#borndigital — Public Fediverse posts

International Business Times: Music, Video Games and News Archives Are Vanishing From Public Access, Internet Archive Report Finds. “Decades of music journalism and a huge slice of video game history have quietly disappeared from public access in recent years, according to a new Internet Archive report on cultural preservation. Titled Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record, […]

Internet Archive: Preserving a Creative Legacy: How CARTA is Safeguarding Artists’ Websites. “Art historians, critics, curators, and humanities scholars rely on artists’ records to understand and contextualize contemporary artistic practice. To support the accessibility and discoverability of these websites for art historical scholarship in the future, the Internet Archive’s Collaborative […]

Data Rescue Project: Announcing the DRP Metadata Analyst. “Today’s post is an interview with our new Metadata Analyst! The DRP is grateful to be able to offer this position throught the generous support of the Portfolio to Protect Science, a fiscally sponsored initiative of Global Impact, as well as other anonymous individual donors.”

Gizmodo: Will We Ever Solve the Problem of Losing Data?. “…for this Giz Asks, we asked experts in computer science, cybersecurity, and archival research to consider the idea of ‘permanence,’ specifically in the context of how we record, track, and store information. That is, is there such a thing as permanent data storage?”

Current Affairs: Who Will Save the Internet From Disappearing?. “From deleted government records to disappearing music, our digital culture can be erased overnight. The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham and Chris Freeland explain what it will take to save it.”

Tom’s Hardware: Chinese courts allow heirs to inherit accounts of deceased gamers — multiple cases spanning years establish precedent for digital ownership of games, in-game items, and microtransactions. “While most of the Western world has been grappling with publishers and big tech companies about digital ownership, a Redditor who claims to be married to a Chinese lawyer and certified […]

Engadget: PlayStation just struck a hammer blow to game preservation. “So, that’s it then. As of 2028, game discs will be a thing of the past for PlayStation. And after previously attempting to do so five years ago — before a backlash prompted it to reverse course — Sony is finally shuttering the digital storefronts on PS3 and PlayStation Vita. It doesn’t seem like the company will back […]

Scientific American: History depends on records that weren’t built to last. “Chat apps, email, and cloud files have become the primary record of how power is exercised. Archivists are trying to preserve them before formats go dark or messages disappear without a trace.”

Daily Nous: Kant Studies Online: No Longer Online. “What happens to the articles published in an online-only journal when that journal not only ceases to publish, but ceases to exist? That question is raised by the case of Kant Studies Online, an online only, open-access philosophy journal that published articles between 2011 and 2016, the website of which is no longer accessible. The journal […]

Oops. A virus left its traces on some of the disks. But ... the virus was created only after the author's death! The virus thus becomes a stemmatological tool #retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

What do you do when you receive a collection of 115 floppy disks without any indication of order or content? Pick one (do not forget to make a forensic copy) and take a peek! #retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

Digital philology thus allows to study not only what was written, but how something was written in digital environments (blackened text in the image is still unpublished) #retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

The end of digital text is sometimes not the end of digital text. Some files - especially such created by Word - have invisible extensions. In this case, they contain text which was deleted before a file was saved. This can be quite interesting material! #retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

Leetspeak Easter Egg: Microsoft encoded the file header as the hex sequence "D0CF11E", which reads "docfile". #retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

Digitality starts with at least two distinct symbols, typically 0 and 1, but it could also be 🍎 and 🍐 - the computer does not care. The computer decodes groups of binaries into something that humans can understand. This interpretation process is arbitrary: it relies on knowledge about what is encoded. Was it intended to represent a number or a letter? #retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

"Philology has always read the traces left on paper. What changes when those traces are no longer inscribed on te page, but embedded in a hard drive?"#retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

In the humanities, digital forensics, however yet untypical, are gaining ground. It allows, for example, retrace the creative process, much like classical text genesis, but in another medium. If a writer uses a computer, this process will be untraceable without a digital philology #retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

The archive is changing because writing practices are changing, and this is an ongoing and very silent process. That is the moment for digital forensics. First, make a forensic copy - legally equivalent to the original - to save the data from obsolescence #retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

The archive is changing! What was once a symbol for "save file" became not only a funny retro emoji, but an actual challenge for the archives. What to do with digital media we do not even know any more from own experience? #retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

Today 4PM Lecture: "Digital Remains: An Introduction to Forensic Philology" by Mariangela Giglio (Bologna), part of the series "Hack & Play", online and on site at the @ZPD. Further information and livestream: https://
hacknplay2026.rtrlb.de
#retrocomputing #digitalforensics #digitalheritage #borndigital #digitalarchives #digitalhumanities #hacknplay2026

Library of Congress Blogs: 2026 Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections. “This year’s event attracted 172 of the world’s leading experts in data storage infrastructure, best practices, innovation, and future projections of the digital preservation ecosystem. The Library’s DSA organizers arranged a robust agenda to foster open discussion of current challenges in digital […]

BBC: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games. “Can a company take away something you’ve already paid for? In the world of online video games, some already do. Publishers can decide to switch off a game’s servers, often leaving it effectively unplayable. Stop Killing Games, a growing consumer rights campaign started by American YouTuber Ross Scott in 2024, is challenging […]

Engadget: California lawmakers are working on a bill to preserve access to online games . “A bill that could require game publishers to offer a way to access online games after they are no longer actively supported is making its way to a floor vote in the California State Assembly, the first step on its way to becoming law, Ars Technica reports.”

Reuters: The Epstein Files and the risks of forensic image retention. “The Department of Justice (DOJ) continues to experience blowback from how it handled the release of voluminous files from the criminal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein. Overlooked in this debate is the Fourth Amendment question raised by the disclosures themselves: what the Constitution requires when the government makes […]

Kotaku: Failed Online Shooter Won’t Shut Down Because ‘Games Are Art And Deserve To Be Preserved’. “Blindfire was released back in October 2024 with a unique hook: It was an online first-person shooter set in the dark and was built around finding your enemies or remaining out of their sight. Sadly for developer Double Eleven, it never found much of an audience. Now, a year after its last […]

Tom’s Hardware: Internet archival sites struggling to preserve the internet because of skyrocketing hard drive prices due to the AI boom — Wayback Machine and Wikimedia punished by stratospheric storage pricing and stricter anti-scraping measures blocking the wrong bots. “The internet is getting harder to archive because the AI boom has caused a storage crisis, with both NAND and mechanical […]

Washington University in St. Louis: New Guide Helps Poets Preserve Digital Work. “The guide provides practical recommendations that poets and other writers can implement immediately to support the longevity of their work. As contemporary creative practice increasingly takes place in digital environments, poets face new challenges in managing, organizing, and preserving their files.”

New #DPC Blog is up! Read about The Postal Museum’s journey to making their born-digital collections publicly accessible online 👉 https://www.dpconline.org/blog/blog-pathway-public-access-helen-dafter
#DigitalPreservation #Coalition #digipres #DPC #community #museum #BornDigital #collections #JoinUs

TechCrunch: The Wayback Machine debuts a new plug-in designed to fix the internet’s broken links problem. “Automattic says that its new plug-in works by scanning your WordPress posts for outbound links, then cross-referencing the Wayback Machine for archived versions of those links. If there are none, it will automatically take new snapshots of the articles in question. Should a linked web […]