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This course acquaints students with the challenges of, and best practices for, preserving digital artifacts. Topics can include a survey of the (sometimes bewildering) array of formats for digital media, along with their vulnerabilities and half-lives; analysis of various preservation strategies (storage, migration, emulation, reinterpretation); institutional, legal, and practical impediments to preservation; preservation standards and resources for digital media (Media Matters, Variable Media Questionnaire). 3 credits.
Upon completing the course, students will have:
* Understood the enormous challenges digital culture represents for preservation.
* Learned the range of technical, institutional, and legal failure points for preserving digital artifacts.
* Understood and practiced preservation strategies such as storage, emulation, migration, and reinterpretation.
* Learned how to document variable works in museums, archives, and libraries.
* Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014).
* Other readings will be provided through e-reserve or other online means.
The course Slack workspace will be where the majority of the class takes place, including videos, lessons, and interaction with the instructor and other students. Before the class begins you will receive a message from the instructor(s) including login credentials and other information on how to access and use the site.
The course will consist of a series of video lectures, readings, and associated assignments broken up into week-long topics. Within each week you will be expected to:
* Watch all of the lectures and tutorials listed in the week's introduction and read any assigned material.
* Submit the weekly assignment on the course web site (or as a link to another site or resource, as appropriate).
* Participate in the ongoing discussions on the course web site. It cannot be emphasized enough how important this is to successfully taking an online-only course. A significant part of what you get from the class will come in talking and listening to other students and the instructors as they discuss their own take on the material.
This course is designed to be completely asynchronous so there are no specific times for meeting with other students or the instructor. Instead, interaction will take place via the online courseware, where you will also be submitting assignments and giving feedback to other students.
Given the variety of backgrounds expected in students for this class, you will be expected to bring perspectives and questions based on your own discipline, expertise, and/or workplace. Everyone*s participation in peer-to-peer messages and presentations will be critical to the success of the class.
If the only time you post a message is when you're turning in an assignment then you will have little opportunity to display your understanding of the ideas being discussed and we will not have much information to use when evaluating your success in the class. Ask questions, throw in comments, and generally add to the discussion as much as possible, particularly if you think you missed something or you have a stupid question. Odds are other people are as confused as you are.
If you for any reason think you may have an issue, either on a specific day/week or overall, talk to us! It is much easier to make accommodations ahead of time than after the fact.
As with all classes, it is expected that you will treat others with respect. If you are repeatedly abusive toward your classmates you will be moderated out of the conversation and it will be considered an absence for purposes of the attendance policy.
As covered in DIG 500 Introduction to Digital Curation, generative AI such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion is transforming workplaces from education to industry. In this class, you will be encouraged but not required to use these tools for certain assignments. In all cases, your instructors grant you permission to use them for brainstorming, research, and drafting assignments as well as generating related media such as illustrations or software programs.
In return, we ask that you simply:
1. Acknowledge that you used AI.
2. Take responsibility for the results, eg by fact-checking any claims or citations generated by AI.
3. Rewrite all texts to match your own voice. (AI-generated prose tends to be bland and easy to spot.)
4. Add specific, supporting citations from the course material and your own background. (You're required to do this anyway.)
š” Remember that your not stuck with what generative AI returns as the first result; incremental prompting in which you request improvements and revisions usually generates better results.
We also encourage adding your feelings, good or bad, about the experience in your posts. For more on the promise and perils of generative AI, see Learning With AI.
Grading for your assignments is weighted equally across each week of the class, including the faculty's assessment of your participation; the final project counts for two weeks' worth of assignments. The criteria for participation will be determined by the quality and quality of your online conversations, including asking questions, posting related links, critiquing others' assignments, and responding to threads initiated by the faculty or your classmates.
The more you add thoughtful, insightful comments to the discussion the more both you and other students will benefit. Questions are always welcome and should be asked publicly so that everybody can see the answer unless there is a very good reason to ask privately. In many cases you will be expected to look at and critique other students* work as an absolute minimum level of participation.
This is a graduate level course and you are expected to perform accordingly. Meeting the requirements in an average manner will result in a "C" as the final grade. Better than average effort and execution will result in a "B". An "A" is reserved for those students who demonstrate exceptional creative development, application, innovation, effort, and an in-depth understanding of process. Under normal circumstances a C or lower grade cannot be used as a graduate student to count towards completion of your certificate. Failure to complete any of the required components of your grade with an average or better effort will result in a "D" or an "F" as your final grade.
The following statements are dictated by the University of Maine; aspects may not be applicable to this online class.
This section introduces the challenges new media create for traditional forms of social memory, both for individuals and for institutions such as libraries, archives, museums, and laboratories. Because it's heavy on viewings and readings, the assignment itself shouldn't take you more than a few minutes.
Requires Maine.edu email credentials.
Requires Maine.edu email credentials.
Requires Maine.edu email credentials.
Find this chapter on social memory in the book, or access this PDF via the password "curate".
An argument for preserving social memory in the sciences.
You'll find the survey link posted to #reference.
In the Slack #bio channel, post a brief description of your background and what you hope to get out of this course.
Optional: as annoying as they can be, social media can also be valuable resources for digital curation professionals. Consider adding links to your profiles on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook or microblogging services like Twitter/X or its rivals Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky.
Pick a project you have worked on in the past year and brainstorm at least a half-dozen of the work's technological and cultural aspects that are vulnerable to obsolescence. Consider your own hardware and software (eg, your laptop and operating system); others you depend on (eg, the servers and software that run Gmail and Google docs); and social references (eg, to current events or specific people). Think as broadly as possible: can you be sure you'll be able to use the same power adaptor, or USB port, or video format in the future? Also list ephemeral cultural expectations often taken for granted, as demonstrated by former DIG student Jason Brough in his list of vulnerabilities for a mapping project based on indigenous knowledge.
You do not need to post your list, but you will use it for one of next week's assignments.
By Sunday 11:59pm
Write a paragraph-long comment or question in response to one of the readings or viewings for this week, and post it to the Slack #what-is-preservation channel. (Just post directly rather than uploading a file; see #slack-tips for more on this.
By Wednesday 11:59pm
Post a brief comment on a classmate's post in any of the Week 1 channels. For tidiness, be sure to click the message icon to thread your reply under the original post rather than as a new post to the channel.
This week, we detail many of the failure points for preserving digital media, from hardware and software vulnerabilities to obsolete institutional practices and intellectual property laws.
Also included as food for thought are excerpts from texts on the mortality of objects and people. These texts interrogate Euroethnic society's unwillingness to let go, asking whether there are some things that are not meant to be preserved.
This screencast shows an example of how a seemingly archival medium can be vulnerable to obsolescence on many levels. The format is an interactive tutorial; simply choose the correct answer to proceed through the screencast and earn the badge. When you get to the end, authenticate your badge by submitting your University of Maine Gmail (@maine.edu) account at the prompt. If you get stuck, don't re-do the badge--just click Report Problem at lower right.
This anthology draws on the experience of artists, curators, and conservators working in a range of formats and media to outline problems and approaches to preserving contemporary creativity. You'll be asked to read selected chapters from it.
An IBM researcher gives CDs that you burn yourself 2-5 years.
Spoiler: study suggests 50% of hard drives will survive until their sixth birthday.
Rising costs of electricity may retire drives with spinning disks--if you believe their solid-state drive-making rivals.
Recounting the trauma of lost photos and playlists.
Examples illustrating the enormity of data produced by the rise in data generation in science and industry.
Study suggesting dead e-mails and obsolete storage devices are major obstacles to sharing biological data in the long term.
Begun by sci-fi author Bruce Sterling and maintained by an online community of "media archeologists," the Dead Media list describes a staggering array of practical and impractical media that have become obsolete. Note that this URL uses the categorized version of the list cached at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
Open a writing application that can support tables (eg, a Google Doc or Sheet) and create a table with 5 columns labeled "Part", "Birth Date", "Expiration Date", "Rationale", and "Years left". Setting Format > Wrap will make any long texts in your spreadsheet more readable.
Review the components of a project you listed for last time. Based on this week's reading and additional research as necessary, add a separate row for each component, including:
Finally, post this list as a link and/or screenshot, sorted from least Years Left to most Years Left, to #achilles-heels.
š¤ You may try generative AI to brainstorm categories for this assignment, but you'll need to do more in-depth research on the web to fill in the details on specific components such as JPEG or a MacBook Pro. Sample prompt:
Pick a technology on the Dead Media List, and invent a fictional scene in which people in the past use the medium the way it was intended. Then invent a second scene in which the characters are transposed to the present, and use the contemporary equivalent of the dead medium described in your first scene. Finally, describe a scene from the future in which present technology is outdated and people use a futuristic medium for the same purpose.
The Dead Media List is full of quirky, exotic-sounding technologies from the past. So pick something more distinctive than simply a humdrum typewriter, camera, or telephone. Here are some examples from past students.
For your future technology, try to think of a futuristic technology thatās more specific (and believable) than a consciousness-sharing brain implant. Or if you canāt resist imagining the thought of mind-melding with your great-grandchildren, be sure to play out the inevitable issues of privacy and obsolescence that would attend such technology.
Describe each scene in a paragraph or two, then add a final paragraph describing what has been gained and lost in each transition from old to new technology. Post your entire text in a single message to the appropriate Slack channel.
š¤ You may ask a chatbot to write a story for you, but you'll need to choose an unusual gadget or protocol from the Dead Media list first and feed the chatbot plenty of information about that technology to draft a suitable narrative. (You may also find AI-generated stories cliched, and actually have more fun writing it yourself!) Sample prompt:
Post a comment on another student's response to any of this week's posts in Slack. You can also reply to other's replies to you, of course!
Obsolete visions of the future, with snarky comments by David Szondy. As the site (appropriately) is no longer online, these excerpts have been accessed from the Wayback Machine.
A somewhat tongue-in-cheek forecast of obsolete things, created by futurist Ross Dawson in 2007--interesting for what it gets right and wrong.
Continued examination of dead media, expanding the range of cultures and media.
This overview of the book may help you understand how the chapters fit together.
Read chapters 1, 3, 6, and 9 from Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory. Then post a reaction in four or more paragraphs to the readings as a response to the appropriate Slack channel. Your reaction may include:
* Examples from your own experience that prove, disprove, or extend the points made in the reading.
* Questions for your instructor/s.
Finally, post at least one followup comment or question to other students' or teachers' messages in Slack.
This week we focus on the default, yet hardly the best, preservation strategy in use by today's collecting institutions. All students should complete section 1 on format survival, plus either the 2a (DNA) or 2b (Blockchain) assignments.
This screencast gives an overview of the history and technology of digital storage, from floppy disks to DNA. The lecture also covers several techniques for making storage more reliable, from external backups to RAID to cloud storage.
This tutorial shows why you should save the source media for audiovisual projects. From animation to games, from audio to 3D files, source files are essential for migrating or remixing creative works.
Is preserving human culture incompatible with preserving the planet?
A reference guide to a different kind of sustainability.
Documents vulnerabilities of a few common document and other formats.
A searchable registry of software formats. Helpful for 3d and game formats.
The Internet Archive's crowdsourced information on a huge number of file formats.
Jason Scott describes the Internet Archive's crowdsourced approach to acquiring and storing data from the Internet and beyond. Choose topics that interest you from the interactive tablese of contents.
Choose one of the media categories listed below that hasn't already been claimed by a classmate in the Slack channel (first come, first serve--though if you are tech savvy, try to leave the audiovisual categories for the less technically inclined :). Then research the longevity of each file type (and feel free to add more for that category); refer to the DigitalPreservation.gov resource as needed. Finally, distribute the file types into three groups corresponding to short-, medium-, and long-term viability.
Although you may cite external resource/s for your reasoning, I want you to make the argument from principle as well. While no format is truly "archival," a file tends to endure longer if it:
Decide which of your chosen formats merits a rating of short-, medium-, or long-term shelf life. Then list them along with their rating in increasing order of longevity and explain your reasoning in #format-survival.
Post a response of two or more paragraphs to the readings in 2a or 2b below in #future-of-storage.
Then please reply to another student's post, either in this channel or another for Week 4.
The most speculative chapter of Re-collection, focusing on storing data in biological material.
Summary of recent developments in organic storage, including storing a museum in DNA.
Artist Joe Davis, who pioneered DNA storage, plans to encode Wikipedia in a forest.
Computer scientist David Rosenthal's update on DNA storage techniques.
The optional segments repeat some information to come in a future week.
Required Introduction (0-04:53)
Optional I. Preservation in the Wild (04:53-21:23). This section starts with the Mapinguary.
Required II. Preservation by the Wild (21:23-26:15)
Optional III. Working with the Wild (26:15-28:21)
A blockchain-based storage with cryptocurrency incentives for maintenance.
A decentralized file system similar to Filecoin with an endowment-based economic model.
Case study of NFTs as a mechanism for preserving digital art.
Computer scientist David Rosenthal's critique of blockchain as a preservation tool.
A Digital Curation teleconference on preserving blockchain-based art.
This week moves from storage onto other preservation strategies, using examples of migrating information from one medium to another to provoke the question of what digital preservation really means.
What happens if you make a copy of a copy of a copy (and so on) of a VHS tape? This experiment shows how the quality degrades with every generation. [Feel free to skim. You can also find this video in #reference]
This experiment shows what happens if you apply MPEG-4 video compression repeatedly to a movie. It's also an homage to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. [Feel free to skim. You can also find this video in #reference.]
You can also find this video in #reference. (Ignore "Fractal Design" advertisement from 8 minutes on.)
Screenshots of changes to content such as altered diagrams and equations caused by migration of files.
Select a file from one of the format categories (text, audio, video, etc.) described in the previous week's lesson. (You can use your own file or find one on the Web.) Using one of the online migration tools linked to in this week's lesson, convert your file to the format that is closest to the one you or your classmates choose as the best preservation format. Examine the results to see if there are visible or audible changes resulting from the conversion process. Report in a post to the appropriate Week 8 Slack channel any detectable changes and say whether or not you think they are significant. Also, report any problems you encounter converting the files using this tool.
Please post a response for two of the following scenarios in the appropriate Week 8 Slack channel. In each case, please give the rationale for your position.
1) As part of an archival collection from the 1980s, you receive disks with word-processed files, the labels of which indicate that they contain electronic versions of exactly the same documents as are in the paper files. Would you consider it adequate for preservation purposes to keep just the paper copies, just the electronic copies, or should both be kept? If you could keep only one copy, which would be preferable?
2) As a museum curator, you receive files from a digital visual artist in a proprietary format that is no longer in use. Would migration to another format adequately preserve these pieces of art or would it require viewing them in their original format. If the company that created the program offered one software for creating and editing art and another for viewing it, would it be adequate to preserve the viewing software or would it be necessary to preserve the module in which the art was created?
3) You are the records manager for an organization that has a standing policy that all written communications with foreign contacts should be preserved for eventual transfer to the archives. A few of the staff reported that they are printing copies of emails to and from foreign and then deleting them. Is this practice adequate for preservation purposes?
4) A collection of word-processed documents that have been already processed by a digital curator are transferred to your custody. You discover that each document has been migrated into an XML format that preserves the text in ASCII and retains metadata documenting the software and platform on which it was created and the date of creation. The original documents were not kept. Have these documents been adequately preserved?
8) You are tasked with preserving the web-site of your department. On examining it closely, you find that it has internal links scattered throughout the written text on the web-pages, an RSS reader bringing feeds from an external sources, and a web- interface with a database maintained by another department. Would preservation of static html pages be adequate for preservation? If not, how would you approach this task?
This brief, non-technical article portrays a migration scenario in the real world.
In this screencast, Jon Ippolito introduces four preservation strategies--storage, migration, emulation, and reinterpretation.
This is the first of two weeks dedicated to emulation, a powerful preservation technique in which newer platforms simulate older platforms.
This interactive tutorial introduces three types of emulation that are useful as a preservation strategy, including hardware-for-hardware, software-for-software, and software-for-hardware emulation.
This screencast features excerpts from a panel discussion entitled 'Generation Emulation,' featuring renowned artists and curators who've experimented with emulation as a strategy for both preservation and creation. The discussion was organized by Caitlin Jones, Carol Stringari, and Jon Ippolito as part of the 2004 symposium Echoes of Art in conjunction with the Guggenheim exhibition Seeing Double: Emulation in Theory and Practice.
In the #gen-emulation channel in Slack, post at least one question about emulation or the "Variability Machines" chapter. Your question can be technical ("What's a cathode ray tube?"), aesthetic ("Why isn't Crown TV suitable for emulation?"), or philosophical ("Is it a problem if the young and old view preservation differently?").
Post at least one answer to someone else's question in the #gen-emulation channel. Please cite relevant examples from the videos or reading.
This keynote from the Yale conference Is This Permanence? argues that emulation provides a better solution than traditional "archival formats" for preserving the context of creative works and artists' archives.
Talk: 00:00 - 48:30
Q&A (optional): 48:30-1:07:55
Sections on "Emulation as a service," "Challenges of an open archive"
(As digital conservator for the prominent new media platform Rhizome, Dragan Espenschied has contributed to dynamic new tools that help preserve social media and helped develop emulation as a service, which allows any user to access outdated software using nothing more than a Web browser.)
This week offers a hands-on exercise in running an emulator, and broadens the perspective to ask how preservationists can exploit the inherent variability of computers to accommodate the relentless procession of new platforms.
This screencast demonstrates a powerful preservation technique in which emulators for recent platforms are nested within emulators for older ones. Following an example used by emulation expert Jeff Rothenberg, this tutorial shows how to emulate the 1949 EDSAC computer inside Windows inside Mac OS X.
Earn the badge for this tutorial by Hillary Cox and Scott Powers, which shows you how to download an emulator and use it to run vintage games on a contemporary Mac.
Although you don't need to exploit all the skills taught in this screencast, the first few minutes of this tutorial will show OS X users how to create a screencast of your emulated game.
1. Download to your own computer an emulator and a program ("ROM") to emulate; OR 2. Run vintage software inside a browser using one of the online resources listed below.
Feel free to emulate any system, application, or game that you want, but you must capture a screenshot of your entire computer desktop, showing the vintage software running in the emulator inside your own host operating system. Post this screenshot to #emulator-test along with two or more paragraphs describing your reaction to the experience to the appropriate Slack channel. (You can even post a video screen capture if you want to get fancy.)
In your reaction, you may describe any steps of emulation you found difficult, any special features you found useful or lacking in the emulator you chose, and/or how well using the emulator captured the spirit of the original game or software. Did you find settings for screen resolution, playback speed, or keyboard mapping?
If you've used an emulator before, please share ideas and urls with your classmates; keep in mind that some students will need emulators for Macintosh and others for Windows.
This semester we are collaborating with Yale on a special testbed for their Emulation as a Service initiative (EaaSI, see below). They would love to hear feedback on this new system from you!
By all means, have fun--how often do you get course credit for playing a computer game?
Please complete this quick evaluation of the course to date, so we can learn from our mistakes and build on our strengths in the second half of the course. You'll find the survey link posted to #reference.
EaaSI's creators have created a special instance for DIG students. Using credentials shared by your instructor, follow the instructions in this link to test-drive this robust emulation platform developed at Yale. Please consider re-using your post for this week to give the EaaSI team feedback using the form in #reference.
These packages let you run Windows applications side-by-side with Mac applications ($$), at least until the Apple M1 chip.
This site offers early Flash animations you can play in the browser using the Ruffle emulator.
Based on an open-source JavaScript framework, this site allows you to play many games originally played on physical kiosks directly in the browser.
This screencast by a former DIG student demonstrates another example of emulating a vintage game, in this case using OpenEmu on a Mac.
For those curious about technical details, computer scientist Steve Bagley breaks down the process of writing an emulator for the Atari 2600.
This week looks at the advantages and disadvantages of reinterpretation as a preservation strategy, as well as a specific technique for "performative preservation."
Read the two Re-collection chapters on museums and archivists below, then think of an example of reinterpretation in any cultural sphere, whether net art mashups, theatrical restagings, transcribed or remixed music, or translations from book to stage to screen, and answer one of the following questions in 2 or more paragraphs in the #reinterpretation channel. Please refer to examples or arguments from the readings.
* Which is more important to preserve, the original recording or the original score? (Recordings include CDs, videotapes, and screencasts; scores include musical scores, scripts, performance instructions, and code).
* Imagine the effects of that reinterpretation persisting longer in the short term than the original form of creative expression. What would be the historical ramifications for cultural heritage?
(A historical note: the original doesn't have to die for the reinterpretation to take over. In the 1800s and early 1900s, before the age of recordings, Beethoven symphonies were known primarily through their piano transcriptions by composers like Franz Liszt. Liszt's reinterpretations allowed more listeners to hear and appreciate Beethoven, and subsequently his symphonies were rediscovered and re-performed in more or less their original form. So you may want to consider the role of reinterpretations in supplying access to a version of the original experience in the long run.)
Post your answer to the question you chose in the appropriate channel.
Pose a question or response to someone else's comment in that channel.
Read the resources on data and privacy linked below, then think of a real or imagined scenario (ideally from your workplace) where you want to preserve data without violating the privacy of people connected to the data. Then compare the suitability of at least two of the techniques described in the Punitha article. Which technique represents the best tradeoff of re-usability versus privacy, and why? Post to the #reinterpretation channel.
Post your answer to the question you chose in the appropriate channel.
Pose a question or response to someone else's comment in that channel.
This study concludes curated data are used more often.
A survey by Punitha and Amsaveni of computational techniques for preserving data while maintaining privacy.
Amateurs and digital preservation (0-35:20) If you watched the optional portion of the "In Wildness" talk, you can skip this section.
Reinterpretation and the problem of authenticity (35:20-43:18)
In a short paragraph posted to #performance-ai-conifer, describe your reaction to either of the two automatic techniques for amateur reinterpretation below (2a or 2b). What was saved? What wasn't? Was anything revealed that might have been obscured in the original medium?
š¤ Generative AI is remarkably good at "mashups" of existing works. For this exercise, you will use a chatbot like ChatGPT or an image generator like Leonardo.ai to transform a work from one genre or style to another. Sample prompts:
To keep Slack tidy, add any lengthy resulting text as a reply to your initial post in the channel.
Perricci was associate director of Webrecorder, now Conifer.
Following the instructions in the video, use Conifer to record a session in which you interact with one or more of your favorite social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Consult the guide for help. Be sure to do more than observe the page; follow links, play videos, and otherwise reveal new content. You are encouraged to log in but do not need to make your archive public.
ā ļø Skimming through movies and the like is not sufficient; you will need to play all media through in real time to capture them.
Once you've finished, return to play your archive (you'll see https://conifer.rhizome.org in your browser's location bar, not the original site).
Please post any ideas or questions you have for a final project in this class to #final-project. Below are two of the many options you can select from for your project. Projects of your own design are also encouraged, especially those related to your own work or personal needs. Idea or question due by Wednesday 11:59pm
This entails downloading, installing, and using a program long enough to be able to identify its strengths and weaknesses. The review should document your own experiences with it, identify its limits, and explain in what contexts (if any) you recommend it use. You can select any preservation tool. Here are some related lists:
Please get approval of the tool you want to review from Kendra before proceeding.
This option for a DIG 550 final project asks you to study a real-world work of variable media and document how it should be preserved for posterity. Your professors will offer a list of prominent works of new media art, and an artist, curator, or conservator familiar with each who is willing to participate in an interview. (You may also suggest a work yourself to be approved by the faculty.) You'll learn how to use the Variable Media Questionnaire via screencasts and screensharing with your instructor, then apply it to document opinions on how the work should be preserved in the future. You'll find some tutorials on using the Variable Media Questionnaire here.
Let Jon know if you want to try this option.
This week we look at digital objects at the most basic level: the physical encoding of the bit stream on physical media.
This video uses animations to explain how solid-state drives can store so much data in a small device.
Read the pdf handout about using a hex editor. Make a small plain text file, and include your first name in the text. Open the file with the hex editor and take a screen shot. Then modify the file, re-save, and open it in the hex editor again. Briefly describe what you see. Then open another file, this time a non-text file such as an image or audio file. What do you see? Is there ASCII in the file?
Consider some form of physical media such as a CD, Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid-State Drive (SSD), etc. Research and describe how a bit stream is physical encoded on the medium you selected.
Post both findings to #materiality.
This week we look a fundamental aspect of digital objects, the database. Virtually all our interactions with digital objects is via database systems and database-like thinking.
Think about the analog objects you use every day. How do you search for and find the things you need. For example, how do you find a can of artichoke hearts at the grocery store? Are the objects in a fixed order? What do you do when you have the object? Compare this analog search to a search for some digital object you use frequently.
Now think of a database system you use. Do not pick a ubiquitous one like Google, Netflix, etc. Pick a system such as the library catalog. What goes on in this database when you execute a query? What results to you get? How are query results ordered? Is it possible for you to reorder the query results?
Post the answers to both sets of questions in a single post to #database-search.
Continuing on with Trevor Owens's three basic concepts of digital objects, we arrive at the third idea: that of platforms. All digital objects are supported by numerous platforms. Hardware, software, programming languages, etc. are all platforms supporting digital objects.
You'll need your MaineStreet credentials to access ProQuest content; you can also check the Slack #reference channel.
Think of a preservation project that takes born-digital objects on one computing system (e.g., HyperCard documents on a Mac SE, Omeka on a web host, or Facebook on an iPhone) and migrates, emulates, or encapsulates them to another (e.g., a new operating system, an emulator, or a preservation package like Preservica or Archivematica). In a single post to #platforms, write a minimum of 2 paragraphs identifying all of the platforms that support the original digital objects, as well as those required in the new system. What are the similarities in features between the original and final platforms? What are the differences?
Using the special virtual environment provided for this course by Fogler Library, launch the open-source preservation software Archivematica. Navigate through the options and add one record (details to come). In a brief post, share a screenshot and describe what was intuitive or nonintuitive about your experience. Can you imagine using this preservation platform in your workplace?
Metadata is essential for all digital objects. Digital preservation requires special types of metadata designed to support all aspects of the digital preservation process.
Earn the badge for this tutorial by Paul Smitherman, which examines the structure of one metadata standard for preservation.
Consider a digtal object or set of objects that you are interested in. Write a post to #metadata describing a METS document for the preservation of your chosen digital object(s). Include metadata for each of the METS sections if possible. If you can, use MODS and PREMIS in the appropriate sections. The idea is to understand the relationships between a METS document and your digital object(s).
This week we'll take a walk through some of the ideas discussed this semester with a demonstration of digital preservation practices: creating a disk image from obsolete media (with Kryoflux); exporting this to readable files (with BitCurator); emulating the original environment (with VirtualBox); and ingesting the files into a digital preservation system (Archivematica).
Earn the badge for this tutorial by Paul Smitherman, which shows a sample digital forensics process.
Write down a question you had about the tools and techniques shown in the video. Then research and explain the answer in a paragraph or more to #workflow, including any relevant links. If your research fails to uncover answers about particular details or concepts, pose those questions in that Slack channel so your classmates and instructors can try to answer them.
or
Based on the resources shared below, draft a Data Management Plan (DMP) for a real or imagined grant.
Boston University's introduction to writing a data management plan.
Free online application that helps researchers create data management plans via a click-through wizard.
Models for data management plans in the public record.
The final week/s are devoted to an end-of-term project agreed upon by student and instructors.