in a 2023 hallowstream you mentioned something like "forgetting is good" or something along the lines of forgetting is important alongside preservation and remembering (specifically in the context of archives, and internet, tying into hallowstreams being ephemeral and not put up on youtube) and i was wondering if you had readings that led you to that conclusion!
hello yes -- this is something that i think about a lot, actually, as someone who is a huge proponent of forgetful data. i've separated my answer into three parts: forgetting hallowstream, forgetting data, and data afterlives. below is a rambling essay that intermingles my own feelings about growing up online, digital recordkeeping, and how the internet became a marketing tool instead of an archive... but at the end i have a far more practical bibliography/recommended reading list.
also if anyone can define a "dead presidents letter" in this context that would help me
thank you for thinking about digital preservation efforts and for asking questions about it! i am happy to clarify, but @h-m-m has pretty much nailed it. i can expand:
as i understand it, much of the current landscape for "digital preservation" is in either preserving born digital objects through technical means OR scanning and digitizing analog objects. both are very specific to the media format of the original object and the mode of "preservation". there are huge pros and cons to each, but i am focusing on the latter, here. i can talk about preserving born-digital objects another time, but i get at some of it in my earlier post.
dead presidents letters: this is a jab at the vast digitization efforts undertaken at places like the library of congress. it feels like a lot of money & resources get funneled into scanning & storing & sharing things like, as @h-m-m referenced, george washington's letters or his diary. i am very pro digital collections for access to collections you might not otherwise get to see! it's a balancing act. TIFFS really annoy me, though, and i'm not 1,000% sure why. typically reserved for researchers and archival purposes, TIFF file formats are popular in archival settings for their fidelity. as a result, however, they are GIGANTIC. they take so much processing power to store and maintain! it's not the standard (there is no standard and there are lots of debates about the "right" kind of file format) but it is the most unwieldy.
the cornerstone for a lot of my own work came from the paper printout of a bulletin board system (BBS) that was made by and for people with HIV/AIDS. the BBS was run from 1987 until 1990, when the sysop died. the sysop who hosted the board that board was on ran from 1984 until he died in 1991. i don't think these guys ever really imagined that their BBS stuff would be held in an archive! they were both kind of preoccupied with dying and also kind of obsessed with documenting it. computers were weird, novel, unwieldy objects and even people at the forefront of personal computer adoption were like, "okay, we can use a computer, but how do we save & store what we did here?" digital recordkeeping was still really controversial and unstable, and archivists were struggling to understand their role as stewards for digital data. so people used the tools they had available. like printers!
when the archives were closed during pandemic lockdowns, i secured a generous grant to digitize much of this collection & it's over 120GB. it took hours to download & move around on my own hardware. this doesn't count all the photos i took in archives in new york that just seem to... live on my icloud bc i don't know what to do with them that makes sense. there's some kind of poetic irony there, all these intermingling file formats and media modes and what have you and i'm trying to reconcile how i feel and think about all of it in the book i am procrastinating writing literally exactly right now.
hope this helps!!!!
