Process, Data, Archive: Curating the Digital
Abstract: Bolstered by the predominance of digital information and a decrease in the cost of storage media, the increasing interest in data curation presents both opportunities and areas for concern. In contrast to the archival of printed materials, data are not fixed entities; as Lisa Gitelman has suggested, data do not exist outside of the contexts that bring them into being. This presentation will examine three key issues in the curation of data. Firstly, process as data: from the birth of the von Neumann computer architecture, instructions and data have been treated equivalently; a program is thus a collection of data, yet one that must be treated differently in order to ensure that it will be available after its originating hardware has broken down. Secondly, data as process: when dealing with "static" data, how can archivists select formats that best ensure this information will be readable and manipulable in the future? Finally, archiving data: what security and privacy concerns have arisen around the collection of large amounts of data, and how can archivists address them? By considering these questions that lie at the intersection of archival practice and new media studies, digital custodians can develop a sustainable, open, and responsible approach to data curation.
Andrew Lison is Visiting Assistant Professor in Media Theory at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. His writing has appeared in New Formations and Science Fiction Studies, as well as a number of collections, including one of which he is co-editor, The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (with Timothy Scott Brown; Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He is currently editing a volume on archives in the In Search of Media series (Meson Press) and working on a monograph about the rise of digital multimedia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, New Media at the End of History.
Presentation Information:
May 4, 2018
9 a.m. - 10 a.m.
KL 360
