Digital archives contain vast amounts of information stored as binary digits. The amount of digital data being created is growing exponentially and is estimated to exceed 500 quadrillion files. Digital archives can preserve important records and make information widely accessible online, helping to promote accountability, justice, and bearing witness. However, digital archives also pose challenges around long-term preservation due to their dependence on continued formats and storage mediums.

1. Digital Traces
Sanjana Hattotuwa

2. Origin early 17th cent. (in the sense ‘place where
records are kept’): from French archives (plural),
from Latin archiva, archia, from Greek arkheia
‘public records’, from arkhē ‘government’.
The verb dates from the late 19th Century.

3. Digital Curation Accessibility

6. Aspiration

7. The tech

10. 7,000 pixels
Over 190 times more resolution than high-end DSLR
~9,720+Mb
~2,430 DVDs
Over 9 1/2 feet stacked
google.com/culturalinstitute/home

11. atoms

12. Geo-physical space
Archive/Library Prague

13. 1s & 0s

14. The Cloud

17. The Democratising Effect
Archive(s) of Life
An endlessly morphing meta-archive

18. HTML5
Semantic Web
The grammar
The connections

21. Connections & meaning

22. Accessible, Replicable, Ephemeral
Digital Archiving:

25. 500 quadrillion files
About the # of stars in our physical universe
More than doubling every two years

26. Archives from Sri Lanka

45. Tiki Toki

48. 6,440,000 {articles}
7,021,500 {comments}
7 years

49. Forgotten mass graves

50. Burial site

57. Over 3.6Gb
117+ items
25 years
More to be scanned...

67. Selecting
Downloading
Producing
Re-uploading
Embedding
Translating
Compressing
Visualising
Flagging
.
.
.
The Digital Archivist

68. Accountability
Justice
Bearing witness
Chain of custody
Medium
Meta data
Storage
Format
.
.
.
Digital Archive’s Purpose

71. Why?

72. To give future generations the ability to erase what they want
To help remember what has been overwritten
To help (re)create what matters

73. thank you