Composting the Archives: The Case for Digital Decay
9 likes915 views
The document discusses the inevitability of digital decay and its implications for archiving cultural heritage. It highlights the challenges of preserving digital information amid a vast influx that makes traditional preservation efforts increasingly difficult. Additionally, it presents decay not only as a challenge but also as a potential catalyst for new creativity and perspectives on memory and cultural narratives.
Composting the Archives: The Case for Digital Decay
- 1. Composting the Archives The Case for Digital Decay Ryan Shaw UC Berkeley School of Information Decasia Panel, 4S Annual Meeting November 2, 2006
- 4. “ The truth is that computation has, from the very start, been built to rot .” “ Delete Our Cultural Heritage?” Telegraph.co.uk , 12/07/2004 Bruce Sterling
- 6. Physical storage media Operating systems Applications References between documents Classification systems Declining usage Norms and economics of use Forms of Digital Decay Computer hardware
- 7. The Case Against Decay Stabilization , preservation and conservation are the traditional goals of the archivist Such goals imply a constant battle against decay But the deluge of digital information available for archiving is making this battle unwinnable
- 8. The Case For Decay Decay as a strategy for forgetting Decay as a dynamic process Decay as a generator of new creative energy
- 9. “ To tell someone their record is gone is essentially to lie to them. In an electronic age, people should understand that once they have been convicted or arrested that will never go away .” “ Expunged Criminal Records Live to Tell Tales,” New York Times , 10/17/2006 Lawyer Lida Rodriguez-Taseff
- 10. “ What can be more inconsiderate or unjust than to compare a few existing Writers with the whole succession of their Progenitors?” William Wordsworth “ Reply to 'Mathetes',” The Prose Works of William Wordsworth , 1974
- 11. Seligmann & Bugaj, “Live Web stationery: virtual paper aging,” 1997
- 12. Tsukada, Takabayashi, & Matsui, “Dying Link,” 2003
- 13. “ ...we must aspire to turn media into dust —to make it as abundant and ephemeral as newspaper clippings...” “ Let us grind them into dust! The new aesthetics of digital archives,” 2005 Matt Locke
- 15. Toward New Forms of Decay Reversed decay Spatial decay Collaborative decay