ABSTRACT. In the 1980s and 1990s, home computers began to populate living rooms and workspaces and, like gaming consoles before them, gradually became everyday objects. The culture surrounding these devices was shaped by a rapidly growing international market for application programs and computer games. Simultaneously, home computers provided many opportunities for hobbyists to engage in digital creativity as programmers, graphic artists, or musicians.

The emerging digital grassroots culture can be exemplified by disk magazines: electronic journals distributed on floppy disks. These magazines, also called “Diskmags,” were often interactive and multimedia, featuring images and sound. They existed for nearly every home computer system and were easier to produce than paper magazines for those with the necessary skills.

Since libraries and archives did not catalog or preserve born-digital literature at that time, the “Diskmags Project,” funded in 2023 by a German NFDI consortium, was launched to document this unique journal form. The project's first phase involved creating a catalog, while the second phase focused on content analysis.

The paper presents the project’s results and discusses possible expansions and future research. With ~2,500 diskmag titles and 10,000+ individual issues, the quantity of diskmags was much larger than initially expected. The catalog provides bibliographical information and links to the disk images, and is open for collaboration with citizen scientists. The content analysis resulted in a text collection which will be published as a search index, providing statistical results and references to the sources.

The project laid the foundation for broader exploration of an early digital media phenomenon,offering insights into diverse digital landscapes across different computer systems and countries. Future sub-projects will delve deeper into various aspects and aim to integrate this information into broader infrastructures like libraries and research data portals, also tackling the question of long-time preservation of copyright-protected heritage.

ABSTRACT. Whilst a significant body of scholarship on artists using technology exists, little has been done on 1980s micro-computer art. Most research to date either covers the very early period of computer art or the 1990s, the period in which the cyber-arts were ascendant. Little of the digital art of the 1980s has been collected to date in Australia, and so asking informants if they have any born digital materials has become a standard part of the research protocol in this large project. But what happens after an informant says yes? How do Humanities scholars get to the point where they can view and meaningfully interact with the contents of floppy disks with which they have been entrusted?

This paper reflects on our experience collaborating to image and emulate a series of Amiga artworks that were surfaced as a result of interviews with four artist-informants: Jeanelle Hurst, Adam Wolter, Gary Warner, and Sally Pryor. Many media, computer and art historians are accustomed to conducting mixed methods research, perhaps combining oral history interviews with analysis of archives or artefacts, but there are complicating factors when the archives or artefacts concerned are born digital. Having access to the digital content -- the works themselves -- has undoubtedly deepened the research, and has raised further questions about artists with archives that require stabilising.

ABSTRACT. Teletext, a standard for distributing basic visual and textual information via the spare capacity of analogue television transmission, was popular in the United Kingdom between 1974 and its shutdown in 2012. It acted as a proto-Web and fostered an active community that has remained interested in its afterlife. While the institutional archives of the BBC, Channel 4, and the Independent Broadcast Authority (IBA) hold little direct evidence of the uses of teletext, a group of folk archivists have actively been preserving parts of this history.

Teletext provides a unique example of electronic media digitization as it was essentially a secondary use of the television signal and was part of a live transmission rather than something that was permanently stored. Teletext editors would often over-write pre-existing material to make updates. As a consequence, the only way to reconstruct teletext material is to extract the relevant data from home recorded VHS cassettes where the teletext data was a byproduct of the recording. This leads to a highly distorted record as there is a disconnect between the reason for recording (and preserving) and the importance of the teletext transmission recorded.

In this paper, I instead focus on the presentation and preservation of this material through a case study of the Teletext Archaeologist’s archives. The team behind the project reconstruct the teletext feed into a website that renders the transmission into a browsable interactive HTML document. Through exploring how this has been achieved, we can see the affordances and trade-offs of this approach to retaining this intangible cultural heritage of the United Kingdom.

ABSTRACT. Social platforms mediate human interactions at a societal scale. Much of that activity is governed by legal texts and policies. Terms of use (TOUs) are the cornerstone of the legal relationship between platforms and their users. Some TOUs apply to hundreds of millions (e.g., Snapchat) or billions (e.g., Facebook) of users. In this presentation, we focus on TOUs as an important but neglected historical collection of digital-born texts.

Firstly, we describe the process through which we created a historical corpus, meticulously collecting TOUs from twenty-one prominent digital platforms. Ranging from 1999 to 2024, the dataset amounts to 323 texts, comprising just over 3 million words. Given the transient nature of these born-digital texts, we discuss to what extent such contracts could and should be preserved for scholars. Because only some platforms provide public archives, historical records of these texts are difficult to gather.

Secondly, we scrutinize how these contracts have changed over time. Given their size and complexity, we leverage computational methods to investigate processes of adaptation, more precisely patterns of text reuse and deletion, to understand how their content changed over time, and to what extent these contracts converged (or diverged). We use embeddings extracted from recently produced Large Language Models, to model meaning at the sentence level and measure the semantic change across contracts over the last 25 years.

Thirdly, we complement the macroanalysis on contractual change with a more targeted analysis of how TOUs determine key substantive issues. In doing so, we combine linguistic and legal analysis to assess how TOUs are shaping legal rights in the digital realm. For instance, we examine terms that determine access to justice (e.g., arbitration and class waivers) and shift risks (e.g., waivers and indemnification).

ABSTRACT. The Digital Repository of Ireland is Core Trust Seal certified repository, providing digital preservation and sustained public access to Ireland’s digital humanities, social sciences and heritage. Working with a variety of depositors from university libraries and archives to public bodies and research projects, the DRI provides stewardship for digital collections: providing preservation and a single point of access, while allowing depositors to retain ownership and set their own licences and level of access.

The DRI recognises the inequality of access and preservation for smaller community-based archives and activists which often lack archival expertise and funding, and are reliant on volunteers to maintain under-represented and vulnerable archival collections. Since 2019, the DRI has run a Community Archive Award scheme, allowing unfunded archives and researchers the opportunity of preservation in the DRI, with assistance for the winners to deposit the material in a form that they feel maintains the integrity of their collections.

The winner of the 2020 Community Archive scheme was the Asylum Archive. This collection includes photographs, academic essays and audio interviews, that document life under Direct Provision, collected by artist, activist, and scholar Vukašin Nedeljković, a former resident of a Direct Provision Centre.

Direct Provision is the name used to describe the accommodation, food, money and medical services provided to asylum seekers in Ireland while their international protection application is being assessed. Since its introduction in 1999, the controversial system has been widely criticised by human rights groups and met by various protests, demonstrations and legal challenges. While the Irish Government announced plan to end Direct Provision by 2024, the system currently remains active.

The Asylum Archive represents a hugely important effort to capture the experience of the Direct Provision System and provide a lasting record of the system’s use by the Irish State.

It exists as both an archival record, but also as a visual art project. As such it provided ethical, legal, methodological, curatorial and technological challenges to the DRI in terms of assessing the content and providing adequate preservation as well as representation in the repository.

Our paper will look at some of the challenges involved in preserving the collection and preparing it for publication before the end of 2024. These include:

- technical challenges, addressing issues of frailty, duplication and identification in the ‘master’ copies provided to the DRI on a physical hard drive;

- methodological questions regarding the appropriate levels of metadata and description to be applied to the collection, increasing its usability while retaining the minimal aesthetic of the original work;

- ethical and legal challenges related to personal data identifiable in the collection contents, representation, and questions relating to publication of records of traumatic experiences.

ABSTRACT. The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) (www.emkp.org) supports teams and communities to document material practices and knowledge systems that are rapidly disappearing across the globe. The programme was established in 2018 with funding from Arcadia, and is hosted by the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the British Museum. Through a diverse range of digital media that goes from low-tech solutions (e.g., drawing, photo, audio-visual) to more experimental applications (e.g., 3D, VR) EMKP supports the recording of a type of knowledge that is neither linear nor fixed, but alive in communities' traditions, memories, and practices. The goal is for these born-digital resources to be stewarded and preserved in an open access digital repository (https://drs.britishmuseum.org/EMKP) to remain accessible for future generations.

Since its inception in 2018, the programme has funded more than 80 projects in 47 countries providing a rich range of case studies of how digital technologies can enable the documentation of material knowledge. While the effectiveness of these tools in capturing and presenting complex systems of individual and overlapping information has become apparent, challenges remain. First and foremost, the difficulties to collect alternative ontologies in a system that is flexible enough to incorporate new information but also robust enough to enable access and retrievability. Second, in the ‘afterlife’ of the assets, the appropriate management, curation and dissemination of the results, protecting the rights of the original knowledge holders, and listening to the international users’ needs.

Drawing on case studies from EMKP projects, this paper explores the challenges that the programme has faced in the development of a digital environment that is aligned with the particularities of collective material knowledge, but also responsive to issues of cultural sensitivity, intellectual property right and access.

ABSTRACT. In China, the term "digital collection" used to be mentioned mainly in the field of libraries, archives, and museums (LAM), but changed to specifically refer to Chinese-style NFT since 2021.

Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is asset tokenized via a blockchain. The most widespread NFT application in the sport industry is digital collection.

Obviously, Chinese words "digital collection" has no literal correspondence to NFT, but it is actually a sinicized NFT in Chinese context. To avoid confusion in this conference essay, CDC is used in this paper to refer to China's digital collection, namely China's version of NFT. CDCs downplay NFTs’ attributes of cryptofinance, so their application scenarios are basically limited in the cultural fields, most related to LAMs. CDCs include subsequent-digital and born-digital products, the latter is growing rapidly in the sports’ field.

Sports collections play an important role in sports’ memory. In 2022, Chinese Olympic Museum released three kinds of CDCs, lowering the entry threshold for young people who are Internet natives. It also enables sports culture be inherited in the virtual world.

Traditional sport collections in LAMs record the past of sports, however, recording latest development must enter the digital space. As librarians of a sport institute, also members of a provincial sport philately and collection association, the authors has been studying CDCs from theperspective of LAM and their broader ecosystems.

Although CDCs are within China, NFT is an international issue for digital collections. In the long run, the NFTs’ market incentive mechanism will promote the explosive growth of born-digital assets worldwide. The authors try to explore the LAMs' role in NFTs’ collection and related legal and technical concerns. Along with the rapid development of metaverse economy, such problems are crucial to be researched.

ABSTRACT. Digital born creations have been fostered by the crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Italy, the first European country to implement the lockdown, faced a dual reality during this period in response to the closure of cultural institutions and heritage sites. On one hand, the crisis exposed the vulnerability of cultural institutions without a significant digital backwardness creating an interruption of their public services. On the other hand, the crisis spurred a new wave of digital creative solutions by a wide range of cultural producers. The resulting innovative digital born formats provided a glimpse into an unsuspected cultural world. Unlike other European museums where new digital formats were ongoing by initiatives conceived for shaping new contents and promoting new understandings of heritage, Italian policies and investments were mostly concentrated on existing huge collections, their preservation and exhibition. Digital born collections or crowdsourcing were almost unknown or ignored. The crisis unveiled not only new modalities for cultural consumption but also new hybrid culture and arts productions as well as the contextual creation of collective memories.

As a result, unexpected but fragile heterogeneous digital formats were created, not easy to catch, valuable to preserve. This intervention analyses this production through insights among the over 700 digital born initiatives representing a variety of formats and user engagement methods, all made accessible, networked and disseminated by the MNEMONIC Atlas. Conceived with Digital Humanities methodologies, the research initiative created a new digital environment, the Italian Hub of Cultural resilience, a web-based Geographic Information System open platform. Through a dual interactive user experience, MNEMONIC helps reconceptualize the materials and practices associated with cultural heritage and memory. The intervention also focuses on the generation of digital formats in emergency period as a form of cultural resilience, fostering an early recovery.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines born-digital invocations of Palestinian cultural heritage on Instagram. Working in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, to encompass the global Palestinian diaspora, it examines accounts and hashtags focused on Palestine and heritage. Heritage-focused accounts are primarily operated by individual users and often repurpose publicly available photographs to highlight aspects of Palestinian heritage, although some monetize that heritage by promoting goods for sale. Heritage-focused hashtags accompany specific posts in accounts that often do not focus on Palestinian cultural heritage. Few accounts or hashtags have high follower or viewer numbers on their own, but in the aggregate, they provide a ground-up, multi-vocal influence on other Instagram users.

The paper identifies posts’ common visual themes and analyzes post texts to elucidate arguments like the history of Palestinian urbanity or the dignity of rural life. It notes the self-interventions through which heritage accounts interrupt their focus to respond to major events impacting Palestine or Palestinians, often via Instagram "stories” – as with stories showing Israel’s June 2024 attacks on Gazans in Rafah. It also notes the meaningful relationship between these born-digital posts and the often highly-material objects they highlight, from the specific (e.g., Bethlehemite embroidery patterns) to the general (e.g., land and home).

Shaping and claiming Palestinian cultural heritage via Instagram accounts and hashtags, the paper argues, offers a case study that demonstrates the important role that individuals play in defining, depicting, and sharing understandings of heritage in the digital space.

In conclusion, the paper asks what broader insights might come from this case study, particularly regarding the pluralization of definitions and depictions of heritage that online platforms can afford, the potential responsibility of heritage-focused accounts to respond to current events, and the possible relationships between material objects and their representation in digital collections.

ABSTRACT. Since becoming a global phenomenon in 2020 (Feldkamp, 2021), TikTok has played a central role in amplifying social movements like #BlackLivesMatter and in documenting events such as the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 lockdown (Badola, 2023; Kendall, 2021). Recognising its cultural value, memory institutions have begun carrying out small-scale sample collections on TikTok in the attempt to preserve this material for future historical research as well as provide essential information to contextualise contemporary events (Espley et al., 2014; Fondren & Menard McCune, 2018; Schafer & Winters, 2021).

However, initiatives specifically archiving TikTok remain sparse compared to others targeting widely archived social platforms like Twitter (Cannelli, 2022; Vlassenroot et al., 2021). Drawing from research and interviews with web archivists conducted as part of a wider PhD comparative study about the development of social media archives, this paper will examine some of the challenges to the preservation of TikTok. These include legal concerns, the platform’s often opaque terms of service and technical issues, which may affect the ability to effectively archive TikTok at an institutional level, shaping the social media archiving landscape more broadly. Moreover, this paper will provide insights into the results obtained by the few archiving initiatives that have added this platform to their collection strategies.

The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on the preservation of born-digital materials by highlighting the specific issues related to archiving TikTok that makes it stand out from other platforms, underscoring the need for continued development of ad hoc strategies, the allocation of more resources to facilitate the development of specific tools to preserve and ensure long-term access to culturally significant social platforms.

ABSTRACT. As algorithmic systems ranging from recommender engines to generative AI models become widely adopted across the globe, profoundly impacting both cultural industries and everyday media practices, new kinds of vernacular creativity emerge - and alongside them, new genres of content. Some of these belong to what I define as “algorithmic folklore": the urban legends through which users make sense of machine learning models such as GPT-4; the folk theories through which people interpret the decisions of social media algorithms such as TikTok’s video recommendation; or the cycles of humorous memes co-created through generative artificial intelligence systems. The genres of algorithmic folklore are as varied and unpredictable as the technologies of automation that shape the vernacular media practices behind their creation. Algorithmic folklore is also often co-produced by shifting arrangements of users and systems, people and algorithms, human decisions and distributed cognition, challenging established practices of data collection and preservation. In this talk, I reflect on an going research project that seeks to collect and archive algorithmic folklore for two key purposes: conducting comparative analyses of vernacular creativity in different global contexts, and compiling a representative anthology of algorithmic folklore in the late 2020s.

ABSTRACT. At the crossroad of the three main topics and axes of the conference, this panel explores the multifaceted dimensions of CD-ROMs, spanning from their historical significance to their potential in re-enactment, exhibition and hands-on engagement. From their origins as data storage tools to their present status as born-digital heritage, we scrutinize preservation efforts, collections, and playable version emulation, highlighting the complexities of archival practices. Furthermore, we contemplate the intricacies of accessing these archived objects, which themselves serve as a form of archive, while exploring innovative methods of recontextualization and exhibition. Through four presentations, we aim to unravel the legacy of the CD-ROM in the digital age.

CD-ROMs as a Missing Link for the Understanding of Digital Cultures and History

The history of CD-ROMs has been largely unexplored and underestimated, nevertheless a few exceptions, notably within the realm of video games (Therrien, 2019). However, delving into this history allows to uncover the intricacy of technological and digital advancements, economic issues and new markets, or the evolving landscape of media convergence in the 90s. CD-ROMs also represent a pivotal moment in technological and digital history as a storage media, a gateway to immersive virtual worlds, or to the first Internet connections. Moreover, entire industries developed or diversified around their production, distribution, and consumption. New professions emerged, from CD-ROM mastering technicians to multimedia content creators. Traditional industries, such as the publishing and audiovisual sector, ventured into the CD-ROM domain, blurring the lines between print and digital media. Educational, gaming, or erotic content found new avenues of dissemination, reflecting broader shifts towards technology and media consumption. CD-ROMs also played a crucial role in understanding technological paradigms, from interface design to data storage mechanisms. Yet, alongside the popularity of CD-ROMs were the trials of users. Installation processes tested their patience. Interactivity, a hallmark of CD-ROMs, sometimes fell short of expectations, highlighting the gap between technological promise and user experience, while affordability also posed challenges. After a short overview of its potential to bring a new understanding within digital history, this presentation will focus on the sources available for historians to understand the lifecycle of CD-ROMs and their journey—from acquisition to interaction and finally «technostalgia» (Van der Heidjen, 2015) and preservation.

Preserving and Heritagising CD-ROMs: Approach and Collections

CD-ROMs preservation effort encompasses different approach: one prominent method involves emulation, where the original software and data are made accessible through platforms like Internet Archive. Additionally, there is a concerted effort to preserve the materiality of CD-ROMs in some libraries like BnF in France (Schafer, 2022), ensuring that they may remain playable on specialized equipment that can read and run these discs, preserving not just their data but also the experience of interacting with them as they were originally intended. Their approach may also vary: in France, CD-ROMs fall under legal deposit requirements and are considered publications. Internet Archive’s approach highlight also their role in computer cultures, boasting a rich collection of shareware.

Alongside these preservation efforts, there are pressing questions about access to this heritage. This presentation seeks to comprehensively map out the landscape of CD-ROM preservation, exploring the various approaches and their consequences for users (i.e., ensuring the operation of emulated CD-ROMs and understanding the value of the physical artifacts), addressing the existing gaps, and highlighting the invaluableassets these collections represent for researchers.

Configuring the Virtual Museum/Archive: CD-ROMs and the Rise of Born-Digital Infrastructure

From avant-garde experiments to informational techno-utopias, the concept of a virtual museum/archive/library was envisioned as a means to democratize culture and knowledge (Huhtamo, 2013). The advent of the World Wide Web has effectively actualized and, to some extent, trivialized it. Today, such digital repositories are recognized as distinct born-digital media, which not only reshape the goût de l’archive but also profoundly alter our engagement with cultural memory, knowledge, and history (Ernst, 2012). However, on the intricate path from analog endeavors to full-fledged born-digital infrastructures, there lies a page of history that is not so well explored. Virtual museums and archives initially became technically possible and widely disseminated thanks to CD-ROM technology. From the first Apple Museum released in 1992 onwards, CD-ROM technologies set the boundaries and possibilities for what it meant to be a “museum without walls”. This presentation examines the media-archaeological case of such CD- ROM based, driven, and born collections. Drawing on a corpus of early CD-ROMs, it seeks to trace how this media functioned, which aspects of “museumness” or “archiveness” were retained or altered when moved to CD-ROM, as well as the implications of this hybrid media for accessing and representing both digitized and born-digital cultural artifacts.

Exploring Video Games CD-ROMs: Curatorial Challenges and Historical Contextualisation and Significance

The last presentation explores the diverse aspects of curating, accessing, and understanding the historical significance of CD-ROMs in the video game industry and history. We will employ as a case-study an upcoming public exhibition scheduled for Autumn 2025 within the frame of a two-day gaming convention. The project features retro-gaming while addressing critical knowledge goals.

The creation of the exhibition must address various curatorial considerations, including concept and narrative flow, target audience, the accessibility of certain games (in terms of game play, interfaces, latency, authors’ rights, etc.), their nostalgic value, and the balance between triple-A best-sellers and less obvious choices. Additionally, the exhibition aims to let the users experience media archaeology (Fickers and van den Oever, 2014), which involves contemplating how to present these games amidst emulation, old gaming consoles, their gameplay relevance, and their contemporary significance. Finally, we hope to shed light on the creative role of CD-ROMs (Lessard, 2018) in shaping the gaming landscape, while providing visitors with an immersive experience that transcends mere nostalgia. A central focus is therefore put on the challenges of contextualization, accomplished partly through paratextual materials. We aim not only to ensure technical accessibility but also to engage visitors cognitively.

This presentation will therefore focus on the curatorial choices, challenges, limits, and research questions that this project raises in terms of media archaeology, public history, and retro-gaming. It relates to several key elements of the call for presentations, like approaches to researching the born- digital mediation of cultural memory and creative research uses to born-digital materials.

ABSTRACT. The Klezmer Institute supports two, interrelated born-digital heritage projects. The Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP) leverages low-cost technologies to digitize, datafy and share early twentieth-century handwritten klezmer manuscripts, drawing on a community of engaged musicians and language experts to create a crowdsourced community resource.The Klezmer Archive Project (KA) is using the KMDMP corpus as the starting point for a born-digital archival space to collect and connect information about klezmer music, and the people (past and present) who create it. The KA team is investigating ways to use cutting-edge technology that supports corpus-specific metadata and tools for curated user contributions within a flexible architecture, showing relationships between items, linking multiple recordings, tune variations, and shared melodic material and any other user-identified relationship artifact-to-artifact.

This paper will discuss project design and infrastructure choices that have allowed these projects to be innovative in a number of ways, including: actualizing a “share everything at the beginning” philosophy; using business automation platforms to develop low-cost datafication workflows; and, creating project teams that bring together researchers, project participants (who have become subject matter experts), and tech industry professionals who are members of the heritage community. These teams are conceptualizing and developing tools that will first serve the target heritage community and are planned to be adaptable for use in other heritage communities in the future.

ABSTRACT. In 2023, a placement was undertaken with the research architecture organisation, Forensic Architecture (FA). The aim was to produce guidance for FA, facilitating their digital archivingdesires, including developing information assisting potential future deposit of digital content into memory institutions.

From both the perspectives of a depositing organisation (such as FA) and memory institutions, ‘the general public’ is often seen as the main audience for digital collections. Clear definitions or detailed breakdowns of exactly who this audience is are scarce. For memory institutions, core concepts such as the ‘designated community’ (CCSDS 2012, Digital Preservation Coalition 2023) are key to establishing collecting, management, preservation, and access to digital collections. As Mitcham (2023) explains, defining the designated community for digital collections is ‘under theorised’.

Through this research, an understanding of the audiences for FA’s digital content was garnered and defined. The result was the production of a Future Audiences Decision Model (alpha release), outlining six likely future audiences, placed alongside axes for ‘technical information’ and ‘storytelling’. The intention was to help guide FA and other organisations in decision making, when selecting and preparing digital content for deposit into a memory institution. This model is the first step towards identifying future audiences.

ABSTRACT. “The purpose of a usable past is not simply to be a record of history. Rather, by building a shared appreciation of moments and traditions in collective history, a usable past is a method for creating the world that we want to see.” (O’Shea, 2019, p. 7).

This paper will take as it’s starting point this definition of a usable past by Lizzie O’Shea as a starting point to consider how we can look to challenge pre-existing colonial approaches within the discipline of history and the practice of archival science. The aim of this paper will be to consider the challenges and opportunities presented by the move towards decolonial modes of re-investigating our collective pasts and to consider how a living archives approach to documenting the lived experiences of migration can help to establish a genuinely collaborate move towards the inclusion of refugee voices thereby creating “a past with a living value.” (O’Shea, 2019, p. 8).

This paper will take as a case study our community-focused participatory Documenting Chile Archive as a case study exploring anti-oppressive and bottom-op oral history methodologies for engaging with life history work with displaced persons within the United Kingdom. It will consider how born-digital records collected as part of this project and curated through both exhibition and digital repositories within the Living Refugee Archive (https://www.livingrefugeearchive.org/) can be used to create a usable past and a genuinely inclusive approach to engaging with a genuine knowledge exchange to ensure that the multi-faceted histories of displaced communities can be documented, preserved and made accessible in ways that can act as both a medium for participation and advocacy. But also, as a counter-narrative to help disrupt and challenge existing colonialnarratives and approaches to the writing of history and the safeguarding of archival collections.

ABSTRACT. My paper aims to explore contemporary literature of the 1947 Partition by Aanchal Malhotra and Kavita Puri in collaboration with two of their digital projects on the Partition: The Museum of Material Memory (2017) and the BBC 4 Radio Podcast “Partition Voices” (2022). By reading the selected works alongside the digital documentation projects/archives that inspired it, I hope to address questions on inheritors’ postmemories in digital archives of the 1947 Partition, drawing connections between the inheritance narratives with contemporary digital preservation practices of oral Partition narratives, highlighting the remembrance of Partition through literary and digital spaces. The selected books borne out of the collaboration with digital archives are Partition V oices: Untold British Stories (2022), an updated edition focusing on Partition testimonies of now-British citizens, including Puri’s father and In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition (2022), where the narrative of inheritance is moved forward with fourth-generation inheritors on recollecting heard Partition stories.

The influence of the digital in Partition’s inheritance is central to my study: I highlight how the literature, inspired by related digital documentation projects, influences how Partition is remembered through collaborative oral history digitisation and in doing so, also reconstructs cultural discourses on the Partition for the upcoming generations. The rise of contemporary digital archival projects on the inheritance of the 1947 Partition, the literature inspired by such inheritance and the lack of research on its collaborative aspects with digitisation projects make my approach timely.

ABSTRACT. Digital literature databases and the narrative texts we build from them are determinant to our understanding of this form. These databases simultaneously signal what is considered to be worthy of remembering and what will, in turn, be more likely to be remembered. The anthologisation process taking place, and the choices regarding the content and metadata schema, are even more important in the light of the vulnerability of these works. When a web page disappears or becomes illegible without having been preserved sustainably, these descriptions are the only traces left to archive.

In this presentation, we will compare three Latin American databases with distant reading methods: the Antología de la Literatura Electrónica Latinoamericana y Caribeña (Flores et al., 2020), the Cartografía de la literatura digital latinoamericana (Gainza and Zuñiga, 2021), and the Atlas da Literatura Digital Brasileira (Rocha, 2021). Although many databases, collections and anthologies exist, few have attempted to take a distant approach to mapping the field (Pawlicka, 2016; J. W. Rettberg, 2014; S. Rettberg, 2014).

We will extract the metadata of the works indexed in these databases and perform quantitative analyses pertaining to the diachronic distribution of the corpus, genres, cultural and technological contexts, authors’ nationalities and genders, and obsolescence status. This study will look at the three databases comparatively, as well as the Latin American corpus as a whole. Our analysis will map key characteristics of the Latin American digital literature production. Furthermore, it will reflect on the creators who are absent or under-represented in these databases, and their potential blind spots in terms of memory. Finally, we will analyse the choice of metadata, what it signals about the aspects of the works which are valued, and how it conditions the ways in which these works are read.

ABSTRACT. For several decades, the increasing use of digital writing technologies by author’s presented a threat for future genetic criticism as it seemed to leave no traces of the writing process such as deletions, additions and replacements. A workable solution was presented by Matthew Kirschenbaum in his highly influential book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008) where he applied digital forensics, textual criticism and analytic bibliography to describe and analyse the material dimension of new media works and digital writing in general. Since then, digital forensic methods and tools have proven to be useful, especially in the archiving of born-digital content. In the field of genetic criticism, especially Thorsten Ries (2017) and the Derrida Hexadecimal project, headed by Aurèle Crasson at ITEM (Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes), have been pioneering in applying digital forensics to the genetic study of born-digital manuscripts (Crasson, Lebrave & Pedrazzi 2019).

In this paper, I will present my research on the born-digital manuscripts of the Finnish novelist Kalle Päätalo (1919–2000). Päätalo acquired a computer in 1989 which he used until his death writing eight novels, a number of stories and correspondence. The computer and the surviving 53 floppy disks are stored in the Professor Kalle Päätalo Archive in Taivalkoski. In my presentation, I discuss the various stages of my research, the hardware and software used and the problems that I have encountered. Among these stages are the creation of disk images of the source media, recovering deleted text files, and the genetic analysis of Päätalo’s hybrid writing process.

ABSTRACT. This paper locates electronic literature at the critical nexus of narratology and memory studies, delineating how the medium-specific narrative elements of electronic literature aid in the mediation of memory to the reader/player. Digital-born electronic literature and its multimodal representations have been challenging the limits of reading and writing literature (Hayles) by taking advantage of digital computation (Wardrip-Fruin) as well as creating interactive and immersive stories. Electronic literature demands its readers/players “to make a shift in their ability to approach and interpret” them (Campbell) while necessitating an innovative and “medium-specific” (Hayles) approach from researchers. Unlike their counterparts, electronic literature offers a doubly-embodied reading experience to its readers/players (Bell and Ensslin) who are simultaneously embodied “as direct receivers” in the real world by interacting with their computers physically while also being re-embodied in their represented forms as third-person or first-person, and visible or invisible avatars on the screen (Ensslin). In this light, this paper close-reads Andy Campbell’s The Flat and Andy Campbell and Judi Alston’s Clearance and explores how readers/players of these digital poetries engage both as outsiders to the storyworlds, performing non-trivial actions (Aarseth) like moving and clicking the mouse to comprehend and progress in the narrative and as observers following the characters’ memories inside the storyworlds, engaging with visual details using the cursor-hands. This paper further elucidates the capability of the landscape and materials inside the storyworld to act as lieux or sites that mediate memory to the diegetic readers/players, while the interactive digital poetry itself mediates “prosthetic memory” (Landsberg) to the readers/players in the real world.

ABSTRACT. Oral history is a complex mediator of cultural memory. It is often filtered and articulated through accounts of personal, subjective recollection, yet it participates in a wider ‘cultural circuit’, where personal recollection can shape, and is shaped by external social and cultural processes, memories and events (see e.g. Summerfield 2016). Until recently, the main representational modality of oral history tended to be the human-generated transcript, often captured in a digital file. Recent and high-profile developments in AI research, involving, for example, foundation and reinforcement learning models, transformer blocks and neural networks are giving rise to a range of systems whose applications extend to oral history as much as any other domain. Next generation Automated Speech Recognition systems like that of OpenAI Whisper, offer, for some languages significantly improved accuracy levels. Yet they present new kinds of problems for oral history, creating born digital resources that may contain instances of hallucination ((openai/whisper and jongwook 2023). Via instances like ChatGTP, the possibility of entirely born digital, machine-generated oral histories has now arisen, even if so far research has focused on search and accession applications (e.g. Švec et al. 2024). In this paper, we will examine the issues of authority, ownership and verifiability, and other technical, legal and ethical challenges, that the born-digital turn in oral history poses. Furthermore, we will consider how the approach we have described as Multimodal Digital Oral History (MDOH) (Smyth, Nyhan and Flinn 2023), which seeks to actively engage with oral history artefacts in all their representational modalities: transcript, sound, waveform, metadata and more, might be extended to incorporate the issues raised here, likewise questioning whether the so-called ‘cultural circuit’ of oral history might now be extended to consider how oral history and born-digital technologies may co-constitute each other, in ongoing interchange, in the years to come.

ABSTRACT. The advent of the internet held the promise of democratisation of access to and sharing of knowledge for all. Forty years into the digital era, the reality paints a very different picture. A few issues that can be encountered in today’s digital world but are not restricted to are for example that access to, creation of and sharing of born digital collections is restricted to mostly people in the global North. Born-digital collections are hidden behind paywalls even universities in the global South cannot overcome. Collections are presented in a few majority languages and writing systems excluding people who do not read and write English for example. The access points, the information what the collections contain are expressed through enigmatic metadata ontologies rooted in cosmologies of academic disciplines only accessible to insiders of the discipline.

Communities who would like to archive and keep their born digital materials safe rarely have access to archives but have to confine themselves to private computers or commercial social media platforms which are not keeping materials safe. Also, the technological development of digital infrastructures enabling participation, access and discovery in the global South is lagging behind not allowing multilingual meta data or presentation styles attuned to knowledge representation of the local communities. Access to and sharing of information has to pass through the writing bottleneck, meaning that users of oral languages or signed languages cannot share their knowledge or access knowledge represented in archives in their own languages. Given that of the around 7500 languages spoken and signed today only a few hundred languages are actually written, the scale of the gap we are looking at becomes apparent.

This round table brings together scholars, activists and practitioners who have been facing different types of inequalities and the continuity of systemic biases in the digital world. The round table participants have initiated the discussion at different institutions and have shed light marginalisation, exclusion and biases but have also supported and developed approaches to change the dynamics and to overcoming barriers we are observing today.

Mandana Seyfeddinipur

Mandana Seyfeddinipur is a linguist and the director of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and the Endangered Languages Archive. She has trained activists, scholars and community members in creating born digital collections documenting endangered languages and cultural practices in all over the world working. For 14 years she has been supporting over 300 documentation projects from conception to archiving. In her work she also engages in the question how born digital collection be made as accessible a possible ensuring that communities can discover and access collections of their knowledges.

Anasuya Sengupta

Anasuya Sengupta is Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. She has led initiatives across the global South, and internationally for over 25 years, to collectively create feminist presents and futures of love, justice, and liberation. She is a co-founder and advisor to Numun Fund (the first feminist tech fund for and from the Global South), advisor to the Flickr Foundation, the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women.

Serge Sagna

Serge is a Lecturer in Linguistics at The University of Manchester, Serge Sagna is Senegalese from the highly multilingual Casamance region. He is speaker linguist who documented the language of his community, created and archived a large born digital collection at the Endangered Languages Archive in 2010. He is also an activist contributing to, initiating and spearheading language revitalisation activities by e.g. producing literacy material to foster reading habits and to improve access to health information in the communities where he conducts his research. His perspective will add to the discussion around knowledge systems, organisation of interfaces and access languages.

Nick Thieberger

Nick Thieberger, linguist and associate professor at University of Melbourne (Australia), he also is the director of the digital language and music archive PARADISEC. He has worked with aboriginal communities of Australia in creating and archiving and accessing collections as well as with communities in Vanuatu. He also has involved in locating, digitising and archiving legacy collections from all over Oceania. His experience in running archives and working with different stakeholder spans over 30 years, during which the digital world developed and changed as the perception of it changed.

Valentina Vapnarsky

Valentina Vapnarsky is Director of Studies on the “Linguistic anthropology of religion”. She focuses on the contemporary Maya and their verbal and written practices, in daily, religious, historical and poetic registers. She is director of the Center for Teaching and Research in Amerindian Ethnology and president of the Society of Americanists. She managed the major project Indigenous Wayana- Apalaí knowledge – A new approach to restitution and its implications for the forms of transmission. In this project a digital platform was built under the direction of the Wayana- Apalaí from Guyana for them to access the objects in museum collections from their community defining selections, modalities of analysis, and conditions of access to the data.