profitable content over those meriting attention, they cannot guarantee the permanence and sustainability of the content on their channels owing to the volatility inherent in digital platforms.

Despite these limitations and the contested status of YouTube as an archive, through careful curatorial and documentation efforts in most cases, these localized YouTube channels invite comparison with traditional audio-visual archives. This comparison is fruitful since many Baul-Fakir and Jhumur lyrics and the voices of many rural, grassroot-level artists, who hardly manage to publish records with well-known labels, are thus preserved, albeit temporarily, and circulated beyond local circles. Our research shows that such collaboration shapes “counter-archives” 5 and “informal archives”. Despite a few limitations these channels may collectively function as archives, especially when there are very few traditional archives that preserve such a wide range of peripheral voices and folk-art forms in the state.

ABSTRACT. Preservation and archiving of born-digital cultural records rely on an extremely complex set of practices with negative environmental effects. Dealing with fragile objects such as obsolete digital media and digital formats, as well as web archives, social media archives and interactive media, digital preservation requires energy-consuming and resource-intensive processes, specialised (software and hardware) tools, devices and systems in place while at the same time these practices are inevitably producing undocumented flows of e-waste and physical waste. Furthermore, digital preservation relies on a multi-layered hardware infrastructure including computing devices, other devices with embedded microprocessors, data centres, cellular towers, satellites, and the network required to connect them all: an energy-hungry infrastructure, also vulnerable to disruptions in energy and raw material supplies.

Simultaneously, since late 2022 the accelerating developments around AI and ML have swiftly gained momentum, while also bringing to the forefront significant concerns around the environmental footprint of computationally intensive tasks and their supporting infrastructure. Collecting massive volumes of data and then training large language models (LLMs) by parsing and computing linkages within these datasets requires huge amounts of computing power and data storage. All these components and processes rely on large data centres with massive power and cooling resources and increased carbon emissions, alongside high-performance computing devices and the network infrastructure required to connect and support them.

However, the environmental impact of this multi-layered infrastructure for computationally intensive work in cultural heritage is often overlooked. Ironically, the digital preservation community has first-hand experience of the complex (and often dirty) materiality of digital content, records and infrastructure and how producing, preserving, and accessing all these components of our digital world has an immense environmental impact. Current data centres and the infrastructure we have in place, set aside our planet, will not be able to cope either with the constantly growing amount of born-digital data we need to preserve nor with the race of (generative) AI. In addition, due to the nature of the current infrastructure funding landscape in digital cultural heritage, infrastructure investments for born-digital preservation and AI-based systems in the UK and internationally are treated separately, without provision of assessing their shared needs and requirements in terms of computing power, data storage and resources. The effect is a repeated cycle of fragmented investment, wasted labour, duplication of machines, systems, resources, and maintenance costs,and resulting to even greater environmental impact.

This roundtable will bring together a group of digital preservation practitioners, AI-focused data scientists, digital cultural heritage and infrastructure professionals to reflect on and explore the requirements, challenges and benefits of an environmentally sustainable, shared infrastructure provision for computationally intensive work in digital cultural heritage.

Moderator: Anna-Maria Sichani, BRAID fellow, School of Advanced Study, UoL

Speakers

Jane Winters, Professor of Digital Humanities, School of Advanced Study, UoL

Jane is Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study. She has led or co-directed a range of digital projects, including most recently the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association: a Network for Research Capacity Enhancement; CLEOPATRA: Cross-Lingual Event-Centric Open Analytics Research Academy; WARCnet; Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities; Digging into Linked Parliamentary Metadata; and Traces through Time: Prosopography in Practice across Big Data. Jane's research interests include digital history, born-digital archives (particularly the archived web), the use of social media by cultural heritage institutions, and open access publishing. She has published most recently on Non-Print Legal Deposit and web archives, born-digital archives and the problem of search, and the archiving and analysis of national web domains.

Andy Jackson, Preservation Registries Technical Architect , Digital Preservation Coalition

Andrew is the Preservation Registries Technical Architect at the Digital Preservation Coalition. After starting out as a post-doctoral computational physicist and high-performance computing consultant, he shifted to working on digital preservation as part of the PLANETS and SCAPE EU-funded research projects, hosted at the British Library. He later became the Technical Lead for the UK Web Archive, with overall responsibility for the technical design and implementation of that petabyte-scale preservation and access service. After more than a decade of experience delivering digital preservation services at the British Library, Andrew has joined the Digital Preservation Coalition to pursue a new research agenda focussed on understanding the systems of people and information that make digital preservation possible.

Leontien Talboom, Technical Analyst , Cambridge University Libraries

Leontien Talboom is a technical analyst in the digital preservation team, located at Cambridge University Library. Her role involves transferring data from digital carriers (optical discs, hard drives, floppy disks, etc.) to a more secure digital repository.

Before working at Cambridge, Leontien completed a collaborative PhD with University College London and The National Archives (UK). This work focused on access to born-digital material within memory institutions. As part of the collaborative component of this work, Leontien worked on a computationalaccess guide with the Digital Preservation Coalition, joined numerous hackathons, and ran a Machine Learning club for archivists.

James Baker, Professor of Digital Humanities, University of Southampton DH

James is the Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton. A historian by training, he works at the intersection of history, cultural heritage, anddigital technologies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar, a Trustee of the Programming Historian (Charity Number 1195875), and academic lead for the Southampton Digital Preservation Advisory Unit.

James has led a number of AHRC-funded and externally funded research projects including ‘Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women’s Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage, 1870 – 1950‘, ‘Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship’, ‘Coptic Culture Conservation Collective‘, British Council, and ‘Heritage Repertoires for inclusive and sustainable development’, ‘Digital Forensics in the Historical Humanities‘, ‘Making African Connections: Decolonial Futures for Colonial Collections’.

Giulia Osti, PhD student, University College Dublin

Giulia Osti is a d-real(SFI) funded PhD candidate in the School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin. She researches the intersection of data and artificial intelligence ethics in the context of digital cultural heritage, with a particular focus on the evolution of the Collections as Data movement and its developments.

Giovanni Colavizza, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Bologna/Odoma

Giovanni Colavizza is specialised in machine learning applications for cultural and artistic heritage, and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums). His research interests span the automatic recognition of texts, representation learning for language, images, and graphs, and quantitative methods for cultural and social data analysis. Thematic areas of interest comprise historical, literary and artistic sources, scientific communication, social media, and Wikipedia. Colavizza is also the CTO and co-founder of Odoma, a Swiss-based studio providing customised machine learning solutions for the cultural and creative sectors.

ABSTRACT. This panel explores Usenet as a historical corpus, covering discourse from the 1980scto today. We first (re-)introduce Usenet to the scholarly community, outlining its history, technology, and culture, and critically assessing its value for scientific and humanistic research. We then survey past work on Usenet archives, describe the sort of tools and resources necessary to support future research scenarios, and discuss thelegal issues concerning use of Usenet texts. Finally, we present a case study on flame wars within Usenet, exploring certain methodologogical and ethical questions and their implications for contextualizing the data and preserving users’ privacy.

PAPER 1

Usenet unearthed: Rediscovering a treasure trove of born-online material

While global computer networks have opened up tremendous opportunities for studies of born-online texts, most collections under study are drawn exclusively from the Web. Usenet, the largest pre-Web network, presents a largely untapped potential as a historical corpus, covering a variety of discourse types and topics from the 1980s to the present. However, its use in research is hindered not just by technical issues concerning preservation and access, but because Usenet-specific research methods are increasingly forgotten or outdated, and because awareness of Usenet itself is fading. This paper aims to stem these methodological trends by re-introducing Usenet to researchers in the social sciences, arts, and humanities who are interested in studying (historical) born-digital material and the online communities that produced it. We provide an overview of Usenet’s history, technology, administration, culture, societal impact, and current status as a living online community, with a view towards critically assessing the value of Usenet for scientific/humanistic research, fostering development of research questions in these fields, identifying the characteristics that distinguish Usenet from other Internet corpora and their bearing on research use cases, and ensuring that Usenet-born material is understood in its proper social and technical context.

PAPER 2

Challenges and prospective solutions for scholarly inquiry with Usenet archives

Usenet is a decentralized, global discussion network that has been in operation since 1980. Having produced hundreds of gigabytes of original text, much of which predates the World Wide Web, Usenet presents tremendous opportunities for data- driven, text-based research. However, there has been relatively little past work to systematically collect and present this material in a way that is useful for scholarly research, and to authoritatively address important legal questions concerning its use. In this paper, we critically survey past attempts at constructing and using Usenetarchives, with a view towards characterizing the models, methods, and tools necessary to produce structured and annotated archives of Usenet texts, and to retrieve, explore, and analyze these texts in a manner supporting realistic research scenarios. We also discuss the legal rights and responsibilities that scholars have when collecting, processing, reporting on, and redistributing Usenet texts, in terms of copyright, rights to privacy and personality (data protection, moral rights, etc.) and other relevant fields, and considering the jurisdictional questions that may arise from Usenet’s multinational nature.

PAPER 3

Studying the “tired old flame queens”: Flame wars within Usenet archives

While often discussed for its role as an archive of early computing history, Usenet was just as notable for its prodigious flame wars, which could remain ongoing for years. However, most of the research in this area focuses on how and why users flame, as well as the practice’s impact on communities. Very little work, in contrast, focuses on the afterlife of flame wars within the Usenet archive, which raise a variety of complicated methodological and ethical questions for researchers. In this paper, I’ll explore some of these questions through the case study of a multi-year flame war between two well-known posters, Lacey Leigh and Laura Blake, who played an important role in popularizing “cisgender” (Dame-Griff 2023). In studying these kinds of ongoing clashes, which began in alt.support.crossdressing but soon sprawled across a variety of newsgroups, including alt.magic.secrets, I argue researchers must contextualize posts in Usenet archives not just within a given news- group, but the wider network as well. They also have an ethical responsibility to reduce possible harms, including the spread of personally identifiable information beyond the archive.

ABSTRACT. Within digital preservation literature, the physical carriers of born-digital records – floppy discs, CD-Rs, hard drives – are treated as temporary and incidental to the content which is to be preserved. Yet while this may be true in an organisational context, within an individual’s archive the carrier can often be vital context. This paper will look at examples of born-digital records from the archive of writer and designer Charles Jencks (1939-2019) to explore what can be learned from the physical carriers, and how best to describe and convey this information within the archival catalogue.

The floppy disks within Jencks’ archive show evidence of regular re-use and re-labelling of containers, which echo his professional practice of re-visiting and substantially re-writing his own publications. Annotations in multiple handwriting also show the evidence of an unseen second individual, presumed to be a PA. The paper will argue that in these instances the physical carrier is crucial for understanding the context of the records’ creation and that the migration process – while essential for preservation – entails many of the same trade-offs as the digitisation of physical records.

Jencks’ architectural criticism was closely associated with postmodernism, and the catalogue of his archive is attempting to follow his principles. In particular, this means a commitment to the visibility of the archival process and the role that the archivist plays in shaping the historical record. By making decisions about what to record within the catalogue, the archivist helps to shape and co-create the archival record. While this was less obvious with paper records, with born-digital the archivist can no longer pretend this intrusion isn’t happening; the question is more how to record it.

ABSTRACT. In 2009, an entire issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly was dedicated to a topic that is likely to resonate with anyone ever involved in managing a Digital Humanities project – “How do we know when we’re done? What does it mean to “finish” a piece of digital work?” (Kirschenbaum, 2009). The open-ended nature of DH projects can be quite liberating but may also result in limited planning for long-term sustainability, discoverability and access to completed projects. This problem was comprehensively addressed in the context of King’s Digital Labs’ reflections on trying to archive 100 DH projects (Smithies, J. et al, 2019).

Web archiving provides one possible solution for long-term preservation of online projects, but it requires raising awareness among DH researchers and forming partnerships with cultural heritage institutions. The H2020 initiative by the Portuguese Web Archive to preserve research and development project websites hosted on the .eu domain shows that this is a viable solution, although the implementation may not be straightforward for web archives that, unlike Arquivo.pt, do not provide public access to archived content. Important insights will also be gleaned from the recently launched pilot project at the Digital Depository of Ireland (Data Preservation for Legacy Research Collections).

This presentation builds on a workshop organised at the Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries 2023, which brought together DH researchers and ALM practitioners. We will briefly cover current practices related to the long-term preservation of DH projects, discuss challenges related to the maintenance, storage, and cataloguing of such initiatives, and present the process of developing guidelines for researchers and archivists.

ABSTRACT. The 1980ies marked the arrival of the home-computer. Computing systems became affordable and got marketed to private consumers, through state-supported programs and new economic opportunities (Haddon 1988; Williams 1976). Early models, such as the ZX Spectrum or Texas Instrument TI-99/4A quickly became popular in Europe and opened the door for digital computing to enter the home. This period also marks the advent of homebrew video game culture and newly emerging programming practices, onto which this proposal concentrates (Alberts and Oldenziel 2014).

Recent studies in video game history have expanded beyond the traditional US-Japanese focus, revealing the significance of local video game cultures in regions such as the UK, Australia, France, and Czechoslovakia (Kirkpatrick 2015; Wade 2016; Swalwell 2021; Blanchet 2020; Švelch 2018). Efforts to preserve local video game cultures are now critical due to the risks posed by obsolete technology and data rot, with various strategies focusing on maintaining the games’ context (Pfister 2023; Guay-Bélanger 2022) and the technology required to run them (Aycock 2016). Here, the role of source code is highlighted in critical code studies, emphasizing its value not just as functional machine instructions but as socio-historically contextual artefacts that can offer insights into cultural semiotics (Marino 2020; Berry 2015; Willumsen 2016).

To do justice to code’s contextuality, we need to consider it as the result of a situated practice (Haraway 1988). Tracing thick actor-networks (Latour 2007; Dumit 2014; Guay-Bélanger 2022; Presner 2014) is proposed as a contextualizing preservation strategy for programming practices. As part of a larger effort to research and preserve Swiss video game history, this proposal reports on an ongoing case study on homebrew video game development in the early 1980ies. The case study’s games were written for the TI-99/4A and the Commodore 64 and saved on audio cassettes and 5.25” floppy disks. The paper outlines the proposed strategy through oral history interviews with developers, close reading of source material of programming knowledge as well as design documents, critical readings of the games’ source code itself, and lastly, the preservation process. Context is crucial in enabling the preservation of these ephemeral programming practices of early digital video game history.

ABSTRACT. Video games are, arguably, the most prominent among born-digital media. Their explosive growth in the last three decades has created an impression of their durability, but they are, in fact, very ephemeral. This has compelled a number of cataloging and archiving initiatives, each of which comes with its specific challenges, including (but limited to) the lack of centralized information gathering about games; logistics and finance of creating and maintaining such initiatives; technological challenges of software and hardware obsolescence, and the maze of copyright and IP concerns. Parallel to these initiatives, the culture of prosumption and “playbour” (Kücklich 2005) has resulted in underground archiving projects whose goal is to catalog, organize, annotate, and preserve bodies of video games and game-related materials. In terms of comprehensiveness and research rigor, some of these rival academic- and museum-grade collections (whose existence has not been as easy as it might seem, either) but many are simultaneously deemed outright illegal or questionably legal under many national regulations (Newman 2013; Zainzinger 2012).

In our presentation, we would like to consider the ethics of using such projects in official cataloging and archiving initiatives and ask a cluster of interrelated questions. Under what circumstances are researchers allowed to use such pre-existing datasets? What kind of acknowledgment and attribution is appropriate? How to navigate a relationship with individuals and small communities that are usually responsible for such efforts? Are truly comprehensive academic or institutional initiatives even possible without relying on the collective efforts of amateur game archivists whose work now spans decades? Our discussion will be grounded in our own experience and process of creating an academic-grade public catalog of all Polish video games as part of the 5-year “Polish Digital Game Heritage 1958-2025” grant from Poland’s National Program for the Development of the Humanities.

ABSTRACT. This research paper delves into the complex interplay between posthuman gaming, cultural identity, and embodied memory in digital spaces, particularly in the context of the indie video game Venba (Visai Studios 2023). This paper explores the ways in which Venba utilizes the gamified act of cooking traditional Tamil recipes to affirm cultural identity in a ludic environment. The game, which focuses on a Canadian Tamil immigrant couple’s attempts to preserve their cultural heritage and form a bond with their son through culinary practices, presents a unique case study for understanding how born-digital artefacts like videogames can contribute to the documentation and preservation of cultural memory. In addition, this paper draws on the concept of collective body memories (Fuchs 2017) to argue that games are a viable digital space to mediate not just episodic memories, but also of procedural memories such as the cooking of traditional recipes, which are quite specific to cultural groups. This paper also considers play as a posthuman activity, and by examining Venba, explores how the mediation of heritage and memories through games are facilitated through the entanglement of the player with the game and its actors, giving rise to the ‘avatar-player assemblage’ (Wilde & Evans 2019), a figure in which subjectivities are entangled andownership of memories are not concrete.

ABSTRACT. As the extent and diversity of born-digital digital collections expands, and new digital methods of scholarship are more widely adopted, opportunities have emerged for how researchers and librarians can work together to support computational approaches to using born-digital collections. This roundtable will feature discussion by a diverse set of scholars, faculty administrators, librarians, and product and policy leads, expounding on different strategies and programs for supporting text and data mining and other data-driven uses of large born-digital collections.

Participating scholars and digital humanists will describe how research methodologies are changing in light of the ability to interpret large volumes of web archives and born-digital collections as datasets and how these collections are enabling new forms of scholarly knowledge creation. Faculty research administrators will discuss work cultivating early-career scholars’ digital methodologies in support of disciplinary work that builds research communities and expands the study of contemporary born-digital archives. Library-based product directors and legal experts will describe how growing born-digital archives, changing research methodologies and technologies and law and policy issues inform the development of new products, guidance, and educational initiatives that facilitate text and data mining of heterogeneous, transnational, large-scale collections.

Together the roundtable participants represent a diverse set of senior-level staff/researchers with decades of work to build and expand computational access to, and use of, born-digital archives. The roundtable will provide expert commentary on the skills, methods, products, and training needed to conduct and support emerging forms of research. Roundtable members will give short presentations and engage in a group discussion with a focus on audience engagement and questions and answers. Overall, the roundtable will highlight innovative research approaches and summarize product and educational work to advance computational scholarly use of born-digital heritage collections.

Speakers:

Ian Milligan is professor of history at the University of Waterloo, where he also serves as Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight and Analysis. Milligan’s primary research focus is on how historians can use web archives, as well as the impact of digital sources on historical practice more generally. His next book, Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory, will appear in December 2024 with Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rachael G. Samberg is an attorney and the program director of UC Berkeley’s Scholarly Communication & Information Policy office. A Duke Law graduate, Rachael practiced litigation at Fenwick & West LLP for seven years before spending six years at Stanford Law School, where she was Head of Reference & Instructional Services and a Lecturer in Law. Rachael speaks nationally and internationally on scholarly communication, copyright, licensing, privacy, and ethics. She has been project director for NEH-funded grants regarding legal literacies for text and data mining in U.S. and cross-border contexts. Currently, she is supporting regulatory analysis of Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions for text and data mining research, and working to advance researchers’ rights to utilize artificial intelligence.

Valérie Schafer has been a Professor in Contemporary European History at the C²DH (Centre for Contemporary and Digital History) at the University of Luxembourg since 2018. She previously worked at the French CNRS and is still an Associate Researcher at the Center for Internet and Society (CIS – CNRS UPR 2000). She specializes in the history of computing, telecommunications and data networks. Her main research interests are the history of the Internet and the Web, the history of European digital cultures and infrastructures, and born-digital heritage (especially Web archives). She is a co-founder of the journal Internet Histories. Digital Technology, Culture and Society (T aylor & Francis).

Matthew Weber is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University. Matthew studies organizational change, news media and institutions. Recent work includes a longitudinal project mapping ecosystems of local news in communities. Matthew is leading an initiative to support the development of media ecosystem research. His work is funded by the National Science Foundation, Knight Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy, among others. Matthew received his PhD in 2010 from the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Southern California.

Jefferson Bailey is Director of Archiving & Data Services at the Internet Archive where he manages a range of Internet Archive's products and services for web archiving, digital preservation, computational research services, open-source software development, and community archiving initiatives. These products and programs have been used by over 1,500 institutions in over 40 countries worldwide to preserve and provide open access to millions of digital collections. He works closely with research institutions, universities, libraries, governments, non-profits, and others on collaborative digital infrastructure, digital archiving, data mining and AI/ML, community building, educational and training, and other strategic initiatives.