Conference Agenda

How do we save the past in a violent present for an uncertain future? As societal digitisation accelerates, so too has the belligerence of state and corporate power, the democratisation of targeted harassment, and the collapse of consent by communities plagued by ongoing (and often unwanted) datafication. Drawing from political forecasts and participatory consultation with practicioners and communities, this research examines the physical safety of data centres, the socio-technical issues of the diverse practice of web-based archiving, and the physical and mental health of archive practitioners and communities subjected to archiving. This research identifies and documents issues of ethics, consent, digital security, colonialism, resilience, custodianship and tool complexity. Despite the systemic challenges identified in the research, and the broad lag in response from tool makers and other actors within the web archiving discipline, there exist compelling reasons to remain optimistic. Emergent technologies, stronger socio-technical literacy amongst archivists, and critical interventions in the colonial structures of digital systems offer immediate points of intervention. By acknowledging the shortcomings of cybernetics, resisting the desire to apply software solutionism at scale, and developing a nuanced and informed understanding of the realities of archiving in digitised societies, a broad surface of opportunities can emerge to develop resilient, considered, safe and context-sensitive archival technologies and practice for our uncertain world.

Digital collections aim to reflect our personal and collective histories, which are shaped by and concurrently shape our memories. While advancements are made to develop web archival practices in the public domain, personal digital material is mostly preserved with commercially driven technologies. This is worrying, for although it may seem that these privately-owned cloud services are spaces where our precious pictures will exist forever, we know that long-term sustainable archiving practices are not these service providers’ primary concern. This demo is part of the first stages in the fieldwork of a PhD project that explores alternative approaches to sustainable everyday archival data management. Through participatory research methods, such as co-designing prototypes, we aim to establish a public-private-civic collaboration to rethink our relationship with the personal digital archive. Moving towards the question of what digital material do we throw away, discard, or forget about, we want to contribute to existing knowledge on how to manage the growing amount of digital stuff.

Translating this question into an interactive installation, the demo combines human and technological performativity employing participatory, playful methods to let conference participants materialize their reflections on their engagement with their digital archives, from their professional and personal perspective. This demo invites conference participants to actively engage with the question of responsibility regarding the future of our personal digital past; is there a role to play for public institutions next to the commitment of individuals to commercially driven storage technologies? The researchers will consider the privacy of the participants throughout the duration of the demo. Through this demo, the community of (web) archivists are involved in the early stages of the project’s co-creative research practices and aims to build lasting connections with these important stakeholders.

In recent years, community participation seems to have become a desirable step in developing web archives. Participatory practices in the cultural heritage sector are not new (Benoit & Eveleigh, 2019). The practice of working in collaboration with different community partners to build archives is underway in conventional archives (Cook, 2013). Indeed, it has now become one of the main themes of web archival development on both theoretical and practical levels.

Although involving wider communities is often regarded as an approach to democratise practices, it has been debated if community participation can lead to improved representation. At the same time, the significant impact that participatory practices have on creating and sharing knowledge should not be underestimated. My current PhD research is to understand how participatory practices have been deployed in web archiving, their mechanisms and impacts.

Since April 2022, I have worked as a web archivist for the Archive of Tomorrow project, developing various sub-collections on the topics relating to cancer, Covid-19, food, diet, nutrition, and wellbeing. The project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, is to explore and preserve online 2 information and misinformation about health and the Covid-19 pandemic. Started in February 2022, the project runs for 14 months and will form a 'Talking about Health' collection within the UK Web Archive, giving researchers and members of the public access to a wide representation of diverse online sources.

For this project, I have attempted to link theories with practices and applied various participatory methods in developing the collection, such as engaging with subject librarians, delivering a workshop co-curating a sub-collection, consulting academics to identify archiving priorities, cocurating a sub-collection with students from an internship scheme, and collaborating with a local patient support group. This poster is to reflect how different approaches have been deployed and lessons learned. It will highlight the transformative impact of participatory practices on sharing, creating and reconstructing knowledge.

References

Benoit, E., & Eveleigh, A. (2019). Defining and framing participatory archives in archival science. In E. Benoit & A. Eveleigh (Eds.), Participatory archives: theory and practice (pp. 1–12). London.

Cook, T. (2013). Evidence, memory, identity, and community: Four shifting archival paradigms. Archival Science, 13(2–3), 95–120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502- 012-9180-7