Digital Traces

Sanjana Hattotuwa

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.

Digital Curation Accessibility

Aspiration

The tech

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

atoms

Geo-physical spaceArchive/Library Prague

1s & 0s

The Cloud

The Democratising Effect

Archive(s) of Life

An endlessly morphing meta-archive

HTML5

Semantic Web

The grammar

The connections

Connections & meaning

Accessible, Replicable, EphemeralDigital Archiving:

500 quadrillion files

About the # of stars in our physical universe

More than doubling every two years

Archives from Sri Lanka

Tiki Toki

6,440,000 {articles}

7,021,500 {comments}

7 years

Forgotten mass graves

Burial site

Over 3.6Gb

117+ items

25 years

More to be scanned...

Selecting Downloading Producing Re-uploading Embedding Translating Compressing Visualising Flagging ...

The Digital Archivist

Accountability JusticeBearing witnessChain of custodyMediumMeta dataStorageFormat...

Digital Archive’s Purpose

Why?

To give future generations the ability to erase what they want

To help remember what has been overwritten

To help (re)create what matters

thank you