Last week I had the pleasure of presenting our paper, Built to Last: Preserving User-Generated Networked Images for the Next Century, to the academic cultural heritage community at the International Conference of Cyber Humanities, held at the Fondazione CR Innovation Centre in Florence, Italy.

This paper focused on the value of social media collecting for cultural heritage researchers, practitioners and academics. Whether uploading heritage projects to create a digital record, in order to maximise reach and impact; collecting community responses to those networked images in the form of comments and tags; or simply appealing to the future historians of our present age, social media images are worth safeguarding. However, recognising the difficulty of securing social media (check out our Mellon research report to find out why), we proposed Data Lifeboat as a preliminary solution. Mirroring the metadata, both technical and social, from Flickr.com, Data Lifeboat is simple, faithful, and cohesive in its mechanism and display.

The feedback was generally inquisitive and positive. I was pleased to hear how many projects were using Flickr as a research resource, including one photogrammetry project at the University of Turin delving into Flickr for photos of Expo ’58 and what became of the buildings in the half-century that followed. Many others attendees were keen to try Data Lifeboat with their own institutional images on Flickr.

A few highlights: Ines Vodopivec delivered a rousing yet thought-provoking keynote on the necessity for institutional collaboration, standard-setting and critical dialogue across subject specialties. Detailing the community research work of AI4LAM, it is clear that application in the G.L.A.M. sector needs to be pioneered by those who understand the contents (sensitive or otherwise) of their in-house collections. We look forward to joining the network at Fantastic Futures in London later this year.

I also particularly enjoyed Federico di Pasqua’s paper, Generative AI for Ancient Insights, which compared emergent Retrieval-Augmented Generation to more generalist Large Language Models (the dominant mode) in cultural heritage. The criticality of localised, specific models is a question not only of better retrieval of information, for interpreting Homeric texts for example, but orients us towards more sustainable practices.

If you missed our presentation at IEEE-CH and would like to know more, you can find our slides here. We’re pleased to share that result of this presentation will be our first (!) published paper on Data Lifeboat… watch this space.

Hello to the Wider Web! I am excited to be joining the Flickr Foundation as part of a part-time research placement funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)*. I am currently doing a collaborative PhD between University College London (UCL) and the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), so this placement is an opportunity for me to develop research in a different context while doing something that I really love: memory work.

I use this phrase to define any work that contributes to the formation of collective memory or parts of culture that will be remembered for years to come. I purposefully define this as memory rather than heritage, as I find that heritage speaks primarily to the institutional form of memory. And although I come from an institution, I have always found community-led archiving and conservation most fascinating, and therefore important to include in this discourse.

My PhD research focuses specifically on the conservation of software-based art and design objects from the V&A’s collection. I am a practicing media conservator as well, focusing on software- and computer-based media. My memory work thus far has therefore been mainly object-based. I have been looking after specific objects in the collection that match my expertise, which can include elements such as interactive software, computers and monitors, assessing their condition and treating them so they can be accessed for research, displayed at an exhibition or just generally enjoyed in perpetuity. This means keeping software and hardware functional through maintenance and repair, balancing any intervention with conservation ethics at all times.

Given that I come from an institutional background and usually work with individual objects, I am particularly excited about working on a different scale at the Flickr Foundation. In my research and practice I have continuously circled back to the question of infrastructure. I am committed to the idea that institutions need to be more active in building relationships with actors whose tools and other forms of infrastructure support digital preservation and conservation efforts, for their own and collective benefit.

For example, as part of my PhD research I have been using virtualisation to facilitate access to one of the mobile apps from the V&A’s collection. Virtualisation is a computing technique that allows software to be run on virtual hardware, in this case the mobile app can be accessed on a regular PC rather than a mobile phone, opening up opportunities for reading room-type displays and future conservation as the repairability of a PC is far greater than a phone. The tools which I found to work best for the purposes of virtualisation came out of the official Android Software Development Kit (SDK). This SDK is, first and foremost, provided by Google for the developers of Android apps, and not for the very niche use-case of providing access to a museum object. When the best tools come out of commercial contexts where licensing is rarely straightforward, officially implementing them presents risks that not all institutions are willing (or able) to take. This isn’t a criticism—it’s a call to action. Preserving our digital heritage demands that we all get involved. I have been developing some of these ideas in published research such as Responding to Obsolescence in Flash-based Net Art in the Journal of the Institute of Conservation (2022) and Peer-to-Peer: Toward the Collective Conservation of Net Art in the Electronic Media Review (2022), so please do check these publications out if you are interested.

My placement will coincide with the next stages of the Data Lifeboat project, namely developing the Safe Harbor Network. I am keen to bring in some of my institutional background to think about how this network might interface with institutions with their own established modes of preservation, in both operational and ontological terms. My interest was piqued by one of the questions the Foundation raised in its White Paper on the first stage of Data Lifeboat development, namely whether any changes and/or deletions in archived content can and should be reflected in the Data Lifeboats themselves. Perhaps there might be some overlap in all of these interests, particularly as implementing any versioning capacity might even challenge existing institutional infrastructures, be that technical or legal.

If you’d like to find out more about my background and research at UCL, please feel free to access my institutional profile page, where you can also find my contact details.

*The Arts & Humanities Research Council is one of the seven research councils forming UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). This particular placement was made possible thanks to the London Arts & Humanities Partnership.

At their core, daybooks have historically served as practical tools for record-keeping, most often in business and administrative contexts. Before formalised accounting systems, they provided a means to track transactions, exchanges, and daily operations. Daybooks not only reveal how societies organised trade, labour, and governance but also how they configured systems of trust, communication and memory.

Grain and Goddesses: Mesopotamian Cuneiform

Perhaps one of the earliest iterations of the daybook can be found in Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, some dating as far back as 3100 BCE. These clay records, impressed with pictographic signs, documented economic transactions, resource distributions and contracts. In Uruk, modern-day Iraq, these tablets reveal a world where grain, pottery, livestock, and textiles flowed through complex trade networks. Crucially, they also capture a society where trust was fast becoming a critical currency—particularly in enabling trade between people beyond immediate social or familial circles. The web of transactions reflects the burgeoning complexity of their society, where record-keeping was not just administrative but an essential tool for managing expanding economies.

These tablets reflect not only trade and social organisation but also cosmological rituals. One remarkable example is Tablet W 05233,b, which records the distribution of different types of grain products to celebrate the festival of the evening star, dedicated to the goddess Inanna—later known as the Assyrian Ishtar or Greek Aphrodite. Here, the act of recording wasn’t just about economic order; it was also about ritual, encoding celestial cycles into daily life (something we’ll return to in a later example).

The level of detail embedded in these small clay tablets is remarkable. Besides flat pictorial representations of traded goods and their quantities, cuneiform records introduced a third dimension of depth. Contracts were often signed using bullae, hollow clay balls, with designs inscribed to mark ownership, identify witnesses or partners in commerce. Here we see the very terms of the contract were impressed into the material. In some cases the fingerprints of the person who made the impression remain visible on the clay.

Often cited as one of the earliest writing systems, cuneiform represents a shift from recording merely “how many” to capturing the contextual detail of “where, when, and how.” For our own Digital Daybook, this invites us to consider how we can convey meaning beyond transactional value—and perhaps, like the bullae, inspire ways to embed materiality into our own system.

Furs and Fusils: The Daybooks of the Hudson’s Bay Company

Millennia later, in a vastly different context, daybooks reappear in the ledgers of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), providing a granular account of the daily workings of a colonial enterprise.

Founded in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) fast became the dominant force in the North American fur trade, operating as a commercial empire backed by English royal charter. While the company controlled vast tracts of land and waterways, its success depended on a delicate balance: Indigenous trappers and middlemen were essential suppliers of furs. The HBC trading posts functioned as sites of negotiation, exchange, and economic entanglement, the details of which can be traced throughout its daybooks.

HBC daybooks meticulously document what was traded and for how much, but beneath their factual, transactional surface, a deeper story of economic dependency emerges as Stephen R. Brown details in The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire. Indigenous trappers brought furs to trading posts in exchange for goods—ammunition, wool blankets, sugar and alcohol—that had become increasingly necessary for survival as colonial expansion disrupted access to their traditional resources. At the same time, European markets dictated the value of Indigenous goods, with prices and demand calibrated through these ledgers. While the records present trade as a system of mutual exchange, the daybooks reveal how European economic logic was imposed onto Indigenous ways of life, reshaping labour, production and survival itself.

What goes unrecorded in the daybooks is just as telling as what is logged. Daybooks meticulously note the number of furs exchanged but omit the labour required to trap them. The names of indigenous trappers rarely appear, nor do the details of their communities. Women, in particular, remain largely invisible, as historian Sylvia Van Kirk explains in Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870. Canadian traders were explicitly told that “an Indian mate could be an effective agent in adding to the trader’s knowledge of Indian life”. This call for linguistic and cultural mediation conceals within it the emerging gendered economy and the instrumentalisation of the Indigenous female body.

In this way, daybooks constitute a “figure under the carpet,” a term coined by historian James Atlas to describe the unseen but essential forces shaping history—if we’re willing to read between their ledger lines. Daybooks don’t just document transactions; they expose hidden histories of organisations and their interweavings with social fabric writ large.

Which should prompt us to ask: How might our Digital Daybook reveal the assumptions, conditions, and politics that underpin the Flickr Foundation and its daily workings?

Rishu and Rosary: Divination and Alchemy in Daybooks

If we expand the concept of the daybook beyond its fiscal and administrative functions, and consider the broader world of record-keeping, we might chance an encounter with daybooks’ more mystical cousins.

In the 2nd century BCE, daybooks—known as rishu (日書)—were used in Han Dynasty China to plot auspicious and inauspicious days. This hemerological use case shows how daybooks were used to record and plan the cosmological fortunes of the year. By plotting one’s activities—agriculture, travel, business, marriage—against the rishu, individuals could align their actions with cosmic rhythms. As Richard Smith writes in Books of Fate and Popular Culture in Early China, these daybooks appear “not simply as information transferred onto written media, but as a constituent of daily life realized anew in each manuscript.” Thus, rishu daybooks were not only descriptive but prescriptive—they structured time rather than simply logging it.

Crucially the rishu suggest a shift from the divination model to recorded experience. Earlier traditions of oracle bones, tasseography, and cleromancy relied on chance and external omens, whereas these daybooks tracked patterns, tested outcomes, and built knowledge through lived observation. They capture an emerging sense of human agency over fate—a written interface between knowledge, ritual, and daily life.

Much like the rishu daybooks, alchemical records were not just passive repositories of data but tools for dynamic experimentation. Often dismissed today for their fantastical contents and purposely obfuscating esotericism, they were critical stepping stones in the history of Western scientific inquiry. Alchemical records—such as Paracelsus’ Opus Paramirum (1531) or anon.’s Rosarium Philosophorum (1550)—captured trial and error, cycles of progress and failure, and patterns that could only emerge over time. Part laboratory record, part philosophical meditation, part mystical vision—these texts foreground the individual’s observations, a contrast to modern scientific inquiry, which often seeks to depersonalise the process of knowledge and meaning-making. Alchemical logs offer the daybook as a potential site of iterative knowledge-building, where reflection is as critical as logging day-to-day activities.

Whilst we don’t (yet!) propose a spiritual undertaking at the Flickr Foundation, these examples encourage us to consider how might we construct our Digital Daybook to reflect on the unknown, embrace the speculative, and remain open to the unpredictable.

In my first blog post for Flickr.org, The Forgetful Web, I argued for the importance of a consciously reflective approach to web archiving. Through my recent research for my Master’s at Goldsmiths, University of London, I’ve seen how efforts to archive the web by contrast often take a restorative approach, seeking to perfectly recreate past platforms or keep them indefinitely online. Even if they’re well-intentioned, attempts like these often end up calling to mind Jorge Luis Borges’ fantastical short story On Exactitude in Science, in which efforts to create a perfect record of a region result in an impossibly huge and fundamentally useless map that “coincides point for point” with the territory it covers. Applied to web archiving, any faithful reconstruction of a website will inevitably fail to exactly recreate the original.

Trying to reconstruct the past web in this way can be understood as a process of “foreverization,” a term coined by American cultural theorist, Grafton Tanner. To foreverize something means not just attempting “to preserve or restore it but to reanimate it in the present.” Foreverization makes it difficult to move on from what’s past, or to revisit it with a critical perspective.

Instead, foreverizing a web platform means trying to recreate an ideal version of how the platform was at one point in time. This isn’t an effective means of truly archiving the web for future access. The dynamic nature of the web calls instead for an archival approach that acknowledges that not everything online can be saved.

In my previous post, I outlined some of the main issues with how web archiving is often performed, with a focus on social platforms on the web. I noted that archiving the web’s social spaces often takes place as an emergency measure, when a platform is about to be shut down. This means that community members don’t get a chance to reflect on what would be actually meaningful to archive — instead, what gets archived is likely whatever is easiest and fastest to download. And because so much of the web isn’t seen to be worth archiving at all, the job is often left up to volunteers, typically amateur archivists, to make decisions about what to archive and when.

Web archiving today often resembles the following process:

• Attempt to save as much material as possible
• Performed by archivists and/or institutions outside the community
• Focused on the universal over the personal
• Concerned with preservation and restoration rather than recirculation.

Organisations like the Internet Archive do invaluable work in trying to preserve as much of the web as possible through primarily automated methods. Reflective web archiving offers a different approach that’s instead focused on preserving the personal histories of the web. Reflective web archiving acknowledges the impossibility of saving everything on any given web platform, or preserving the platform indefinitely. It embraces the challenge of choosing what to save by focusing on individual stories. 

Reflective web archiving means choosing not to save everything, aiming to instead preserve a sample of platform history. And instead of only happening as a last-minute, emergency measure, reflective web archiving is a process that ideally begins while the platform is still operational, in collaboration with the platform’s community.

Reflective nostalgia

My proposal towards reflective archiving is inspired by the work of the cultural theorist, Svetlana Boym, who outlined a theory of nostalgia that is guided by either reflective or restorative impulses. While restorative nostalgia tries to resurrect the past, reflective nostalgia, Boym writes, dwells in loss and “the imperfect process of remembrance.” Nostalgia online frequently takes a restorative rather than reflective form, and web archiving is often focused on restoring the actual pages and platforms of the past web.

The popular understanding of born-digital media suggests that perfectly recreating the online past should be possible, and that all digital media can be safely stored for posterity in “the cloud.” And as Abigail De Kosnik argues in Rogue Archives, the belief that everything online can be archived is reminiscent of one of the earliest fantasies of computing: that computers will be able to perfectly preserve and make accessible all of humanity’s collective history.

De Kosnik suggests that while the web is often viewed as a “giant memory machine,” automatically building a “total archive” of online activity, the reality is that human volunteers are the ones who actually build this archive. Reflective archiving brings the web back down to a human scale, focusing on preserving personal narratives, not complete histories, for future reflection.  

Hereon, I willl outline the four key principles of reflective archiving for the web:

1. Reflective archiving accepts that not everything can be saved
2. Reflective archiving is guided by community
3. Reflective archiving focuses on personal stories
4. Reflective archiving encourages recirculation

Principle 1: Accept that not everything can be saved

De Kosnik outlines three major types of web archives: universal, community, and alternative. Web archiving often strives for the universal form, attempting to collect and preserve as much as possible. The Internet Archive, with its original goal of collecting “all publicly accessible World Wide Web pages,” offers a good example of an effort to create a universal archive of the web.

But not everything on the web is included in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, especially when it comes to social media platforms with a large number of individual profiles. Trying to locate one’s personal records from old web platforms through the Wayback Machine often leads to disappointment. I was surprised to discover one capture of my deleted Tumblr blog from my teenage years there, but only one page was visible, and none of the links worked.

Efforts to find Flickr profiles from ten years ago are likely to lead to similar dead ends. The Wayback Machine is very helpful in recording what platforms like Tumblr and Flickr looked like in the past, but archiving the enormous volume of personal histories there demands a different strategy — one that accepts the fact that not all such material can be saved.

As De Kosnik suggests, the ideal of the web as a vast memory machine, automatically saving everything uploaded, overlooks the human care needed to actually archive web material. Reflective archiving re-centres this human labour. Instead of striving to preserve as much as possible, reflective archiving is intentionally limited, focusing on saving slices of the web instead of whole platforms. 

Reflective archives are not universal archives. They have more in common with De Kosnik’s ideas about community and alternative archives, which focus on preserving material that tends to be overlooked by institutional archives. Born-digital media is often at risk of being overlooked in this way. Institutions may not have the resources to archive social platforms in particular — material types such as comments and photo metadata tend to not fit so easily into the frameworks of typical collections, and the sheer volume of content on social media can make any preservation a daunting task even for established archives.

Reflective archiving seeks to complement more traditional archival practices by creating alternative archives that are highly specific to platform communities and individual users, instead of universal records of entire platforms or periods of time in web history.

Principle two: Be guided by community

Reflective archiving is community-centred. It’s bottom-up rather than top-down, taking place in collaboration with the people whose records are being saved. This means that the community of the platform being archived decides what gets preserved. The platform itself might facilitate the archival work, but the platform users inform decisions around what to save and how to make it accessible in the future.

The community-centred nature of reflective archiving means that:

• Community members can choose what archival content is relevant to their communities, both those on and off the platform
• The content that gets archived is likely to be a more diverse and accurate representation of the activity taking place on the platform and the communities that gather there than it would be if it were selected only by archivists at institutions.

Choosing what to preserve is one of the greatest challenges of archiving the web. Placing community members at the lead of the archival process also means that more people can be involved in selecting material to be archived, helping to not only diversify viewpoints but to distribute the work of archival selection across a larger group of people.

Principle three: Save platform stories, not infrastructure

Archiving web platforms calls for a unique approach because in many ways the content on web platforms is uniquely vulnerable to loss, and also uniquely difficult to archive. There isn’t typically much of an incentive for platforms to create their own archives — after all, if the platform is still live, users can presumably access and download their own data. But in many cases, platforms actively work against user efforts to build their own archives. Individual data downloads may be in formats that are difficult to access or only offer incomplete views of platform activity.

Everything from personal contacts to creative work by users can be abruptly lost when platforms shut down, or even just when technical errors happen: over ten years of Myspace member content was lost in 2019 in a faulty server migration. Reflective archiving acknowledges that even the largest web platforms aren’t infallible: it’s an effort to keep the stories of web platforms accessible even if those platforms disappear, focusing on archiving what users shared online rather than the spaces where that activity took place. 

This isn’t to say that archiving platforms themselves isn’t also a worthy task, but it’s one that has to be understood separately from archiving platform contents. Major web platforms are created and owned by private companies, while their contents are created and owned by platform members and communities. Reflective archiving works to save what individuals have created and the context in which it was made, rather than the proprietary structure of the platform itself.

Principle four: Encourage recirculation. 

Web archiving, much like the web itself, is still relatively new. De Kosnik points out that much of the digital artifacts of the past few online decades may disappear entirely in the next few hundred years — though “much of the current digital repertoire” may still be used. “The repertoire of conversing via telephone has persisted into the digital age,” she notes, although the vast majority of telephone conversations were never archived.

De Kosnik argues for the importance of “repertoires for digital archiving,” suggesting that the archival practices being developed today may continue to be relevant far into the future, even if the archives themselves are no longer accessible.

Reflective web archiving can be considered a specific archival repertoire informed by the principles outlined here, including this final one: recirculation. Arguably any effort to archive the web demands a kind of recirculation; when the web is archived, it must be “reborn,” as Niels Brügger describes in The Archived Web. “The online web must be collected, preserved, and made available as the archived web,” and through this process, it is reconstructed and changed.

The web can never be really perfectly preserved. Reflective web archiving focuses more on the continued availability of records of the past web rather than their exact restoration. This means ensuring that what gets archived isn’t simply stored on a hard drive somewhere, but is also made available for future use.

Conclusion 

Not only are records of the web’s earliest years limited, much of Web 2.0 is also quickly disappearing. Archiving the web of today is a much more difficult task due to its larger size — but this is also why it’s so important. Embracing a reflective approach to web archiving can help make the work of web archiving more accessible by putting the focus on the personal rather than the universal.

A web archive that follows the principles of reflective archiving has the ability to preserve slivers of a platform that, through their specificity, offer a genuine look back at the platform’s history. And the community members who inform the work of reflective web archiving have the ability to guide how their own histories are recorded for the future, and ensure that they have the chance to look back on their online past, even if the platforms of the past are long gone.

“Nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective,” Boym wrote in The Future of Nostalgia. Reflective nostalgia doesn’t have to only inspire mourning for what’s gone: it can also “present an ethical and creative challenge,” she suggested. Reflective archiving takes up the challenge of how to preserve records of collective online memory for the future, embracing the creative potential of archiving’s limitations.

Bibliography

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Brügger, Niels. The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts:

The MIT Press, 2018.

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge

Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016.

Tanner, Grafton. Foreverism. Medford: Polity Press, 2023.

Data Care Workshop, @ University of Utrecht

Hosted by the Inclusive AI Lab, this was second in a series of workshops bridging researchers, policymakers, industry professionals, artists and academics to discuss how creatives and cultural communities can play a bigger role in the development of AI.

The centrality of AI in cultural communities cannot be missed in 2025. As Nanna Verhoeff noted in her opening remarks, we are at a curious inflection point, well-captured by the feminist adage describing a moment as “between no longer and not yet”. She proposed conscientious engagement with, rather than disembodied critique separate from, the machine. This doesn’t mean adopting AI wholeheartedly, without pause for reflection, but instead staying curious about the processes and designing for intimacy — no small task.

The first roundtable, featuring guests from the British Council, Adobe and Future2, discussed how this engagement might be enacted. Particularly invigorating, against the backdrop of seemingly unbridled AI data capture, was the call to “fund people instead of [AI] projects”. If creative works have already ended up in AI datasets — a story that seems increasingly foreclosed — then we ought to recognise the value of these contributions and fund towards greater creative flourishing. While opt-out mechanisms, such as the Spawning database and anti-training tools, remain desirable, it increasingly feels as if the proverbial horse has already bolted.

One beautiful addition from Smith Mehta, Assistant Professor at University of Groningen, introduced the Jain concept of anekantavada (“no-one-perspective-ism”) to the discussion, which resists philosophical dogmatism and recognizing the good qualities of many different points of view. He proposed, in making decisions about AI’s development, “We ought to judge technology by its ability to visualise multiple realities — something that can speak to both, or multiple, sides without needing to choose one”. How might we develop technological tools and practices that allow for multiple possibilities rather than singular pathways?

Expanding this poeticism, Wakanyi Hoffman, Founder of the African Folktales Project, proposed the following indigenous metaphors to guide future conversations about AI:

• braiding knowledge
• weaving the social fabric
• repairing the tears in the fabric
• planting seeds for future forests

Hoffman asked panellists what each metaphor would mean for designing and handling AI systems, while maintaining community and ecology not just as stakeholders, but as system holders.

A particular highlight, and a welcome jolt from the traditional conference format, was a performance by Dr. Nii Ocquaye Hammond and Dr. Marleen de Witte. De Witte sets up the white-gloved anthropologist (or digital archivist), proud of her DAMS system that can show date, origin, connections of Ghanaian ancestral statues. Her self-assured practice is intercepted by a wandering griot, Ocquaye Hammond, who demarcates the spiritual space, implores her to step out of her structural confines to understand what cannot be captured by the collecting system. The piece was first developed in consultation with the Ghanaian community in Biljmer, Amsterdam, de Witte probes: “What journey were they on before ending up in a European museum collection? And what new meanings were they given during and after that journey?” The ramifications of such performance were being shared late into the summer evening. /

Inclusive Design Leadership Summit @ Social Impact Factory, Utrecht

Also hosted by the Inclusive AI Lab, this summit experimented with an inaugural format for engaging professionals — particularly from policymaking, public sector, and start-up fields — in embedding critical inclusive design frameworks into strategy and existing systems.

Flickr Foundation hosted a workshop on Digital Legacy, an emerging strand of inquiry for us that connects to the Inclusive AI Lab’s focus on diversifying the digital commons. Organisations are huge repositories of data, knowledge, and histories, yet few consider the long-term preservation of this data (whatever form it takes, websites, Slack, codebase, Google Drive), particularly in the digital realm. We prompted participants to ‘think like an archivist’ with the following overarching provocation:

How can my organisation develop a digital legacy strategy that secures a more detailed, representative and equitable record?

Participants selected what they would save for 100 years in their organisation and collectively developed principles for technical and social maintenance of organisational digital legacies. Key critiques were also surfaced. For instance, what gets included in archives is inevitably skewed toward who is in the room when preservation choices are made. We felt the ‘archival moment’ presents an intervening opportunity to reflect organisational diversity, particularly forgotten or hidden labour. More conscious reflection and storytelling in the present can also serve future inheritors of organisations — something we’ve been exploring with our in-house tool, Digital Daybook.

Other points surfaced by participants:

• the emergent practice of death cleaning in Northern Europe
• shifting our mindsets to work on being ‘good ancestors’
• applying the care of family archival practices to organisational strategy
• navigating contextual privacy in legacy settings (e.g. personal blogs)
• from vellum to floppy disks at the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave

We’re considering rolling out this workshop as a service for organisations. If this sounds like something you might be interested in exploring, please let us know!

PublicSpaces Conference: Shaping Our Digital Future, Amsterdam

Nestled in a former warehouse on Amsterdam’s Eastern Docklands, PublicSpaces tackled the ambitious goal to “reclaim the internet as a force for the common good.” A stirring opening as Paris Marx’s (host of ‘Tech Won’t Save Us’ pod) keynote immediately rallied against the dominant techno-feudalist, techno-fascist practices that de-nature and de-future our possibilities for alternatives.

Presentations and workshops focused on how successful alternatives have been built — strengthening the public domain, building open-source tools, fostering offline networks, designing software for the often-forgotten — and how to maintain these practices against the odds.

Particular highlights included:

• A workshop with the Permacomputing Collective where we examined what their Principles mean in practice within our organisations (”Expose the Seams”, “(Almost) Everything Has a Place”) and how we might be able to apply them
• Flavia Dzodan’s reflections on almost a decade spent interrogating algorithmic systems and their impact on creativity. Check out her ‘This Haunted Inbox Where I Archive’, possibly the best newsletter name on the planet?
• Maria Farell’s closing keynote on ‘Rewilding the Internet’. which introduced the metaphor of wildlife corridors. The most common form is the hedgerow, which not only facilitates species movement but also provides shelter, nourishment, and interaction opportunities. How might we design more of these technological hedgerows rather than walled gardens? We also found out that the Gaelic for ‘ladybird’ is “little cow from God” 🐞

Just as historians rely on physical media like newspapers and photographs to interpret the pre-digital past, it’s obvious that we’ll need future access to records of the web to be able to study the present. The more the web grows, the more important archiving it becomes, but this task also becomes increasingly difficult. With so much of our lives taking place online, how do we decide what to save?

Archivists and librarians have been discussing the prospect of a “digital dark age” since the 1990s, and the myth of the web’s endurance plays a large part in contributing to this risk. “Digital storage is easy; digital preservation is not,” Stewart Brand wrote in 1999. Yet the belief persists that when something’s been shared online, it will be available forever, and there’s no need to worry about archiving it.

Since 1996, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has tried to make this a reality by saving as much of the web as possible. But even though it’s saved over 928 billion web pages to date, the Wayback Machine can’t archive everything online, especially when it comes to social media platforms with millions of dynamic user profiles.

One of the biggest challenges of web archiving today lies in the fact that so much activity on the internet now takes place on social media. When these platforms get deleted, not only do users often lose access to their personal data, but future historians lose access to records of our time. Live platforms can be difficult to archive due to the volume of content and activity over time, but doing so is crucial for our understanding of web history.

In my recent research for my Master’s at Goldsmiths, University of London, I investigated the challenges of web archiving and the rise of nostalgia for the online past. Nostalgia for the web’s early years has grown online as that time period recedes further into the past — not only in the usual sense of time passing, but also because records of those years are increasingly inaccessible. This nostalgia has contributed to the trend of efforts to “foreverize” the web by reviving the platforms and aesthetics of Web 1.0.

In this post, I’ll draw on this work to discuss online nostalgia and the challenges of web archiving. Web archiving today often takes a restorative approach, as seen in nostalgic efforts to rebuild old platforms or even preserve them indefinitely. I’ll discuss the importance of a more reflective nostalgia in deciding how to archive online platforms. Instead of trying to preserve everything we can from the past web, a reflective approach to web archiving embraces the fact that not everything online can be saved or restored.

The forgetful web

Just because the web itself appears accessible anytime that doesn’t mean specific web content always will be. Media theorist Wendy Chun describes this state of affairs as an “enduring ephemeral,” writing that “memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage.” In Rogue Archives, Abigail De Kosnik highlights the tension between the ideal of the internet as a “giant memory machine”, in short an archive, capable of storing users’ web histories and the reality: that the web can only effectively function as this archive thanks to the work of human volunteers.

In fact, “the web tends to forget all by itself,” media studies scholar Niels Brügger writes in The Archived Web. The only way old websites and online media can stay accessible is if someone has previously “taken the initiative to collect and preserve the web and to make it available for research purposes.” If no one does this, then records of online history may eventually disappear. Just like physical media, online media needs a certain amount of maintenance and care to survive.

Online nostalgia

As more and more records of the web’s early years fade away, a growing sense of nostalgia for the past web has emerged online. The amateur aesthetics of Web 1.0 have come to be seen as charming retro-kitsch, and people of all ages talk about longing to return to the simpler days of personal websites. The early web hosting platform Geocities, founded in 1994, has come to represent a particular nostalgic ideal of the old web, as seen for example in the 2015 digital collage Cameron’s World, a “tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet.”

The musical genre vaporwave, which emerged in the 2010s, took inspiration from the aesthetic of the early web; in the 2020s, nostalgia for Web 1.0 continues to influence online visual culture and music through the aesthetics of “webcore” and “internetcore”. Photos of old desktop computing setups go viral on social media, inspiring nostalgic comments about the pre-smartphone era.

In her influential book The Future of Nostalgia, the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym argued that “obsession with the past” often occurs in “inverse proportion to its actual preservation.” Without reliable records of the web’s early years, it’s easy to idealise the online past and wish we could go back to that supposed golden age — a simpler time before targeted advertising and AI spam.

Boym outlined a theory of nostalgia that offers a useful perspective for thinking through the longing for the past web. She proposed “restorative” and “reflective” as the two main types of nostalgia, writing that

“restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.”

Restorative nostalgia attempts to faithfully reconstruct the lost home (or homeland) of the past. It lacks the self-reflexivity of reflective nostalgia.

Restorative nostalgia can be seen in efforts to rebuild damaged monuments of the past. Boym describes the controversial restoration of the Sistine Chapel frescoes in the 1980s, an effort to remove all “material traces of the past” from Michelangelo’s work, as an example of restorative nostalgia.

In contrast, reflective nostalgia embraces the patina and imperfection of ruins. While restorative nostalgia sees the past as something that can be perfectly remade, reflective nostalgia acknowledges its “inconclusive and fragmentary” narrative, making room for ambivalence and contradiction.

Wanting to rebuild Geocities in the present is an example of restorative nostalgia, while looking through the Geocities archive can offer a chance to reflect. When the platform was shut down in 2009 by Yahoo, it was partially archived due to the emergency preservation work of the Archive Team, a collective of volunteer archivists who acted to download as much of Geocities as possible before it went offline. Because of this voluntary labour by people who were passionate about saving web history, an archive of about one terabyte of Geocities data is now publicly available for free download today at the Archive Team’s website.

The accessibility of this archive has made possible efforts to restore Geocities, such as The Deleted City, a 2017 “interactive visualisation” of the Archive Team download, and The Geocities Gallery, a 2019 attempt to recreate the platform by hosting a browsable version within the live web. Although projects like these may seek to recreate Geocities as much as possible, the fact that only part of the platform was saved limits any reconstruction efforts. When it comes to the past web, restorative and reflective nostalgia often coincide.

Challenges of web archiving

The story of Geocities highlights some of the key problems with web archiving, which hold important lessons for archiving other large-scale social platforms like Flickr:

• Web archiving often happens in a reactive state, as an emergency measure when a platform is about to be shut down. This means that what gets archived may just be whatever material is easiest and fastest to download, rather than what offers a representative view of the platform.
• Archiving a platform right before it goes offline likely means only saving what is currently available, as older content may already be inaccessible.
• It’s often left up to volunteers, typically platform users and amateur archivists, to decide what to save.

De Kosnik highlights the importance of “rogue archives” online, noting that digital archiving has been primarily embraced by “‘rogue’ memory workers” such as “amateurs, fans, hackers, pirates, and volunteers.” She discusses the fan fiction database, Archive of Our Own, as a case study of an volunteer-run archive created by fans, for fans. The Archive Team, which bills itself as “a loose collective of rogue archivists,” offers another example.

Unauthorized and alternative archives can be a powerful tool for preserving histories that may otherwise be overlooked by institutions, but we shouldn’t rely too much on unpaid enthusiasts to preserve web history. Web archives can be costly to maintain, and it’s crucial that institutions and governments also support this work.

Foreverizing the web

Web archiving isn’t necessarily about recreating the past web, but efforts to do so have become popular online in recent years, as outdated web platforms get remade through the process of “foreverization.” This term comes from the work of Grafton Tanner. In his book Foreverism, Tanner discusses the recent trend of frequent movie remakes, sequels, and prequels as one example of foreverization. As he describes it, “to foreverize something is not merely to preserve or restore it but to reanimate it in the present and ensure its future survival, forever.”

Similar to Boym’s restorative nostalgia, foreverization is motivated by an inability to let go of the past. While restorative nostalgia is an effort to rebuild what has already been lost, foreverization is a process that aims to stop the past from disappearing. Tanner describes it therefore as a kind of anti-nostalgia. After all, you can’t miss what isn’t actually gone. In his view, foreverizing works to “extinguish nostalgia while also profiting from it.” Foreverizing profits from the desire to return to the familiar while making critical engagement with the past more difficult.

Just as popular movies from the recent past keep getting rebooted, old web platforms are also being foreverized. In the last few years, outdated websites such as Neopets and Habbo Hotel have been rebooted in attempts to recreate the web’s “good old days”. These two virtual worlds were both hugely popular with millennial kids in the 2000s and have now returned in attempts to capitalise on the nostalgia of their former users.

Here we can see the distinction between restorative nostalgia and foreverization as approaches to recreating the past web. Trying to bring Geocities “back to life” in the contemporary web is a form of restorative nostalgia because it’s an effort to remake the past, not as “a duration but a perfect snapshot,” as Boym describes the restorative impulse. But unlike Geocities, Neopets and Habbo Hotel never actually went offline. Launched in 1999 and 2000 respectively, both websites have remained active for over twenty years, but their popularity dwindled as the broader web changed and their users got older.

Neopets announced a revitalized site in 2023 with the stated aim of bringing back the platform’s “glory days,” while Habbo Hotel’s 2024 launch of “Habbo Hotel: Origins” sought to recreate the platform exactly “as it existed in 2005.” Reboots like these appeal to the narrative of web foreverization which asserts that life was more authentic on the early web, and that creating a better future online is possible if we can only keep that past alive.

Tanner describes foreverizing as making “small upgrades constantly within a closed system.” Foreverizing the early web uncritically resurrects the techno-utopian philosophy of that time, keeping us stuck in that same system and preventing critical reflection on how the old web really was.

Recording the landmarks of everyday life

Attempts to restore the past web can distract from the need to archive records of the present web. But so much of what’s online, especially on social media platforms, is often seen as not worth saving. After all, these are just the traces of everyday life. Choose a photo from a platform like Flickr at random and chances are that it isn’t all that meaningful to anyone besides the person who shared it and their community. Of course, out of all those photos, there will also be many that do have broader significance as records of historical events, for example.

At scale, even the seemingly random personal images and comments shared on platforms like Flickr are also important records of our social history and visual culture. They are part of what makes up our collective memory. What gets shared on social media are “the common landmarks of everyday life” that, as Boym puts it, “constitute shared social frameworks of individual recollections.”

A restorative approach to web archiving puts the focus on recreating or preserving the platforms of the old web, “reconstructing the emblems and rituals” of a past home, as Boym writes. In contrast, archiving that’s inspired by reflective nostalgia dwells in the details, seeking to preserve not the past functionalities or structures of the web but the everyday interactions that took place there.

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age exemplifies a reflective nostalgia approach to engaging with the online past. For more than ten years, the artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied have recirculated the web pages in the Geocities archive, both through writing and via a Tumblr blog which has shared hundreds of thousands of screenshots of the archive. Writing about the project in Documentation as Art, Annet Dekker and Katrina Sluis suggest that it “shows how preservation is not necessarily always about maintaining and fixing the original.” Instead of trying to recreate Geocities, One Terabyte thoughtfully interrogates and recirculates the histories the archive contains.

With a platform as large as Geocities, a reflective approach is needed to make sense of the collective history found there. The One Terabyte blog reflects on selected content from the archive, thereby asking “what preservation could mean in the context of amateur digital preservation,” as Dekker and Sluis argue.

A reflective archival approach that focuses on a representative selection of content can help preserve the collective memories of large web platforms. The Flickr Foundation’s Data Lifeboat program is an example of one such effort, offering a toolkit anyone can use to archive their own selection of Flickr. Many social media platforms allow users to download archives of their own data, but the Data Lifeboat also allows for the archiving of other people’s content, facilitating the creation of archives that document a community, place, or time.

While Data Lifeboats can also work to archive platform-specific data such as photo tags and user comments, the program is not an effort to preserve Flickr as a web platform. Web archiving entails preserving records of information such as how platforms looked, the way in which they operated, and of course their contents.

Web archiving doesn’t seek to maintain platform functionality, which might require restoration work or even a full recreation of the platform if it has gone offline. The goal of web archiving isn’t to bring the past back to life, but to ensure that records of that past remain available.

Conclusion

By uncritically seeking to rebuild what’s been lost, foreverization risks recreating the conditions that led old web platforms to be shut down or abandoned in the first place. There’s a lot wrong with the web today, from inescapable ads to corporate monopolies, but simply trying to return to how things used to be isn’t a realistic solution.

Web archives are essential in enabling study of the web’s history and helping us chart a path for an improved web in the future. We can’t indefinitely preserve the web as it currently is, and we can’t perfectly recreate its past either. What archiving can do is help keep accessible those collective frameworks of memory that emerge online, making possible the conditions for future study and reflection.

Bibliography

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Brügger, Niels. The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (September 2008): 148–71. https://doi.org/10.1086/595632.

Dekker, Annet, Katrina Sluis, and Olia Lialina. “One Terabyte of Documentation: The Circulation of GeoCities.” In Documentation as Art: Expanded Digital Practices, edited by Annet Dekker and Gabriella Giannachi, 120–30. New York, NY, USA: Routledge, 2022.

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016.

Tanner, Grafton. Foreverism. Medford: Polity Press, 2023.

Running our first co-design workshop

Our pilot workshop ran on March 11th, 2025 with eight participants, including the two of us. We asked all participants to submit a photo they believed should be preserved for 100 years, and conducted two activities based on the photo they submitted.

Activity #1: Physical vs Digital Planning

After printing out physical copies of the photo, we asked each of the participants to describe the significance of the photo they submitted. 7 out of the 8 photos were of family and friends, and preserved for the purpose of family and friends to look back on. The last photo was of members of a diverse computer science club, and preserved for the purpose of the club’s mission. Following participant’s descriptions of these photos, as a provocation, we ripped the physical photos to shreds to symbolize the deletion of photos online. We then observed participants’ reactions to this. In discussion they concluded that although it was shocking and visceral, as long as the memories associated with the photo were still well and alive, losing a physical copy of it is okay.

Activity #2: Ownership & Autonomy

In this activity, we asked all the participants to trace the number of times the photo has been shared since its inception – whether through uploading to a platform, messaging it to a family group chat, or even printing it out for the workshop. Our participants’ answers ranged from five times to fifty times, with the highest outliers being from a) a photo competition in which it was shared for public voting, and b) the club photo having multiple people in it, therefore having shared ownership of the photo. We noted that most family photos were shared with only family through platforms like Facebook, Messages, and Instagram.

Activity #3: Reflection

In our final activity, we asked our participants now that they had the words to describe preservation and legacy, what steps would they take to preserve photos intentionally? Their answers varied, some talking about physical hard drives, saving to multiple devices, printing the photo, and even giving up ownership of the photo so that someone else or the public would access it.

Learnings and limitations

This workshop helped us confirm what we believed about Gen Z – in that we need literacy for preservation in order to understand and care for it. With the internet growing so exponentially, it’s hard for us as a generation to stop and think about the impact of our photography and digital presence. The workshop participants expressed their newfound interest in the topic, and were very engaged in all the discussions we had about the concepts of preservation. We found that the participants were the most interested in sharing their experiences with the photos they submitted because of the personal aspect of the workshop, and enjoyed learning about each others’ photos as well.

As a capstone team, we felt that we had accomplished what we meant to do with having these discussions, but there is always more work to do. This workshop went well, but our recruitment timeline was extremely short, meaning we had to pull a lot of our friends to come. In a future run of the workshop, we want to make sure that we have a long enough recruitment timeline – such as two or more weeks in order to build up enough interest from circles that aren’t our immediate ones. We also felt that although there were productive discussions, the participants didn’t necessarily have enough time to think on their own before hearing each other’s thoughts, resulting in a lot of similar answers and agreement. In future runs, we want to build in more time for participants to think and marinate on their own before moving into a group discussion.

With the workshop over, we anticipate sending out a feedback survey and reflection form to our participants in a month, to understand what concepts stuck with them and have changed the way they view social media and/or digital preservation. We hope to potentially run the workshop again at the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium to collect more information, and get more feedback on how this could be passed on to another passionate team of preservation enthusiasts.

Next Steps

Having concluded our workshop and findings, and presented to our mentor team, we find ourselves somehow at the finish line of our capstone project. This entire project has taught us much about the concepts of digital legacy and preservation, as it relates to us and our generation, as well as intentional usage of social media and photography, and finally about the digital capacity of us as people. It calls us to ask, how can we be sustainable when so much of our information is cluttered online? Lastly, we’ve learned so much as individuals working in a professional environment – a huge thank you to the Flickr Foundation team and community for being so patient with us and inviting us into the space, especially Tori and George for their mentorship & guidance through these months! We’ve learned so much about the design and research process, and gained professional communication skills that will follow us throughout our future careers! Again, a huge thank you to Flickr Foundation and our professor Dr. Odumosu for everything we’ve learned throughout this project, we could not have done it without you! Thank you so much!

Hi there! We are Amy Sun and Daniel Kim, two seniors at the University of Washington Informatics program with a focus on UX/UI design. We’re extremely honored to work with the Flickr Foundation, who have generously sponsored our capstone project exploring digital archiving in the context of digital preservation and legacy planning, alongside our professor Dr. Temi Odumosu who has served as our mentor throughout this project. With our backgrounds in culturally sensitive UX design and accessible design, we are incredibly excited to begin this project with the Flickr Foundation.

For the past two months we have stepped into the world of memory work as welcomed strangers, taking the time to learn about the importance of digital archiving in order to preserve our shared cultural heritage. Being among some of the most forward and preparatory thinkers addressing digital preservation has felt like walking through déjà vu, where we are designing and thinking about future solutions that were anticipated in the past: our present moment.

Our research questions

Our first step of research was to explore the vast literature surrounding archival work where we became particularly interested in digital death and destruction. We were especially struck by the following concepts, which led us to some key questions::

Digital estate planning: We found an online guide on how people can dedicate a “will” or “legacy” to loved ones to have access to their digital accounts.

• How can people be given the tools to think through posthumous digital assets?

The scale of digital mortality: It is estimated that by 2070, those who are dead will outnumber the living on Facebook… we might assume a similar scale for  Flickr. Physical death doesn’t necessarily account for a person’s digital footprint.

• How can we address the fact that digital content will outlive its creator?
• How long should these memories last?
• Who should have the right to decide what happens to this content?

Deathlogging: The digital persistence of deceased individuals on the internet creates new mourning rituals between the living and the dead.

• What is the experience of users interacting with deceased accounts?
• How can this experience provide insights into how those in the future might interact with content (or Data Lifeboats) created by deceased creators? 

Archival Refusal: In the Pittsburgh Queer History Project a marginalized community’s artifacts and information were intentionally protected and excluded from museums and curators, serving as a critique of archival research’s encroachment on the personal. This reading revealed that unchecked preservation risks distorting precious cultural memory, while intentional removal risks erasing vital histories.

• What happens if digital content is taken out of context or misrepresents cultural histories, and archival or set expiration dates on archives for this reason?
• What contradictions exist between an archive’s promise to empower through acquisition and its compulsion to expand by any means necessary?

Alongside these readings, we found ourselves in a unique design space: considering digital power and autonomy today.

While talking with Dr. Odumosu, we discussed why this is an urgent issue. She highlighted the mass deletion of information in the U.S. federal government through data purging. The “death” of data at the hands of our government exposes the false promise of online permanence.

This is not limited to those in power in the U.S. federal government. Corporations closely tied to the administration—such as Meta (founded by Mark Zuckerberg) and Amazon (founded by Jeff Bezos)—hold immense power over our individual and collective digital assets. If these corporations were to adopt a similar shoot-from-the-hip approach to digital assets, what steps can we take to ensure digital legacy planning remains in our hands?

If the livelihood of data can be deleted in a split second by our government, what decisions about longevity and time-constraints on our digital assets should be given to the user?

What promise of preservation could something like Data Lifeboat reasonably offer to the user?

We question the systems of power safeguarding, saving and holding crucial information. It gives us the language to say,

“We are saving and archiving because there are power structures that actually control what we thought we had control over.”

In the coming weeks, we will be exploring these themes through interviews and an educational workshop aimed at increasing literacy surrounding digital preservation for young adults.

Thank you to Tori, George, and Dr. Odumosu for their ongoing mentorship throughout this project and we will keep you posted on our research in our Part 2.

At the Flickr Foundation, you may have heard we’re developing a Digital Daybook—just one tangible codification of our 100-year plan. Answering the question, How might we keep Flickr alive for the next century?, is no easy feat, so we figured we might need some tools along the way to help us out.

Through our 100-year plan workshops, one theme emerged again and again: it’s not just technical infrastructure that sustains an organisation, but social infrastructure, too. Shared rituals—the everyday and periodic habits, customs, and practices of a group—are just as critical to long-term preservation as robust servers and secure storage. Rituals create a sense of continuity and belonging, allowing knowledge, values, and ways of working to be carried forward even as individuals move on.

Rituals that Sustain

Take, for example, the Royal Society, founded in 1660. Today, it still upholds its core principles through rituals: formal presentations, roll calls, elections, and the meticulous recording of experiments and discussions in its journal, Philosophical Transactions. While the people, research priorities, and conditions for entry have changed, these rituals reinforce continuity and collective memory, ensuring that the institution’s intellectual traditions endure.

On the more speculative side, consider the Atomic Priesthood, a speculative proposal by a linguist (Thomas Sebeok), physicist (Alvin Weinberg) and science fiction writer (Arsen Darney) in the 1980s. They imagined a ritualistic system of knowledge transmission designed to warn future civilizations about nuclear waste disposal sites—long after current languages and cultural systems might have vanished. The idea was to establish a priesthood-like order that would embed knowledge of radioactive dangers into myths, superstitions, and religious customs, ensuring the information’s survival for millennia. The half-life of nuclear waste far exceeds a human lifespan, but rituals can endure — with the founders citing the Catholic Church’s survival over two millennia as proof of concept.

The kernel of history in the everyday

Beyond these grand and speculative examples of organisational sustenance, much of what we understand about historical institutions, corporations, and communities comes from the small, seemingly mundane records they leave behind. The minutiae of daily life—ledgers, journals, memos, meeting minutes, logbooks, annotations, schedules, receipts, rosters—constitute a form of ritual in themselves. These documents often appear purely practical in their own time, yet they later serve as a rich resource for historians.

Take, for example, a 19th-century household daybook discovered in Jönköping, Sweden. At first glance, it might seem like a simple log of purchases—how much sugar was bought, how much the gardener was paid. But when read with an attunement to the social, it reveals something more: the purchase of a bicycle for an 11-year-old girl, a quiet but profound marker of shifting ideas around childhood and womanhood in the fin-de-siècle.

Building the Foundation’s first ritual

As Flickr Foundation founder, George Oates, noted back in 2014, there’s an opportunity to view corporate corporate digital archives not as static documents, but “through a feeling of human activity and depth”—records imbued with the lived experience of the people who create them and the values of their time. Given our work at the Foundation, which so often deals with the care and consequences of archival materials, it only makes sense that we consider our own.

But the Digital Daybook isn’t just a gift to posterity. It’s also a tool for reflection in the present—a moment in our daily work routines to bring awareness to our own practices, values, and rhythms as we shape Flickr.org’s future.

In this series of blog posts, we’ll be crafting a sort of ‘prehistory’ to our own Digital Daybook, tracing its conceptual lineage and exploring its potential significance. First, we’ll ask: Where do daybooks appear? How have they functioned across history? Venturing into more unexpected corners, we’ll also survey adjacent ephemera that might be considered the spiritual ‘cousins’ of daybooks. In the subsequent post, we’ll examine what these records can reveal to us—about institutions, communities, and memory. Finally, we’ll turn to the role of the daybook in the digital era and what it means to document daily organisational life in an age of shifting technologies.