librarypunk - 081 - Web Archiving and Social Media feat. Jessica Ogden and Katie Mackinnnon

Episode Date: January 22, 2023

This week we have two researchers to talk about web archiving, its politics, its goals, and how web archiving is often mobilized to address problems it really can’t help. We’re talking Tumblr and GeoCities, Twitter’s feared implosion, Internet Archive, and the space to mourn our platforms and communities.    Jessica’s social: https://twitter.com/jessogden  Katie’s social: https://twitter.com/ktcmackinnon; katiemackinnon.xyz Readings https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24701475.2021.1985835 PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EEODs_kMMUj0vywKLZMf7aetgUcBdh1q/view?usp=sharing https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24701475.2022.2051331PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16305lQTUYB2IK_G-eSnjvCEgt5YdOCQp/view?usp=sharing  Media referenced Jessica PhD thesis https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/447624/ Jessica’s publications: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/jessica-ogden  Katie’s PhD: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/125246  Katie’s publications: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=zKGIFGEAAAAJ&hl=en  GeoCities Tumblr research project https://www.tumblr.com/oneterabyteofkilobyteage Dead-and-dying platforms: a roundtable https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24701475.2022.2071396  Baltimore Uprising; A Teen Epistolary https://www.activedistributionshop.org/shop/books/3963-the-2015-baltimore-uprising-a-teen-epistolary-by-various.html 

All right, let's go. I'm Justin. I'm a Skaulcom librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they then. I'm Jay. I am a music library director, and my pronouns are he him. And we have guests. Would you like to introduce yourselves? Sure, thanks a lot. I'm Jessica Ogden. I'm a lecturer in digital features at the University of Bristol in the UK, and my pronouns are she her. I'm Katie McKinnon. I'm a postdoc at the University of Toronto, and my pronouns are she her.

Welcome. It's so nice to have you here. Thank you for having us. Yeah, since we've got five people today, and these tend to run long if we don't cut out the segment. So no segment, no Reddit questions we're going to answer. No, no AI generated tomfoolery. Although I do, I was considering having chat GPT, kind of like write the introduction sometime, and then just see how it does. But I don't know. So we're going to jump right in.

Jessica and Katie have written about. web archiving and we wanted to talk about web archiving because well we started planning this episode when twitter was really uncertain about its future and people were worried about downloading all their data i know a lot of people who work in both libraries and IT so a lot of them were you know just saying i'm going to download everything i'm going to build my own website put all my tweets up on it you know save it there as kind of a personal website and then people were worried about like hey where is everyone going to go. Are we all going to go to Mastodon? Are we all going to go back to Tumblr? Like, what's going to happen? The three of us never left Tumblr. So this is a Tumblr podcast,

basically. That's how we all know each other. That's why we're like this and we're sorry. This is great. Okay, but that explains a little bit, sorry, the interest, perhaps, in reaching out about this article that I wrote. Awesome. Jessica, let's start with you. Your article was about the porn ban on Tumblr and the NSFW archiving project. And I think it might have been more than one, but you did like an ethnographic study of the group that was doing the preservation. What got you into that? Were you a Tumblr user?

Did you have a strange fixation with this platform like we do too? It's so interesting because I'm really, I'm so happy to hear that you guys are all Tumblr users because actually I am not a Tumblr user. And when I started the project, I knew very little about Tumblr. And I don't really even feel like I know a little bit more now because of this project, but definitely a noob when it comes to Tumblr. And actually, the thing that got me interested in doing this study with Archive Team was that I had been studying Archive Team for a while.

And this became a kind of case study. So it was part of my PhD project, which was looking at how, web archiving was happening across a number of different kinds of organizations and institutions. And archive team was one of these places, like a field site that I was interested in understanding what they were doing around web archiving because they do a lot of it. And maybe we could talk about who they are as well. But it was basically timing. And so they were ramping up to do this Tumblr not safe for work project. And I decided that that was going to be the project that I was going to focus on for one of the case studies in my PhD. So that's how I kind of got interested in what was

going on in Tumblr specifically. Is it helpful to talk about archive team at all? Yeah, yeah. We'll get there. But I wanted to kind of ask you, since your whole PhD project was on web archiving, like what generally motivates people to do web archiving? Like, this is a left this podcast, we like to do like a political economy and, and like an ideological look at, like, why is this happening? What's, people say they're doing things for all kinds of reasons, but like, what's motivating people to do web archiving? Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question, and I've been thinking about it the last few days because I felt it coming. A lot of people want to know what motivates people to do this kind of work. And I think it's interesting because in my,

And this was part of partly where my PhD project was coming from was that a lot of, there's a field of web archiving practitioners, obviously, as you guys know, being in around library stuff, like that this is happening in a lot of libraries, at least ones that are kind of funding it. And a lot of the sort of tooling and the thinking and the practitioner work has kind of been focused in that, in library and archive space for a while. But in actual fact, there's all this other stuff going on outside of these kind of institutional settings that looks a lot like, and I would definitely call it web archiving. And so in terms of the politics of those projects, they are kind of pretty broad, I would say. And definitely in terms of the motivations or

what brings people to these projects, I think it's kind of a huge, yeah, broad swath of things going on. And, you know, I guess you can see it most recently with the discussions that are happening around Twitter. So the kind of obvious things about sort of individually motivated, like what's happening to stuff. Like, how do I save my stuff? Like, that's a kind of basic thing that people are concerned about often, especially if they're creating like these kind of, or they've been participating in, you know, specific platforms and contributing to those platforms over the years. Like, they got a lot of stuff. They have a lot of memories. They have a lot of attachment to that stuff. So that, you know, that largely motivates the kind of individual. But at a collective level, there's all kinds

of other stuff going on. The, you know, the big project around archiving Ukraine web domain space. that's clearly like a recent thing to point to, which obviously is also like a bunch of librarians as well as activists and people who were really motivated by the kind of like very real geopolitical landscape that is impacting what's online. And then, yeah, I think in my PhD there was another project around environmental climate science, which was a kind of like consortium of both like scientists, libraries. as well as like community activists and open source people and civic technology people who were all really concerned about, you know, with Trump being elected in 2016, that everything to do with climate science was going to be taken offline. So there's a very kind of explicit politics involved in that, like capital P politics that brought people together to think about how to archive stuff. So that was like another case study in my PhD, which had a kind of overt politics to

it, which is quite an interesting contrast to these other projects. And I think, like, maybe it's something, you know, I'd throw to you guys as well is that often in the library space, not being a librarian myself, but having worked with a lot of librarians and archivists, I don't have that training either, but that there's a kind of pretty prevalent narrative with some people around keeping those politics, like, undercover and maintaining some kind of neutral, semi-objective view on what's being saved and how practice works. And I was really interested in kind of unpacking that within the web archiving space. So it's there. It's always there, as I'm sure you guys would probably agree.

Yeah, we can do that too. But Katie, feel free to jump in too, if you have any thoughts. I was just going to say that Jess and I have spent a lot of time talking about crisis as a main motivator for a lot of web community collection particularly, which obviously carries with it a lot of problems for how archivists are going about it. Yeah, and I definitely want to unpack a little later the difference between cultural institutions approaches and these community approaches, because you were studying basically community approaches. Your paper, because of its nature, wasn't so much about the technical way in which they did the preservation, although you did touch on that, like, how do you get around limit rating?

that's a real big problem. Like the terms of service of most websites are like you can't scrape our data or we will ban your account and block your IP address or whatever. That happened to me with Researchgate. So could you go a little bit into the cultural aspects of web preservation? I guess we could just go with what you said, unpacking. How did you phrase it? Unpacking what's motivating people? Is it the way you phrased it?

Sorry. Yeah. And this kind of question about the politics. Like what's driving people and how people come together on these kind of, And Katie's right. Like we, I bang on a lot about crisis. Like what there's a kind of like it's something I haven't written yet, which kind of came out of my PhD, which is that a lot of the stuff is driven by what I would call sort of crisis collection. So the environmental data example I tried to write about in my PhD quite a bit about like crisis being this sort of like motivator for bringing people together.

And maybe now is not the right time to back what that what that means. But thinking about it in terms of cultural terms, like, you know, the actual practices associated with web archiving, if we put aside the sort of technical aspects that you were referring to and think about how communities are built around these practices, that also was of interest to me in this, in this archive team example, because it kind of, archive team is this sort of volunteer group. So Abigail DeCosnick called them sort of techno volunteers. So volunteers that come together with like, with technologies, with particular sort of social aims to, you know, come together around a particular kind of project and this one being an archiving project. And they're interested in archiving the stuff, right? Like, they want to save the

stuff. They want to save it for history. And there's some really big, ambitious claims around what web archiving is doing and how it's a means to this kind of, much like the internet archives motivations around universal access to all knowledge. It's about this kind of like infinite archive that we're all building together. But I was really interested in sort of the kind of community dynamics that were happening through web archiving. So like people were creating meaning about what they were doing as a community together and they were motivated by particular kind of values, really. And some of those values were about what they want the internet to be, what they want the web to be, how they wanted to be open and accessible and free for all, for all time. You know, some really

big, big value statements about what they want the internet to be. But then also when it came to Tumblr, there was some really interesting specific stuff around, yeah, sort of the deplatforming of sex online, which is clearly a big, big part of the discourse around the not safe for work communities in particular. So I was also thinking about the sort of cultural dynamics of how communities form on the platforms that are being saved and how the values that were being kind of mobilized in those communities in terms of the curation of particular kinds of content or the way that you connect with other people through that content. and the practices that those communities develop around how you share or do not share certain kinds of content in certain kinds of ways, how those are being disrupted by this whole thing, this web archiving thing where people are coming in and grabbing stuff and putting it somewhere else, even though their aims are like, you know, really lofty. And most of us would think we're pretty good aims and pretty good goals and well-intended,

I would say. But there's this tension there often. And that's kind of what I was trying to sort of figure out if culture, like the lens of culture is a way to start to sort of unpack what those values actually are and how they might be in tension when these technologies are deployed to preserve stuff forever. Yeah, sort of like the ethics and the etiquette behind like screenshoting. It's kind of just that on a different scale. It's like you screenshot it my tweet. Now I can't delete it if I feel bad about it. And that goes from nuanced people, like people genuinely feeling bad about something or they said something wrong to people who want to hide evidence that they said something.

But it's kind of the same thing when you have these communities that are more or less not intending to be found. They're still on the open internet enough that they can be archived. But it is that same sort of etiquette of, do you archive this? And the internet archive in particular has gotten critiques from library professionals. specifically on their goal of access to all knowledge openly, because we all know that there's indigenous knowledge systems. There are religious knowledge systems that are closed systems. And if you get your hands on it and then digitize it and preserve it, make it open, you haven't done anything illegal, you haven't broken copyright. Jay's told the story before about culturally

sensitive Buddhist manuscripts where someone said, oh, I wrote this in a previous life and going, oh, well, do we have your permission to put this in our collection openly? Since you're the author, we want you to retain control over it. He goes, yeah. Of course, there was no legal obligation for them to do that, but they did it as an etiquette aspect. It's a cultural aspect to, because libraries serve people and they interact with people. Yeah, I'm really familiar with the Internet Archive and the kind of tensions around their mission statement. And actually, they were another case study in my PhD as well.

So I spent a bunch of time actually at the Internet Archive understanding what's going on there as well. And they're deeply intertwined with all these other web archiving projects as well. They're very entangled with archive team and the stuff that happened around Tumblr. And of course, all these archives are on the Internet Archive now. Like, you can go download them. So big questions there. But, I mean, Katie's work really intersects with this kind of question of what happens to and how that might be in tension with the people that created the stuff in the first place,

which maybe we'll get, we'll get on to as well. Yeah, like, and I know I've brought this up before and not to be, because I know there is a criticism of people bringing this up all the time, but have either of you heard of Isabel Fall? Isabel Fall is a trans author who published a short sci-fi story. It's sort of in response to the like, I identify as an attack helicopter, like transphobic joke and went like, what if I wrote a sci-fi story where someone's gender? was an attack helicopter.

And people called her a Nazi. People said that she wasn't actually a trans woman. People said that this was causing harm. People harassed her to the point of, like, it was bad to the point where she considered detransitioning and actually like committed herself for a little bit. And she asked the editors of that story to take it down. And also it is no longer in the internet archive because I wrote a thing about this for like a library, just academy course I was taking.

It is no longer in the internet archive, but other archive projects have it that do web archiving, because that's how people still, you know, read that original version. But then all of the tweets of the people harassing her and whatnot, there are screenshots of a lot of them, even if they got deleted. But then what happens when those screenshots like break, right? And so there's this whole like history of harassment and that it's just, all tangled up in like emotional reactions to things and who gets to say what gets pulled down and what doesn't what is allowed to exist on the internet what's causing quote harm etc etc

I thought that was a really interesting like recent case of how complicated web archiving can be yeah that's really that's really interesting and I'd like to follow up on it I think I think for me the issue with the, not that this has to be a whole rant, all these things always kind of turned into a rant about the internet archive. This is a very familiar. We've done it before. This is a very familiar conversation for me. Even when we defend it, we also criticize it a lot. You know, like, yeah, and maybe I should just say, like, I'm, you know, a great lover of the internet archive, you know, I use it all the time. It's a core part of my research. It's, you know, I do have a lot of love for them organizationally and for some of the people who dedicate their time there, both as volunteers and as staff.

But my issue has always been around transparency. So, and part of the problem is that, of course, as a kind of, you know, they're just an organization. They have no obligation to be transparent about whatever. They're not state paid or, you know, they're not public organization. But when we're making the kind of claims that they're making and the role that they're planning. online, and this is kind of part that came out of my research as well and is ongoing, is that the Internet Archive is changing, in my opinion, what the web is. Like, by replacing all the 4-4 links on Wikipedia to be directed to the Internet

archive, like they are part of, as one example, they are part of the infrastructure of the web. And as are all these other web archives that are existing in the world, as these kind of services are being proliferated. And for me, it's about being transparent because they are taking stuff down all the time. They are modifying their access scripts to, you know, to block and enable certain kinds of content from being viewed or accessible online. But the decisions behind those processes are extremely opaque. And actually, they are, I think I can say. Most of them are like a lot of people at the Internet Archive are under NDAs about what they can and cannot talk about when it comes to access restrictions.

I think I can say that. I don't know if I can, but they are. That's kind of a fact. And because they could be sued. And, you know, they are, you know, and that's, that's understandable too. Because, you know, they're involved in all kinds of court cases where people are taking other people to court about what was or wasn't online. So they are forming a function there. But yeah, I just have big questions about how we, as it becomes part of this sort of public infrastructure of what the internet is fundamentally, you know, what rights do we have as users and people who put stuff online to understand what the policies are behind what, you know, what goes through the Wayback Machine and what gets turned out for other services? Because, of course, it's not just, you know, what we access when we go onto the Wayback Machine. Like, all that data is getting packaged up and used in all kinds of ways and, you know, put into data-driven technologies. And through machine learning models that are then impacting other parts of our lives, So there's a kind of a big thing happening here that web archiving is just like one,

one, in my opinion, very important component of it. But it's a lot of black boxing happening. Yeah. I want to back up a little bit and go back to archive team and their ideological commitment. So I wrote in the notes that they were anti-corporate from what I could tell. And I guess a liberal way was the best way to say it. It was sort of, we want control over this product. It's fine that it's a product.

It's fine that you're selling it to us. But we won't control over much as in the same way video gamers tend to talk about video games that you are exploiting this community of people called gamers. We want control over the industry as consumers, but they don't realize, like, you can't have control over the industry as consumers without either a law or, you know, working in solidarity with unionizing. They never really get to an actual political critique of what their criticism. It's sort of just the, this is bad. And so, oh, Tumblr can just take away our stuff,

therefore we should preserve it. And it's sort of just a very reaction just against, this is ours, don't take it. I mean, there's a deeper level of something we've talked about recently in regards to intellectual property. If I make something, I should be entitled to the fruits of my labor, right? And we're not like a pro expansionist IP thing, but it's like, it's a normal thing to say, I created this, I want to benefit from it, I don't want a company to steal it from me. And that's kind of a layer that they could have gone towards, but I think it stayed more at a surface level of we don't want this to go away. You can't just take it.

It's the arbitrariness hits at an injustice, but they don't seem to be making a political critique of why that injustice happens and why it's allowed to happen. Yeah, I mean, I'm interested, am I the archive team expert? or I don't know if anybody else has kind of come across them. It's usually, usually if you've heard of archive team, it's because you've come across Jason Scott, which is the kind of,

I'm sure he wouldn't disagree with sort of loud mouthpiece for archive team, but also works at the Internet Archive. But he, you know, he's a really interesting character, and I kind of spent a long time sort of looking at a lot of the stuff that he does online. But in terms of the sort of like ideological commitment, of archive team, it can be very difficult, and it was in my, in my research, and I should say I've not been really paying attention to what they've been up to over the last few years. So that's where my knowledge kind of drops off. But it can be difficult to disentangle, like Jason, what Jason Scott

says and what his kind of vision was for archive team as the kind of initial co-founder of the group. and what archive team itself, which is also like not one thing. And, you know, there's kind of core group of volunteers who have been doing the archiving stuff for, you know, some of them for 10, 15 years and some who just rocked up yesterday. And then there's all those sort of volunteers who come on board when a particular platform or something they are, you know, have a stake in is going off and wouldn't necessarily consider themselves like core members of archive team, but are participating in the kind of the practice and the labor of doing the archive team work. So like there's it's kind of difficult to say

even though I've tried to I've forced myself in this paper to like really try and say something about what's driving them as a group. But many of those things are are based on or at least kind of extensions of previous understandings about sort of hacktivist hacker ideals about, you know, that have connections with open source community, free and open source community. around freedom of information, freedom of access. And those things do seem to drive them. But I think you're right in the kind of pointing out that there's big claims and these sort of big aims, I guess, to their work.

But it's never really sort of followed through in terms of thinking about how you might change the things that lead to the need or the need for web archiving if we believe there is a need for web archiving. I mean, I'm always on the fence about this. kind of swing in lots of different directions about whether or not web archiving is needed in some of these cases. But it does seem to be centered on user rights, right? So part of it is about like, if you post stuff on a particular platform, and clearly this stems from a lot from sort of the platform, or at least it's been proliferated because of the platformization of the web, when we create

stuff on the web, we should have some kind of right to not have that stuff online in perpetuity necessarily, but at the very least, those platforms have some obligation to let us know if they're going to sunset the platform and give us a reasonable notice period to like say, hey, come and get your stuff. And of course, the example of Tumblr not stay for work is like really complicated because there were all of these sort of fits and starts about what was happening and how they were obscuring and then blocking and removing and then not removing some stuff and leaving other stuff up. and it seems to be in a sort of weird gray area still to this day. They're bringing back some things and leaving other things off.

But most of those things are driven by money, right? They're driven by ad sales. They're driven by Apple. You know, Apple store saying we're not going to host that app anymore, which then leads these companies to, you know, say, well, okay, well, we've got to change something. We have to change it next week because if we don't change it next week, we're not going to get the ad sales from then onward,

which will be losing, you know, bleeding money or whatever. And I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but that is one of the clearly a big motivating factor and why some of these platforms do stuff really quickly without letting people know or letting them know, right, you know, without giving them kind of reasonable time frame to actually do anything about it. So a lot of the archive teamwork, at least in the early days, was driven by this kind of feeling like, well, if platforms are going to do this, we may not be able to change what they're going to do, but at least we can give people the opportunity or the avenue to do to archive this stuff and save it. it's not really based on like individual action it's usually about like we'll save it for you

and we'll put it in this place over here and we hope you can come and find it later there's some problems there I would say but disentangling like what their goals are and if their goals are actually to change the way platforms work I mean I don't know that's a that's an open question I haven't seen anything to the contrary sure and let's let's move on to sort of the difference between these volunteerist approaches and the crisis approach to web archiving to cultural institutions. How do cultural institutions do web archiving? How do they do it different? You mentioned they do neutrality, but what are the main defining differences? Yeah, I mean, and Katie, you feel free in your library and information science expertise if you have comments on this. Let's jump in. But I mean,

they are often using the same tools. They're often using the same technologies, with the exception of archive team who rolls like a lot of their own tooling around this stuff. They're using the same libraries usually. But the practices are driven, are much more, and I write a little bit about that in the framing of the Tumblr article, is that, you know, they're much more organizations and institutions in this space are so much more risk-averse than the other spaces that are doing this work. Like, they're driven, they're driven by similar aims in terms of, you know, preservation, in terms of history for all and cultural heritage and these kind of lofty claims around, you know, the role of library and archives in society. But they are extremely risk-averse in the sense that

they're not going to be often most of the time. And that's where the internet archive is also the outlier here. You know, they're doing it in a way that will prevent them from getting sued by the people who create this content. And yeah, so it just leads them to be extremely slow moving. when it comes to web archiving and not terribly responsive or at least responsive in the same way, which is why we often see librarians and archivists who are working in this space. If they're doing activist work,

they're doing it outside of their institutional commitments because, yeah, often it's very difficult to do those kinds of things when you're inside of these sort of big moving because most of these organizations are at the national level. So they're like national libraries, national archives, who are even slower moving than, say, your university library or the kind of burgeoning, there are some burgeoning projects going on around sort of public libraries who are getting involved in doing web archiving projects around their local communities and things, which is

kind of different, slightly different kettle of fish, I would say. Yeah. Although I do think maybe some of those political ones that we mentioned earlier actually wouldn't be so politically risky for universities, as long as it's like, you know, a state-approved propaganda sort of project like the protests in Iran, right? Because that's destabilizing Iranian government. No one is going to come after them for studying that kind of protest against the government. The United States is hostile to.

I think that's probably right. I've seen things like that. Yeah, they have. And there's a lot of university libraries who have been involved in, like, creating collections that are, they tend to be driven by researcher interests or what they think researchers are interested in doing in their own institutions, but some of them can be very, very sensitive archives. They can be about topics that are, yeah, geopolitical in nature, and they do try to respond to those as quickly as possible. So it's not to say that collection work isn't happening, but the way that

it's done, I would say, is just slightly more careful, more considered. And it sounds like I'm making a value judgment about that. It is just a different way of working. And that's also, Also what I tried to sort of point on in this article is that, like, one of the key tenets of archive team is to archive first and ask questions later. Like, it is all about get as much as possible before this thing, you know, is sunsetted. And so, you know, they often sort of compare it to sort of the metaphor of the burning building and that they're the firefighters running into the burning building. This is a someday I'll write about that metaphor in web archiving because there's a lot. lot to think about there. But it is driven by the time concerns. And often these or other organizational projects, you know, have very difficult time mobilizing under those kinds of

constraints, which means they just collect different things and usually not as much. But yeah, I don't know if I could I could spin off in lots of different directions from that. But I don't know if you say, Sadie's got her hand. That just reminded me of how sometimes there's a lot of critiques that individuals will lobby at institutions or public figures online about how, like, well, they haven't said anything about this. And they have, why didn't they do something sooner? And I've seen a lot of that from within libraries. So like librarians and library staff critiquing their own institutions or other similar institutions with like, well, why didn't you say something about this sooner? And yeah, there is a different angle there with sort of that you have to give

people time in the sense that both you have to give people time to preserve their stuff and you have to give institutions time to come to a conclusion and act on it. Like action takes time sometimes. So I see a lot of that with like diversity initiatives and stuff. So people are like, well, why didn't you do something sooner or faster? And it's like, well, it's an institution. It's going to move slower than like your rag tag team of web archifs who are claiming to be, you know, internet firefighters kind of thing. So, yeah, I think that's definitely an interesting, interesting take to look at, something to look at. They're also constrained by other things like, you know, their organizational mission and remit and, you know, regulations. So like the UK Web Archive is only about archiving stuff in the UK Webspace.

They are not allowed to be archiving stuff outside of the UK website. So, and it's similar with other national web archives as well. But in addition to that, there's a huge resourcing question, like having the people and not only the time, but the people and the like computational infrastructure to be deploying in order to collect this stuff, both, you know, in the limited amount of time, but then also having the space to keep it all and not knowing what's necessarily in there, sometimes not wanting to know what's in there. Because if you start kind of unpacking this stuff, like, you know, you can find all kinds of things. and that was a big question with the Tumblr, not safe for web archive. Like, there's some stuff in there that most organizations would definitely not be okay with housing on their own infrastructure. So there's kind of really interesting questions too there with Archive Team about how they deploy their own sort of personal computational resourcing to the infrastructure that is Archive Team, which is a whole other thing. Yeah, that does make me wonder, as I was reading this, how they started and how they were grabbing as much as possible,

it really made me wonder, what is the use of these archives? Because when you build any kind of special collection or an archive, it's very, very important in library science to know what's the scope going to be, who's the audience going to be? Because collecting is, and I think this is something a lot of people don't get intuitively, collecting is very, very intentional. And so if you're trying to like study the gay bars in your neighborhood, you have to know, okay, how am I going to get a lot? swath that's representative? Or am I just going to pick up every flyer, every piece of thing? You know, I've seen very, very bad gay collections because it's like, you know, it was just some guy's like collection of magazines and it's like, who is it for? It was for him. You know, he liked collecting. But as a research collection in a research library, what was the point,

except maybe preservation? So do these archives see a lot of use, I guess, is my basic question. Yeah, great, great question. And something that Katie and I talk about a lot. And actually, I think it leads into her work really quite nicely. These collections do not see a lot of use. But that depends on what you think about when you think, you know, how do we qualify use, right? And this is something I've been working on in another project. In terms of researcher use, like very limited, extremely limited use, even at the Internet Archive.

And there's been lots of programs around like developing researcher capabilities and capacity. to be using these sort of, you know, so-called big data archives often and developing the tooling around that to enable researchers who may not come from computational sciences to use them for other types of research. But obviously, like, people use the web machine all the time as individuals, as organizations. It's performing a function along with other web archives, as I already said, like on the internet that is often not really considered in the small, but yeah, the kind of field of web archiving practitioners,

because there's a lot of focus on research or use and not really a whole lot of focus on how other people are already using them. And how these web archives then, as I said too, like then fuel machine learning models and content moderation models, like all kinds of other stuff. Like the not safe for work thing was so interesting because it was the users who are tagging not safe for work content on Tumblr that were basically producing a database for then Tumblr to then use against them in the future to be able to flag content.

Like web archives get used in different ways just depends on how you draw all the boundaries around what we think a web archive is in my opinion. But this kind of question of like who are they for really has driven a lot of my work and Katie's work and a lot of conversations that Katie and I have had. And certainly her research around looking. at how people engage with or think about or in using those web archives to engage these kinds of questions with the people who originally created this content is super, super interesting. So maybe I'll pass it to you, Katie. Who are these things for?

Oh, yeah, I don't know. I mean, so I've done a lot on, I guess, like the ethics of use, particularly with the Internet Archive Wayback Machine because I think that's the thing that people have most access to and familiar to at this point. So yeah, in my PhD research, I asked participants to come with me on an archive promenade, and we went through the internet archive way back machine to find their digital traces, and they would sort of comment on how they felt about it, both the difficulties of trying to find things and often not succeeding, but also like the horror of finding a blog from like 1999, where you're talking about your sexual identity and stuff.

Yeah, so in terms of who this is for, I think like the hoarding tendency of like a scrape and dump approach has just led to a lot of ethical concerns, particularly for researchers, but often like beyond that scope as well as just has been mentioning like these other uses of the data for other types of like building. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, I wanted to move into your work next too. So you wrote a paper about GeoCities, which went under around, I want to say 2009 or at least it was winding down significantly in 2000. 2009. Yeah. And you mentioned that the, so just tell me a little bit about your project, just off the top. Yeah, GeoCities.

GeoCities is like, I think the website a lot of people think about when they think of like the utopic vision of early, like late 90s blogging. And because of that, it has a lot of like nostalgia and memory attached to it. And there's often like a lot of romanticizing, I think, when it comes to thinking about its history. but I wanted to get into why it died and when that actually happened, because by 2009, it was already pretty inactive. So by using the Internet Archive, there's a lot that you can find in people's websites

that talks about why it was failing as a platform and what was leading to it and how they felt about it and just these different tensions that were coming about, which I think tells us a lot about relationships between like individuals and the spaces online where they spend their time. Yeah, I do enjoy there is. a Tumblr blog actually called 1 terabyte of kilobyte age a GeoCity's research blog

by Olia Leolina and Dragon Espinshide and it I just enjoy it because once in a while I'll just see an old GeoCity's page show up on my Tumblr feed and it'll be like

you know our grandchildren and it's just pictures of like a couple let's see what's the one here's my project page. And a lot of them are already broken by the time they were archived. So a lot of them are gone. Some of them are like businesses. Let's see what else we've got a little bit of like creative writing, American Top Ten Countdown, like blogging, but like before all blogging was turned into timeline-based blogging. I think we talked about, we have an old episode about that, didn't we?

Yeah, that was actually something I was going to bring up if the conversation allowed it. But, you know, yeah. I don't know if you want to need to talk about that. at all. Well, go listen to that episode. I don't remember what episode it was, but yeah, we talk a lot about... It was a digital garden episode. Digital Gardens. So we talk about digital gardens and different ways of doing the web.

Yeah. And, yeah, I kind of thought about bringing up personal knowledge management in terms, once we get to a later section when we're talking about individuals and their preservation of their selves. So, Katie, comparing like the political economy of GeoCities, which you mentioned in 2009, There was a lot of acquisition. There was a lot of political, there's a lot of like economic turmoil for these companies. What about now?

What's changed? Because we're going through a time of change with internet companies busting because the economy is becoming real again. It's not free money anymore. You can't just throw money at these companies and they never become profitable. Now they actually have to be profitable. So what's going to, is there, are there comparisons or is it different? I mean, what's happening? Yeah.

I mean, I think like these social platforms, are fundamentally unstable things, and that is something that has always been true and is sort of demonstrating the reality of that now with things like Twitter. But I think the main differences between something like GeoCities and something like Twitter is the platform infrastructure itself. I think also an increase in platform power that we've seen over the past 20 years. But what this means is like there's differences in elevation and visibility for individuals. And I think that like changes their feelings about like privacy and how well like what the size of their audience is. And that sort of dictates like feelings about its permanence on the internet. But in terms of the

platforms itself, like I think, I don't know if you guys agree with this, but I think there's something sort of different about Twitter. Like there's something about it that feels like it should be because it's like inserted itself into the media infrastructure so successfully. And also maintains these like niche and smaller communities. It feels. feels like it should be around forever, which is something that wasn't necessarily felt in the late 90s, early 2000s, where people were migrating between sites pretty easily and bringing their groups with them. I think that's something that is maybe a bit different now. Yeah, I definitely wanted to talk about people's feelings, specifically, like, the first thing you mentioned in your paper were these platform eulogies. So grief. People really grieved losing their site, losing their community. their web ring. And I don't think we talk about that very often because it's like, oh, it's a silly thing to grieve over, but not for a lot of people. And in fact, I saw people

definitely grieving at the thought of Twitter going away. I mean, I made fun of them a little bit for it and being like, you know, like black Twitter will never survive without Twitter. It's like, no, it'll, black people will be in communities on other platforms if this one died. I think it's, And they were like, no, but it was like designed for black people specifically. And I was like, I don't know if that's entirely. It's grief, but someone's working through it, right? And we don't really make space for that. Or people are making their own space to talk about it.

But we take it varying levels of serious. Yes. I think it's really easy to sort of get in your feelings about online spaces. But for good reason, right? Like we're spending a lot of our time here. It becomes part of ourselves. and it's where a lot of different interactions are taking place. But I think it's interesting to look at grief and eulogies of these spaces

because it sort of tells us what we value about them, what we sort of anticipate losing, and what that sort of means for like, you know, the purpose of all of this at all. And that's sort of what I was doing with the GeoCities thing, was like digging into what their sort of like expressions of, what their complaints were, what their like expressions of grief were

because it was sort of telling us what, GeoCities meant to them, which is, like, I think, an important part of web history. Yeah, and kind of combining these two things, this modern political economy where you say, you know, people are, I don't think you said it this way, but people are a little more concerned that these things are, that they are temporary. People are having trouble dealing with the fact that they're not, that they're, you know, they ebb and flow, they boom and bust. They're tech companies. They're designed to not be particularly stable because that's how they stay ahead of regulation. It's in their business model. Combining that with like modern, like Twitter

problems, long-term prospects of web archiving, what goes into the historical record, right? It's just saying if you don't have a conscious approach to how you're archiving something, what's the use going to be? And so I think, like I said, I think people are a little overly dramatic about preservation. But I mean, where does the fear of loss come from? Is it just grief? Is it a fear of impermanence. We got a little Buddhist about this the other day. Me and Jay were talking about it. Like, do people just fear their digital selves dying because they fear their own death? I'm trying to get at what people are feeling, because this is like an emotional conversation. People fear that this is all being taken away from me, therefore I need to save it right now,

even if the way I'm saving it makes no sense and might not actually ever be used again. Yeah. I learned a lot about this in my research, because I was asking people, what it meant to them and how they were feeling about it. I think there is this hoarding tendency similar to your childhood bedroom. You just kind of don't want to throw some things out because you might want to look at that down the line. But what I learned through talking to people is that their opinions and their feelings about archiving a preservation or deletion are going to vary drastically. So some people are really disappointed when they try to find their early digital traces and discover that they're gone. But other people are horrified that it's

continue to exist or like they thought they deleted something and it surprises them by still existing. And that can feel like very violating depending on what you're doing. But this sort of gets up my next point, which is like, I think it falls along lines of differences in context of when it was made and like personhood and like identity stuff. So like the context of the production. So like what was the perceived size of your audience? What was like the vulnerability levels of that? What's like the sensitivity of the stuff? Is it photographs? Is it, text? Are you using vague or explicit language to talk about things? Are there links to your real life identity that are being breached by its continued existence? There's some of the

things that were coming up in the conversation. So we went back to this like what someone's blog that they were working on in 2004 or 2006 and it had links to their early Facebook page, which is the one that they still use. And it's like those types of like breaches of privacy, I guess that they were really like struck by and and horrified about. Can I comment on that as someone who does not research this? So I have three things. One, this is going to be dorky. So there's a recent horror movie that just came out,

Megan, aka Mithrigan, that I saw for my birthday. And it was very goofy and fun. Everyone go see it. Let your teenagers go be rowdy at it if you're an adult with teenagers. And there's a scene in it because it's about a girl who was in a car wreck with her parents and both her parents died, like in front of her, right? And her aunt makes this doll

Megan for her, who's AI, basically. And there's a scene where they're like demonstrating this to investors of like, oh, here's how the doll interacts with the little girl. And the little girl, it's like, she said she was like ready to like be able to be in that space. And then it's she's not. She just like breaks down crying. And the doll, Mithrigan comes up to her and is like, you know, why are you sad? And she's like, well, I'm afraid that I'm not going to remember my parents at all, that I'm going to, like, lose these memories and whatnot. Like, what happens when I grow up and I, like, can't remember what my mom looks like or things that we did? And the doll asked, like, well, what's, like, a favorite memory of yours or whatnot? And, you know,

she tells her, and then Megan goes, I've just recorded that. So it'll be here forever if you ever want to visit it again. That, like, preservation of memory. And it's like, and any time you have those types of memories, tell me and I will record them. Like, in half, them for you forever. And then they hug. And all the investors in the room are weeping. And are like, yeah. As a like, you know, look at how this thing helps with this little girl's grief. Right. And this like kind of like maybe unhealthy, like I'm going to hoard all of the memories that you have. Which reminded me of Marie Kondo. I don't know if like people have like read her book and stuff. A lot of librarians hate her because she tells people to throw their books away.

But that means they haven't read the book. And there's a thing of like old photographs and other like chotchkes and whatnot, that she's like, you can get rid of those. Because if you're just holding on to them for the memory, you have the memory. So you can actually get rid of the thing. But then I think of like people with bad memories, you know, especially people who maybe have experience like trauma or have certain like mental illnesses. Like my memory is shit. Like I've been in a head on collision. I have like PTSD. I've got ADHD. I don't remember anything. Like I don't remember what I ate yesterday. And so I'm My memory is really bad.

And so my relation to like, you know, this like very Buddhist, like, everything's impermanent. Just let it go away. I agree with Marie Kondo and like, oh, but my memory is terrible. I can't just let them live up there is like attention I live in because like, so my mom died in 2018. And I didn't see her a lot because she lived elsewhere and I didn't visit her a lot. So I mainly interacted with her over like Facebook or calling or FaceTime and whatnot.

And she made me her legacy contact because she died of cancer. So she like knew it was happening. made me her legacy contact. So I'm in charge of my mom's Facebook now. Like I have it. And it's like I can't get rid of my Facebook now because like the ghost of my mother is like attached to it. And there's all these pictures and all these posts and whatnot. And like that's my mom because I didn't really get to interact with her otherwise.

And so this is like interesting thing with like memory and death I think is like and not just oh, I'm afraid of myself dying and all of these things going away. but like the death of memory, and especially if those memories are related to people who are dead. Like, where social media then acts as like a ghost of someone. That was kind of rambling. I tried to connect it. So I don't know if that was successful or not. It's really interesting, Jay.

And it made me think of a couple of things as well. And one of them is quite, is a little personal as well in the sense that my dad died in 2015. And it was quite sudden. So there's no like legacy person to take over his like digital. stuff. And so basically one of the only reasons I haven't left Facebook is because of my family, but also I get these really like triggering reminders of him when I'm on there. And part of it is like really awful, painful stuff. And then sometimes it's like, oh, that's nice. I forgot about that or whatever. But I think the thing that I struggle with is like I don't get a, where do I get to choose? Like,

it's not really a choice. I leave the platform and I lose all these things or I tweak my settings so that I don't have to see that photo of us like way back when. There are things you can do, but it sometimes doesn't feel like a real option to leave these spaces, even if we want to leave them because of these, like these memories and at least the attachment to the digital traces of these memories, which can be really difficult. But the other thing I was thinking of when you were talking about the AI doll, which suddenly I did remember when I've seen the trailer for this.

Yeah, I'm intrigued. There's an episode of Black Mirror from years and years ago where they have the glasses and where people record every day, all day long. And I think about that episode a lot when it comes, like in relation to web archiving. Because the thing, like the thing where it gets dark in that, not sorry, spoiler.

Maybe we should like have a spoiler alert. here but the thing that gets dark for me in that episode is like people then rewind back to like as a kind of accountability mechanism for the people in their lives like no you did say that I can go back to the exact moment when you said that or go back to like when my wife was cheating on me with so and so or whatever and you can it's just that that accessibility to the I mean I'm not saying we're living in that now but there it does raise as a Black Mirror always does, like really interesting questions about, like, what is too much? Like, what is too much in terms of what we're capturing, not just about ourselves, but about

everyone around us, which is what's happening on any platform today, certainly. It's not just about your own kind of archive. It's deeply interconnected with everyone else's, which I think speaks to that question that's maybe Justin was also alluding to around, like, what is this stuff for like if we just got like a bunch of individuals out there like archiving their Twitter archive and putting it on their laptop like what's that for like what is that just for them I guess it is it's not really saving the platform and in terms of like what you were saying Katie about the grief Katie and I were also together when like platform was like imploding so she saw my like deep anger when it when it was first going down I think I've worked through my grief a little bit since then

the thing I was mad about and I still am mad about is I've considered it to be like public infrastructure. Like this is a public space. This is not a private space in my view. And it wasn't my private space. It was this kind of nationalized Facebook. Kind of. I don't.

And maybe that's too strong. But I do think that it had kind of wormed its way into obviously not everywhere. And we're talking about, you know, not everybody was on Twitter. And that that's, you know, that's really important. But for the people that were like very online on Twitter, you know, has been, has been interesting to sort of work through like what does this thing mean to me and it mostly just meant connectedness it actually had nothing to do with like my memory my like my own personal memories or attachment some people I guess use Twitter in that way but it was more about just feeling

connected to communities of people around ideas and sharing stuff and research communities and stuff like that but I'm still pretty angry about it actually now that I think about it A question that I saw come up by non-library people when Twitter was going down was they started grappling, I guess, for the first time in their lives with how does information get preserved past your lifetime? Like, who gets put into an archive? And we have a character on this show called John D. Fuxmith Institute. So we talk about, like, the politics of special collections, which is they're named after people like John D. Fuxmith. because he had a lot of money and a lot of the collection was built off his collection and also collections about himself.

It was a very old system of sort of noblous oblige and personal libraries. And the people whose stuff gets preserved tend to be political figures, rich figures. And so these people were saying, I downloaded my Twitter data, what do I do with it? How does stuff get into an archive? And I mean, as someone who's worked in special collections, my answer is, We don't want it because like, who are you? It goes back to this kind of like one person's Twitter data by itself has no real use. And also, there's no context.

Like, do we have any of your papers? Do we have anything about your life? Did you write a bunch of books that we can make a collection out of? Like, were you an author? What did you do? And if you're going to talk about ordinary people and not do like an individualist type of things, then the scale has to be massive. It has to be, okay.

I have a book that's just tweets. It's called The Baltimore Uprising A Teen Epistolary, and it's just tweets from teenagers about the Baltimore Uprising. That's all it is. And that's a curated collection that makes sense, and it made total sense

to publish a book like that as a primary source, because it was curated, it had a purpose, it went through a publisher, it was distributed, but what it was not was a data dump of each of those people's whole Twitter accounts. And so I think that, again, it brings back this fear of impermanence and also this not understanding how preservation works because a lot of preservation works by elitist conceptions.

Yeah, and it's also like in the five laws of library science, you know, it's like every book, it's reader, every reader, their book, books are for use. And then there's like another version of that that's about data. And so it's like, it's not that all of these tweets and archives and what, not don't have value because I think people sort of like to equate preservation and use with value. But all of these are very subjective. You know, like your own Twitter archive might not be useful in this specific context, but it might be useful and valuable in this specific context. And I think people are having a hard time wrapping their head around that where it's like,

well, if it won't be archived here, like, are you saying that it's not useful or valuable? And it's like, well, maybe not to them, but somewhere else it might. be these things are subjective. And I kind of wonder about how, and maybe this ties back to the GeoCity things, like how sort of the centralization of a lot of information on the internet has contributed to that because like people were, I hardly use Twitter. Like I have a Twitter, but it's mostly because of this podcast. And but I hardly use it.

And so when everything on Twitter went down, I was like on Tumblr thrown back the popcorn. Like, you know, like having a. fun time watching people's reactions because it didn't affect me. But at the same time, there is that sort of so many people get so much of the information from Twitter that it would be a really big deal if it just suddenly went away one day. And yeah, like people thinking like if I don't preserve my Twitter and if it's not useful to this one thing, it's not going to be useful or valuable at all. And I wonder how much of that is because things like everybody has to use to Facebook. Everybody's tied back to Facebook somehow. Everybody's tied back to Twitter somehow to get

all of their news and stay connected to their communities. And, you know, so many people are, I also only have a Facebook mostly because it's the only way I stay connected to a lot of my family. So it's like, that's sort of like these nodes of the internet and how they sort of centralize how we get stuff and how that then fleets back to how we view our digital data and what's valuable about it. So like, Jay, like, it might not be valuable to this particular institution, but it might be valuable to this particular project and people losing sight of that. But then again, maybe they didn't have a very good, they didn't have a good view on it to begin with.

I don't know. Yeah. And we do like to close out with an action-oriented question. What should people be doing to preserve websites and communities they value? Should the priority be maintaining communities moving from site to site? Should it be preserving content? That shouldn't be a comma there. or taking the time to mourn and eulogize what we had?

Are we underestimating the grieving process? There's a lot there, Justin. I guess maybe I'll start with what I was going to say off the back of what Sadie said, which is that I think that web archiving is often mobilized for problems that it can't help. And it kind of comes back to the kind of conversation about archive team and whether or not what they're doing is, actually changing what the platforms are doing, which I don't think it is. And I think similarly with other, you know, when we're thinking about preservation as a tactic to, in response to platforms dying, which we haven't really unpacked what we mean by that, which I always have kind of

interests and understanding how these things are dying, slow deaths versus just going, you know, somebody pulled the plug suddenly. You know, does web archiving, it depends on context, I guess, as we've been saying this whole time. Like, do web archives help, you know, for particular communities around specific topics or specific networks to, to enable them to preserve some snapshot in time? Yeah, probably. But they're not going to help communities stay connected or continue to socialize through, through their communities of practice online.

Like, those will migrate elsewhere or they won't. And I think that's why this Twitter thing is the, an interesting time right now in terms of like what's happening on on these other more cooperative platforms that are driven by different sorts of values and are hosted by peers and you know are operating in different ways which I think are trying to experiment in ways that mean that we're not tied to these sort of centralized monopolies of power when it comes to the platforms that we are using to create our community and share information. So it feels like I don't think I'm responding directly to your action-oriented questions, mostly because I don't think,

I often think web archiving should not be happening in most spaces online. So maybe that's not the action I would advocate. But I would advocate for people like understanding more about what is happening around web archiving and the spaces that they are operating in. And maybe, yeah, understanding how that integrates with the values that they hold and whether or not they want their communities or their individual stuff to be archived online, connect with other people who are advocating around the space because they do exist. Maybe we could source some links for the pod as well. Yeah, I obviously agree with everything you're saying, Jess. I think that, like, preservation doesn't have to sort of begin and end with web archiving. I think there's like lots of ways to talk about web history.

and I really like projects that are that are community-based and talking about their own histories and doing sort of different creative projects with that. There's a really great book series called Remembering the Internet where Anna Valen's Tumblr Porn was published, and there's a few others on that list as well. And I think those are great examples of sort of thinking about how we want to write about these histories, which sort of goes beyond just saving different material pieces of it. I think that's an important part, but it's not like the whole thing. So we've covered a lot of stuff, but I don't want to keep you too long.

But if you had any final things that we didn't get to address, I wanted to leave a little time for that. Yeah, I know. I was trying to think of something really, like, awesome to say. But I don't, I don't know. I think the only thing I would say is, like, I feel I often am like super ranty about web archives. And I'd go back to my previous point about, like, there's a lot of cool organizations. And, you know, Katie just pointed out a super cool project as well. There are other groups like documenting the now.

and others who have been really advocating for thinking critically about how we give tools to people that need them and want them to archive stuff, but also think critically about what's also going on in the wider space and how we might advocate for change around those archives and archival practices and their role in our everyday lives. So yeah, I would just say there's space for change and space for advocacy. It's not all bad. Yeah, and I would love to see just more collaboration partnerships between like institutions and individuals. I think there's a lot of extractive tendencies involved currently and we could build different types of relationships between people and their data and memory institutions. Is there any, I'm going to link to both your

dissertations and your public works and you mentioned you want to send me some link, but is there anything else you wanted to plug any projects, any upcoming publications, or do you want people to leave you alone. Well, yeah, both Jess and I published in the Dead and Dying Platform's special issue on the Internet Historys Journal, which has a lot of other great articles as well that people might be interested in checking out. Yeah, good call. It's a super interesting special issue, which will be really relevant to all the things that we discussed today. Otherwise, leave us alone. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, I mean, you can definitely plug your social media too if you're interested. Yeah, I'll link my Twitter profile. We'll see if it's still. there. Okay, yeah, you can just put those straight in the notes. Awesome. At the top and I'll get them.

Thank you so much for coming on. This will be fun. We're going to post it to Tumblr as we do most of our episodes. We're going to try paying to blaze the post. See what happens. So maybe people on Tumblr will be interested. I'll let you know. We've also wanted to talk about this for like months.

So it's really exciting to like finally like get to talk about it and have you all on. This has been really great. Oh, thank you so much. The invitation. Yeah. I've had a good time. Hopefully it, yeah, it wasn't just too too rambling and wide, wide ranging. Anytime I think like, oh, God, I sounded like an idiot, this episode is going to be terrible. Justin's a wizard and it always turns out great. Yeah, always sounds better in the edit. No, that's really cool. And you've gained at least one other listener to the pod.

So thank you for reaching out. Really super cool podcast. good night