Dr Kim Foale very kindly invited me to do an interview for the Geeks for Social Change blog about digital archiving. It felt so validating to take a moment to reflect on one specific thread of my career, particularly one that connects to the museums side that goes all the way back to my undergrad year abroad experience. This interview was prompted by my two upcoming workshops with Raju Rage’s Desperate Livin project, on 22nd November online and 2nd December at Studio Voltaire in London.
How would you encourage our readers to get into archiving?
For some people archiving is a practice of collecting physical things like zines and artwork. You keep your collection somewhere safe: probably in your own home, rather than in a stranger’s garage, for example. Ideally, we’d approach digital archiving the same way. So, if you’re doing something digital, take a bit of time to think about your relationship with corporate power, and consider learning from the IndieWeb. Your safety strategy here depends on how nerdy you want to be - maybe you’re just periodically exporting a backup to an external hard drive, or maybe you’re self-hosting tools on your own server. I’m somewhere in the middle personally!
I wish more people who share their own experiences and perspectives with a community online were thinking about how they archive their contributions. We need searchable permalinks for the things people are posting on Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube. It’s remarkably easy to set up an automatic archive on PeerTube that takes in videos from Youtube and Tiktok.
