Preserving Digital Cultural Heritage

On the internet, even the recent past can become inaccessible, as anyone who has ever clicked on a broken hyperlink will know. Preserving recent digital heritage comes with its own complications. In addition to the official and national institutions that are charged with preserving our cultural history (i.e. galleries, libraries, archives and museums), grassroots efforts are also being made. These “rogue archives” (De Kosnik) are built by different people for different purposes. Examples include the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own.

These archives have different priorities, which can be seen by how their structures and affordances determine what they house and how it is accessed. As a result, they make visible and invisible certain types of cultural heritage for certain audiences. Taking fanfiction and Archive of Our Own (AO3) as an example, this talk discusses what is at stake in preserving digital cultural heritage from the recent past, and how AO3’s metadata structure works to prioritise some content and user groups and not others. While it was built with the feminist principle of inclusivity in mind, not all communities have felt included in the way the archive operates.

We will end with a discussion of how the structural limitations of digital archives, as well as the contemporary information landscape, offer specific challenges when interacting with and recovering recent digital heritage.

Dr Suzanne R Black received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh for doctoral work examining the interconnections of a range of literatures in the twenty-first century digital literary sphere. With a background in English Literature, she combines humanities approaches with digital methods, and has worked across a range of projects involving data and the creative industries. For more information, please see www.suzannerblack.com.

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