January 17, 2023
Electronic Literature Organization Unconference, with Bournemouthe University and the British Library
Below are collectively written anonymous notes by participants in the workshop.
Lee Tusman
What are some of the archives you'd like to start or collections or communities you're part of that you think are worthy of 'archiving'?
Unconference 23!
ELO salons! Yeah, my bad on that. I'll get to it. Time is tough@ (no comment on it being done or not!)
Climate change digital fictions
Alan The text with Atkinson/Baldwin - the actually "look" might be important - they were part of Art and Language I think?
Pandemic debris/signage,
experiences of people knowing the world before the internet and then experiencing the internet now Yes, from someone who grew up without the internet. Or computers.
An archive of the RFC re: internet and the back-materials for each of them
An archive of 19th-century family photo albums - most of these get destroyed -
An archive of high-school graduation yearbook comments - most of these are thrown out -
Subversive digital fictions where they're not supposed to exist (e.g., Amazon's bic for her pen reviews, fake customer services accounts on socials, etc.) If we are going to subvert, we should record the sub-version
Twitter, before the man-child destroys it completely
Mastadon?
Do we want to archive all of those pictures of dinners people ate in FB? My grandmother saved the menu from her cross-Atlantic trip and I still have that, so I am not sure!)
Fanzines
Collaborative fictions (creepypastas, wikis, SCP Foundation, etc.)
Locative fiction
Independent forms of digital fiction
REader experiences with Flash works
The NEXT is amazing. IT even has archives of archives
An archive of my experimental interactive website projects. Links to them, screenshots and 1-sentence description.
Archives of net provs@
Actually, some of the 1990s web cam folks who were on the web all the time. Reminds me of Ted Nelson's archives of every moment of his life.
An archive of the mini code golf art community that previously (still?) existed on twitter, creating small strange animated images and text-poems.
An archive of National Novel Generating month (nanogenmo) entries. Currently exists mostly in GitHub issues, not the most publicly facing/engaging)
Federation (30+ year old multiplayer text game)
Everything? wait, maybe not everything. But, perhaps? :)
collaborative digital fictions - text files of the forums/reviews/discussions, but also screenshots of the same, as some are highly linked to images
system of metadata for whatever it is I'm archiving.
NaNoGenMo Entries - lists of each entry, link to each work, short description. Screenshot?
version of texts - as evolution and all the collaboration/collaborative dynamics on it
I am afraid that ALL digital materials will leave soon, or not be available in a century as the energy needed for digital preservation, computers and hardware and software are going to disappear soon. I made a hyperbook sorta related to this. The internet and fake news destroys the world, lol. - http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ylqhzaposlxyvqfb
Federation - Early material on community management, including material from AOL internal mailing lists / staff manuals. Web archives of fan/player sites, original Interactive Broadcasting website. Code changes and design changes to the game over time. Time-indexing & cross-references to the various sources of info. Scanned images of player-made maps and design sketches
I printed out my small works--but these created an entirely new work and experience. So we have to think about how people will experience these archives differently.
Who are we archiving for? and do they want the archives?
Do we want archives to be accessible?
I wish there was an archive it button that would just copy the webpage or digital object and put it somewhere on a cloud... with forms for metadata. Wayback machine can do something like this! There is "Archive-It", a more industrial tool by the Internet Archive (with a monthly/annual fee, though they indicated they would share this with DIY/non-profits as well)
Poke Dene to do it, lol. Poor Dene and her crew! Had we but world enough or time... I know!
Could we get a time machine and go interview future folks to find out what they want archived