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Vanishing Culture: No Film Left Unscanned

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The following guest post from archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Soon after the cinema was born in the 1890s, a few visionaries realized that film could become one of the most vivid and engaging means of recording history. But when they proposed creating archives to collect and preserve moving images, no one seemed to respond. Most movie studios treated films as expendable objects to be discarded after their theatrical runs, and most collections that actually survived were hidden in specialized spaces: newsreel archives, stock footage libraries, universities, and collectors’ basements. 

In the 1930s, a handful of courageous archivists in Europe and America inaugurated the modern film archives movement. Asserting that cinema should be seen not only as valuable documentation but as an art in its own right, they collected as best they could. But they encountered great resistance. They fought pushback from copyright holders who saw archives as a violation of their ownership, aesthetes and government bureaucrats who considered movies to be vulgar commercialism and unworthy of preservation, and fire inspectors who treated film as explosive hazmat. Ultimately, film’s immense popularity won out. In half a century, the first four film archives expanded to hundreds, and today it’s impossible to count how many thousands of archives collect film, video, and digital materials.

But film has always been hard to collect and preserve. Until the 1970s, film was generally made from organic gelatin bonded to various forms of plastic that inevitably decomposed. Much but not all pre-1951 35mm film was doubly vulnerable, made from cellulose nitrate stock that if heated or exposed to flame could burn rapidly or explode. Film, therefore, was and still is a deeply inconvenient object, requiring very cool and very dry storage in order to survive. Archives fires throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have destroyed large collections, and almost every film is still at risk from decay and decomposition.

For many years the gold standard of film preservation was film-to-film copying coupled with restoration—aiming to preserve films as their makers intended, and trying to preserve the theatrical film experience. This process is difficult and expensive. The turn toward digital technologies came in the 1990s, and now almost all film preservation is digitally-based, even if the product is a long-lasting film print for storage projection.

To think about film preservation is to think about much more than what we call movies. While to most people film and cinema describe the stories we see in theaters or on television, feature films are really a special case. The majority of films are “useful cinema”—films produced to do a job, to sell, train, teach, promote, document, convince. Almost none of these films have been preserved. And the supermajority of films, totalling in the billions, are home movies. 

From the Prelinger Archives, “Home Movie: 003791,” preserved and available to view at the Internet Archive.

Home movies—8mm, Super 8, 9.5mm 16mm and even 35mm—are ancestors of the videos we shot on camcorders and now capture on cell phones. We might think of each home movie as a pixel in a giant collective documentary spanning a hundred years, endless films picturing family, friends, travels, rituals and celebrations. Home movies picture our own experience of daily life, work and leisure, rather than narratives cooked up by commercial studios. And every home movie is evidence: a gesture of permanence. While there are large collections of home movies, most still live with the families that made them, often in damp basements or hot attics, all vulnerable to deterioration and the vagaries of a changing climate. Of all films, home movies are the closest to our hearts, the most charismatic, the most fascinating—and they are in the greatest jeopardy.

From the Prelinger Archives, “New York World’s Fair (Part 6),” preserved and available to view at the Internet Archive.

Fortunately, we now have digital tools and workflows to extend the life of film. While scanning film to produce digital files demands considerable skill, technology, and resources, it is more achievable than ever before. It’s possible to digitize most films that have not completely decayed and turn these inconvenient reels into digital files that can be viewed, shared, studied, edited, and woven together with other images and sounds. It’s now easy to take a film that may exist in only a single copy and share it around the world via the internet. 

Beginning in 2000, Prelinger Archives collaborated with Internet Archive to digitize and offer thousands of useful films online, and since then our films have been seen and downloaded over 200 million times on the Internet Archive and arguably billions of times elsewhere. Our three-year collaboration with Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, now in progress, is allowing us to scan thousands of films (especially home movies) every year and make them available in a safer, decentralized environment where we hope they will survive for many years. While this is not classic film-to-film preservation creating restored film copies that sit on archival shelves, digital scans of films are likely to exist in many places, avoiding the vulnerability of unique copies in individual repositories. And the quality of digital scanning now exceeds the quality of film-to-film copying.

Perhaps most importantly, digital scans are easy to share. While film preservation should enable universal access to the sum of cinematic creativity, much film is enclosed by copyright or business restrictions. Most films held in archives are still not visible and even fewer are available for reuse. By scanning films that are out of copyright or have no surviving rightsholder, we can open up an immense reservoir of images, sounds and ideas for the makers of the present and the future. Scanning has made film preservation practical, and it’s also enabled preservation of “smaller” films like home movies and useful films, which reveal evidence and truths absent from feature films and television.

No film left unscanned: this is our dream. We have the opportunity to preserve deteriorating films in digital form and make them available for viewing, reuse, and computation as never before. As thoughtful archivists have said for many years, “preservation without access is pointless.” Digital scanning can and should enable both as it helps us to build moving and permanent memories.

About the author

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator. He began collecting “ephemeral films” (films made for specific purposes at specific times, such as advertising, educational and industrial films; more recently called “useful cinema“) in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002, and since that time Prelinger Archives has again grown to include some 40,000 home movies and 7,000 other film items. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now over 9,700 items) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. Prelinger Archives currently collaborates with Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web to scan historical films and make them available online. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 30 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library in 2004, which continues to serve the needs of researchers, artists, activists and readers in downtown San Francisco. He is currently Emerit Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Vanishing Culture: Punch Card Knitting

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The following guest post from digital humanities scholar Nichole Misako Nomura is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Punch cards are a fascinating binary data storage format that aren’t just history—they’re still used by knitting machines today! Thanks to the Internet Archive and other collections, we still have access to historic punch cards, but there are some technical challenges to using them in the format they’re stored in. Meet a few folx working on those challenges. 

Punch card computation—the good old days, or the bad old days, depending on who you talk to—lives firmly in the land of “the old days” for most—a piece of history, with pedagogical and nostalgic benefit—but it’s alive and well in the textile world. 

Histories of computing frequently point to the Jacquard loom as the example of the “first” code,  used to create fabric in a variety of patterns—like this 1839 commemorative portrait of the Jacquard loom’s inventor, J.M. Jacquard: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002737214/. These looms use punch cards to lift warp threads above or below the weft, allowing for the mechanized creation of non-repeating patterns across the loom. (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_645517) 

While the Jacquard loom gets all the attention for being the first code, the punch card knitting machine transitioned from being a Jacquard attachment on lace and knitting machines in industrial textile production to the kind of local, DIY code that a lot of people in textiles interacted with—many of whom were women. By the 1970s, they were used by people knitting for themselves and their families, for take-home piece-work, and in textile factory settings. The punch card machine was eventually replaced in commercial and, if you can afford it, home contexts by machines that could control individual needles, instead of depending on a punch card’s repeat—but the machines are still in use in a number of hobbyist workshops (like my own!) and are even still in  production (albeit much-reduced). 

The knitting machines I own share their punch card dimensions (24 stitches wide) with one of the first punch cards (the Hollerith card, used for the 1890 census, was a 24-column punch card). They’re an important piece of computing history—and crucially, one of the few that isn’t only history because a broad community of people, on- and off-line, are still sharing knowledge on how to hack, restore, and use them. 

All punch cards are fundamentally digital, even if we don’t generally think of “digital” as a property physical objects can have. It is only recently that our associations of computing with “the cloud” and other ephemeral metaphors have superseded the fundamentally physical processes that support computation. Working with knitting machine punch cards reminds me that the cloud is a metaphor, and lets me own and manipulate my code in a way I find both challenging and creatively liberating. 

The coolest thing about knitting punch cards is that they really are just sequences of “yes” and “no”—and that information is actionable in a wide variety of machines, all of which perform different functions based on that information. Some machines can knit two different colors at once—one color is “yes,” and the other is “no.” Others can skip the stitches marked as “no.” Some machines can make tuck or slip stitches, and others still do something called “weaving,” a variation on the aforementioned two-color knitting. The information encoded by these punch cards, regardless of the actual dimensions of the cards, is interoperable across most machines—and when it is not, it is because the number of holes in the punch card doesn’t permit the same numeric repeat (30 and 24 are divisible by a similar, but not identical, set of numbers). 

There are a lot of punch card knitting patterns stored on the internet, found in multi-purpose archives like the Internet Archive and in countless community-hosted Google Drives. Unlike a pattern written for hand-knitting, these punch cards are not, strictly-speaking, usable in the format they are stored in. While I could knit a sweater from a set of directions that look like knit 1, purl 40 from an image, working with images of punch card knitting patterns requires a different workflow—one that, counterintuitively, is challenging because of the digital nature of the punch card itself. 

Digitizing the already-digital

Knitting machine punchcards are relatively easy to digitize in a way that preserves the information, but relatively difficult to digitize in a way that makes the transition back from stored-on-the-computer to stored-in-physical-material feasible. It is entirely possible to recreate a punch card using an image—by hand, laboriously, with a physical hole punch. (Image: https://archive.org/details/handypunch/HandyPunchDirections/mode/2up) Usually I work row-by-row, with a ruler across the image, to make sure I’m putting holes in the right spots and chanting things like “3 yes, 1 no, 3 yes, 4 no” in repeating patterns. It is error-prone, but consistent with how generations pre-internet worked with these patterns—translating an image in a book or magazine into binary data of “punch this, not that.” 

However, those with more patience for debugging than patience for tedious card-punching have been experimenting with a variety of methods that allow for computer-controlled punching—or, more often, cutting that imitates punching. The Cricut is the standout piece of hardware here, although any machine that can precision cut paper using code will do. These machines, called CNC machines (CNC stands for “computer numerical control”), can have laser or blade attachments, and they work the same way as the massive plasma cutters used for cutting steel. A layer of software, which can be open-source or proprietary, translates an image stored as a SVG (scalable vector graphic) into strings of numbers that control the cutting head. 

SVGs aren’t that hard to generate off of images; the challenge here is generating an SVG off an image that actually fits in a punch card knitting machine. There is exactly one spot a hole can go that will work with the dimensions of a knitting machine, and unfortunately, low-quality scans (even pretty-good quality scans) are often too noisy to make it possible to blow up the image and then cut out all the dark spots. I tried, and was rewarded with a punch card that jammed, ripped, and complained loudly for several rows before I gave up. With higher-quality scans, this one-to-one kind of reproduction might work—but only for the machine the punch card was originally designed for. So there’s an incentive to extract the information in those punch cards in a way that is not tied to the specific dimensions of one knitting machine or another. Knitting magazines frequently turned to standardized grid formats for this, preserving the information (“yes, no, yes, yes, no”) but not the specific dimensions of any given punch card. 

I work with punch cards in my home workshop for fun, but I’m also fortunate enough to work with them at Stanford’s Textile Makerspace, where Quinn Dombrowski has been teaching data visualization using textiles on an assortment of knitting machines, looms, and sewing machines. Quinn’s colleague Simon Wiles, a Digital Scholarship Research Developer at Stanford’s Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research, has worked on a computer-vision approach for converting images of punch cards into data that could be used to generate new physical punch cards. He previously worked on an incredible digitization effort on behalf of the Stanford Libraries to digitize their player piano rolls, which posed related technical challenges, so knitting-machine punch cards seemed like a challenge right up his alley. 

When I asked Simon to describe his ideal digitization and preservation workflow for knitting machine punch cards, he said something that surprised me—that the encoded information preserved in magazines and books might be a better starting place than the punch cards themselves, depending on the goals of the project. It’s really hard to scan a punch card well. He pointed out that all sorts of things happen to physical punch cards that make them harder to digitize—they get bent or torn (and in the case of the player piano rolls he’s worked on, people repair and modify them in a variety of ways)—all of which are interesting material information about use, but which pose challenges for computer vision. The question of what to do with a hole that has been taped over is not only a creative decision, but also a technical one: will the scan be able to capture that? Do we introduce a new character to represent the tape in the encoding? Not that magazines are foolproof, he stresses—there are plenty of challenges in digitizing shiny paper, especially if one is trying to do it quickly or automatically. 

Regardless of source material, Simon stresses the importance of high-quality scans: “From the point of view of posterity: the scan quality is really important—preserve it the best you can: things that are difficult to parse now will only get easier to parse in the future.”

Punch Card Encoding 

Storing the parse—and circulating that information without having to repeat the process of either manual or computer-vision-assisted encoding—relies, at the moment, on community-supported infrastructure. 

The format accepted by Brenda A. Bell’s generator, which generates SVGs for a given punch card style based on a user’s plain text file, has become one of the de facto encodings for this information as a .txt file encoded in ASCII—a way to archive and share punch cards that skips over the limitations of image-based archiving, even as it requires more upfront investment in labor. See image below for an example of what this looks like. 

Text files are a lot smaller than images, and can be stored easily on both personal hard drives and cloud storage. There are many community-run Google Drives that act as repositories for these punch cards. As far as storing and circulating go, the ASCII format accepted by Bell’s generator offers a lot in terms of flexibility—allowing us to quickly remix, edit, and modify punch card patterns using lightweight, open-source software, even if the current format decontextualizes the information from its original conditions of use. Simon pointed out that a standardized metadata structure could do a lot there—maybe a standardized plain-text header—and I imagine what I could do with a corpus of punch card encoding linked to metadata about its provenance and digitization and to source images stored somewhere like the Internet Archive. What would we learn about knitting and textile history? What creative remixes would be possible? 

Punch cards preserve the past and future

Knitting punch cards are an important part of any feminist computing history, and surprisingly resilient. They’re interoperable across machines with the same repeat, can be stored as physical (but still fundamentally digital) copies without worrying about hard drives going bad or requiring ongoing power consumption, and are also, in the age of seemingly-endless proprietary software and terms and conditions, refreshingly punk, in a minimal computing, open-source sort of way. How many people actually read the source code of the open-source software they use? Punch cards are the source, in something so fundamentally binary that fluency is not hard to come by. (Fluency in binary for almost all other tasks is nearly impossible.) I can repeat a row as many times as I wish. I can change whether my machine ignores the 1s, knits the 1s, purls the 1s, etc. I can perform subsequent operations on the punch card’s outputs with manual manipulation. And I own it. I own my knitting machine, can take it apart and repair it without violating some terms of service, and can hack and modify it and my punch cards to my heart’s content. 

In a dream world, we’d have naming conventions or databases that let us link the .txt files to their corresponding stored images, in a system that balances the practicalities of storage and future use with the incredibly rich history available to us in the images. Punch card archiving supports an active, developing space where folx continue to develop computational and coding expertise in a variety of formats and ways—from working with mathematical modeling software to generate new punch cards to working out new designs with a hole punch and the memory cartridges at their machine. Our digitization and archiving practices can help us better understand the history of computing at the same time as they support an ongoing community working in creative computation. The Internet Archive and other community archives—which Simon says “are our best hope against enclosure”—don’t only preserve history, they enable communities to continue using and developing our technological resources. 

About the author

Nichole Misako Nomura has a PhD from Stanford in English and an MA in Education, and studies digital humanities pedagogy. She’s currently an Associate Director at the Stanford Literary Lab, a digital-humanities research collective, and a lecturer in the Stanford Department of English.

Vanishing Culture: What Early Internet Era GIFs Show Us About Preserving Digital Culture

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The following guest post from writer and editorial director JD Shadel is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Once upon a time, everything on the Internet existed in one single location: on a Wal-Mart flat-pack desk in my childhood home. OK, that’s not technically accurate, but it felt very true to me then. When I sat on that height-adjustable ergonomic desk chair, the whole Internet seemed to rest on that particle-board desk, which sagged under the weight of the chonky desktop computer it held. 

I first glimpsed the World Wide Web through an off-white monitor four times the size of my young skull. The first sound the Internet made was, of course, a screech—i.e., the symphonic shriek of dial-up. A kid in the hills of Appalachia, I turned up the volume knob on the clunky speakers to hear 19 or so screaming seconds of skooo skeee skooo skeee dooo skahhh skaaaaaaahhhh skahhhhhh on full blast. It made my mom cringe, which made me love it more. This was the fanfare for us early cybersurfers, a sound announcing that we were all logging on. And when this sound concluded, I saw this new world. Internet Explorer would load the web’s jittery rhythms: a seemingly endless sea of constantly looping GIFs that felt as cheeky and comical as they felt fresh.

For those who came of age with the early days of the World Wide Web as I did, that dial up shriek sounded like the future. And that future looked like the web’s emergent image filetype: the new Graphics Interchange Format combined multiple frames into a single file, displaying basic animations on repeat. It quickly came to define the dot-com aesthetic. 

The limited bandwidth and capabilities of the day’s desktop computers helped GIFs transcend technical barriers to become an icon of the time. Soon, everything seemingly imaginable had been GIFed: dancing babies, dancing skeletons, and, of course, loads of cat GIFs. There were timely GIFs for everything from “The Simpsons” cartoons and e-pet like Tamagotchi keychains and a Furby blowing bubble gum (like those I have sampled on my writing website, which highlights a few dozen from my personal collection saved through the years). 

As culture increasingly flourished on the Internet throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, culture increasingly looked like GIFs. GIFs became the first widely adopted computer art, the vernacular for the first-wave of Internet memes, and the way contemporary Internet users then expressed what we today might call our “personal brand.” If you click around a few personal pages from GeoCities, the first major platform that let individuals host their own websites (archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine), you’ll see how early Internet users would select a series of decorative GIFs like clip-art to express their identities and interests in these emerging virtual spaces. GIFs served functional purposes, too—they were used as spacers to define different sections of a page, for instance. They were also an animated way to invite someone to take some desired action, such as send you an email or sign your guestbook. On forums, GIFs even became avatars and the visual representation of our “netizen” personas at a time when not everyone was comfortable using real names or photos online. 

But in my mind, nothing captures the creative spirit of the early-Internet era quite like the rich “under construction” subgenre, which I’ve cataloged in my own personal GIF collection I began archiving during the pandemic using GifCities. 

Due to easier-to-use hosting services and the relative ease of learning HTML essentials, the landscape of personal websites in the web 1.0 felt handmade and do-it-yourself. If you were working on a new website but it wasn’t quite done, you’d be prone to make the incomplete version live and highlight the pages that weren’t finished with a litany of GIFs themed around building physical infrastructure—think animated flaggers holding signs, jittery construction workers operating jackhammers, and dump trucks and the like. 

The physical construction metaphor speaks to the collective sense then that the World Wide Web was a place we were engaged in making together. Dropping a few construction GIFs on your page was a way to indicate “hey, this is a work in progress”—and it was a continual reminder that this new medium was something we could all play some small role in shaping. I don’t want to indulge in undue nostalgia. The early web was a capitalist place built on the backs of government-funded networking systems that had become accessible to folks outside academic circles with the World Wide Web. Many of our current challenges have roots in decisions made during the early Internet days. But there is a lesson inherent in that era that a lot of us have forgotten, as the Internet has started to feel more like a generic shopping mall as opposed to the digital public square it’s always been mythologized as. 

Back then, there was a more palpable sense that we were all netizens—even the “noobs,” the irritating new kids like me logging on every evening from their parents’ computers. We were citizens of something collective. I might’ve been a nobody queer kid living on farmland in coal country. But when I got online, I was participating in building some corner of this wild thing we called the web. The web was never truly democratic, of course, but those early days did have a sense of openness and humanness that was apparent in its incompleteness. Whenever we advertised that the current reality was soon to change, we were drawing attention to the fact that we were all working on figuring out what this could become.

As with a lot of things on the web, GIFs were everywhere until the moment they weren’t. 

In 1999, patent and royalty controversies around the algorithm that made GIFs possible spilled over into a real-world campaign to burn floppy disks that contained GIF files outside the headquarters of a tech company in California. 1999’s Burn All GIFs Day may have focused on obscure intellectual property law: The Atlantic magazine reported that year that “Burn All GIFs Day may be the first time in human history that anyone has ever thought it worthwhile to stage an organized political protest, even a small one, over a mathematical algorithm.” But it was a proverbial canary in this digital coal mine.

As connection speeds increased and web 2.0 shifted toward a glossier and more sanitized user experience, early web GIFs faded into obscurity—looking as dated as the candy-like iMacs and the much clunkier but still colorful HP tower computer my family had. 

Even so, GIFs would not die. While the file format itself may have faded into obscurity, video file formats that mimic the repeating nature of the original GIFs became somewhat incorrectly dubbed “GIFs” and embedded firmly in the meme stylings of Tumblr, Facebook, and soon every messaging app on the planet. 

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

Today, the Internet doesn’t feel like a single place in our lives. The idea of having a designated space in your home where you engage with the digital world is old-fashioned. “I miss the computer room,” culture writer Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick eulogized earlier this year in a cool short essay in their newsletter, The Trend Report. Many of us do our day jobs on laptops, are programmed to repeatedly check the notifications on our “phones”—which we primarily use to connect to Internet-enabled services rather than actually phone anyone—and if not that, we’re on our iPads or glancing at our smart watches. By referring to an era of the Internet when it was accessible only through designated corners of our physical lives, I’m showing my age—and also drawing attention to how quickly digital culture evolves as the technology fueling it changes. 

Early GIFs off GeoCities websites are really only accessible thanks to the work of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the GifCities search engine that the Archive launched in 2016 in commemoration of its 20th anniversary. That, to me, underscores a fact about the modern Internet that we take for granted: with 5G common, including in many subway tunnels, and Wi-Fi in some jurisdictions a publicly funded utility freely accessible in certain cities’ streets, the Internet can seem like the air around us. 

But the Internet isn’t invisible. It’s a very physical thing encompassing mind-boggling maps of wires and undersea cables, and networks including countless privately owned and operated data centers—and in this current era of the web, where so-called “artificial intelligence” is causing an up-tick in the environmental and human impacts of this technological infrastructure, it’s good to be reminded of the physicality of the digital world. 

When somebody flips off the servers, as GeoCities did when it shuttered in the late 2000s, the world risks losing all artifacts of that culture if they’re not preserved. GIFs that seemed like they’d dance forever simply disappear—for example, if the only copy of the file existed on a floppy disk that was, say, burned in 1999. 

This is, after all, the ephemeral truth of the Internet: if you don’t save it, even if it seems like it’s everywhere momentarily, it will just as quickly disappear. 

When we preserve digital culture that would otherwise vanish, we don’t necessarily gain the keys to a richer creative future. Again, the web has largely moved on from early GIFs. I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t become more virtuous by being enthusiasts of outdated image types (in the same way that listening to music on vinyl records doesn’t necessarily make you cooler or a more conscious listener). 

But when we preserve and revisit the remnants of digital culture’s recent history, it behooves us to remember that this networked realm, as imperfect and as frustrating as it can feel sometimes, is what we make it. And maybe if we realize that, we can start to again play a more active role in shaping a better collective future that many of us want. In the meantime, the GifCities database of millions of GIFs provides plenty of entertaining throwback material for your browsing pleasure. Heck, maybe it’ll even inspire your own GifCities-themed website, as it did with my recent website update. (I spoke to Chris Freeland, the Director of the Internet Archive’s Library Services, about it earlier this year. Yeah, it obviously features the bubble-gum blowing Furby.)

About the author

JD Shadel is a writer and editorial director from the Appalachian Mountains and now based in London, where they recently launched ESC KEY .CO, a new media outlet examining tech and modern life with skeptical curiosity. Their work often focuses on trends where the online and offline worlds blur. Before moving to the United Kingdom, they spent nearly a decade in Portland, Ore., where they freelanced widely as an editor and served as The Washington Post’s travel writer for one of America’s most consciously “weird” cities. Shadel launched the Future of Travel column for Condé Nast Traveler in 2023, serves as editor-at-large at Good On You, and has contributed to VICE, BBC News, Them, Bloomberg CityLab and other outlets. Their long-form reporting was named among VICE’s Best of 2017. They completed their MA with Distinction in international relations at the University of Exeter.

Vanishing Culture: Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications

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The following guest post from curator and amateur radio enthusiast Kay Savetz is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

A selection of cassette tapes from the “Ham Radio & More” radio show digitized by DLARC.

Amateur Radio has been a hobby for well over 100 years. For as long as there has been an understanding of electricity and radio waves, people have been experimenting with these technologies and advancing the state of the art. As a result, the world has moved from wired telegraphy to tube radios to telephones—fast forward a century—to GPS and high-speed digital communication devices that fit in your pocket.

Advances made by amateur radio experimenters have propelled the work of NASA, satellites, television, the internet, and every communications company in existence today. People fiddling with radios have pushed forward technological advances the world around, time and time again.

And yet, the people making these efforts, doing these feats, aren’t always the best at documenting and preserving their work for the future. That’s where Internet Archive comes in.

I’m the curator of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. DLARC is a project of the Internet Archive, and my job is to find and preserve this rich history of radio and communications. DLARC collects resources related to amateur radio, satellite communications, television, shortwave radio, pirate radio, experimental communications, and related communications.

In the two years since the project launched, DLARC has preserved thousands of magazines and journals, manuals, product catalogs, radio programs, and conference proceedings. These materials were scattered worldwide, often inaccessible and in obsolete formats. We’ve digitized material that was on paper, cassette tape, reel-to-reel tape, CD-ROMs, DVDs. We’ve digitized video from 16mm film, VHS, U-Matic, Betacam and even more obscure video formats.

We’ve built a collection of more than 140,000 items and made them available to the world. Researchers, academics, and hobbyists use the library to learn from the rich history of this 100-year-old hobby.

Learn more about DLARC

One reason this preservation is necessary is that the people creating history don’t always realize at the time that they’re creating history. In 1977, the creators of Amateur Radio Newsline—a weekly audio news bulletin—probably didn’t realize that their project would still be going on in 2024, 47 years later. And for all of their amazing work, if they had realized they were documenting history, they might have made more effort to save those recordings: the first 20 years of their work are missing. (DLARC has found some recordings from 1996, then most of them since 2012.)

Sometimes creators do recognize the importance of their effort. For more than six years, Len Winkler hosted Ham Radio & More, a radio show about amateur radio. Winker recorded every episode on cassette tape and managed to digitize many of the shows himself. However, the process of digitizing hundreds of episodes is tedious and he wasn’t able to complete it. With his approval, DLARC stepped in to finish the job. They’re all online now, more than 300 episodes including interviews with many notable names in the radio community.

There have been other huge successes: the entire 43-year run of 73 Magazine is digitized and online thanks to the publisher, Wayne Green, who donated the collection to Internet Archive before his death. Most issues of The W5YI Report, a ham radio newsletter that was published for 25 years, are online as well.

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

Attempting to preserve material years, or sometimes decades, after the fact makes systematic preservation nearly impossible. For every success story of content saved and archived, there is a heartbreaking story of loss. When amateur radio enthusiasts die, their media collections are often disposed of by survivors who don’t have any connection to amateur radio. File cabinets and bookcases full of (sometimes irreplaceable) materials are emptied into recycle bins.

Another challenge to preservation and access is membership organizations that keep their material behind paywalls. They sometimes prevent any of their information from being lent in an online library, which it is their right to do. However while they actively thwart efforts at preservation, it remains unclear whether those groups are adequately preserving their own history.

Some material is preserved intentionally, but a good amount was saved purely by accident. The material we recover and digitize has come from attics and basements, from libraries discarding obsolete material, from long-forgotten FTP sites, from scratched CD-ROMs, and from the estates of people who have passed.

So we float where the radio waves take us, trying to preserve the past as much as possible, while encouraging today’s content creators to consider how to make their material accessible to future generations.

About the author

Kay Savetz is curator of Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications. DLARC is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. If you have questions about the project or material to contribute, contact kay@archive.org.

Vanishing Culture: Type Ephemera—Lessons in Endearment

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The following guest post from writer and book artist Eve Scarborough is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

What is type ephemera and why does it need to be preserved? 

Type ephemera, specifically the kind collected by Letterform Archive, refers to paper goods used to advertise or display typefaces for purchase. Often produced by foundries, type ephemera takes many structural forms and examples including—

  • a paper folio containing multiple examples of types in use, such as mock restaurant menus, travel pamphlets, concert programs and business cards. (below)
  • a saddle stitched book with one or more typefaces, referred to as a type specimen, including examples of the upper and lowercase alphabet or shown alongside sample sentences. (below)
  • a small booklet printed in black, red and green ink, illustrating the foundry’s seasonal collection of holiday borders and ornaments. (below)

From an archival perspective, type ephemera is important to preserve because it captures a time when past printing technologies and methods of bookbinding were abundant. While there are multiple organizations, museums and libraries dedicated to preserving fine press and book arts, not all are accessible to everyone, and only a handful focus specifically on instruction. Thus, it is urgent for type ephemera to be digitized and remain widely available to the public, especially as interest in learning book arts and letterpress printing continues to grow. Ephemera is unique in that it challenges notions of value and permanence, two ideas that dominate special collections and archives. Its temporal nature as both everyday and non-archival objects invites us to consider, and in some cases witness, how pieces of ephemera were repurposed and transformed by their makers and guardians. 

It is difficult to find and name the workers who cast, set, printed, and bound the specimens that eventually made their way to the archive. At the time I was cataloging this collection, the metadata fields we used included columns to note typeface designers, foundry names, and potential partner distributors. There was also a column to include the object worktype; “metal type” appears frequently throughout the spreadsheet. As I worked, I noticed that many of the specimens were produced with acidic paper,* intended for immediate distribution to print shops and customers.

Sometimes I would come across a pamphlet or binding that expanded unexpectedly, or made use of additional space. I began making note of the type of structure or binding for each specimen in the object description field: 

“Booklet, 12 pages. Saddle stitched binding. Light blue cover. Single color printing. Black ink on white paper.” 

Including the names of these structures allowed me to begin filling the gaps in knowledge. By including them, I hoped that their presence would spark curiosity among viewers and provide insight to those researching book structures. Through writing and editing metadata, I could contribute to the dialogue between the object and its makers, and lend what I knew as a book artist and archival worker to future researchers and visitors. 

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

Many of the objects I have cataloged during my time with this collection bear signs of use: paragraphs of type circled in ballpoint pen or cut out entirely, lead-smudged fingerprints likely left by typesetters, signatures coming undone from their text blocks. These details are the most precious to me. They are instances in which an object left an impression on its reader, and in turn, its readers left a tangible impression on the object. By making note of these imperfections in the metadata, I hope to preserve the labor and relational histories of the objects, and in a way, center the people who made them. 92 years ago, typography scholar Beatrice Warde argued that good printing should aim to be almost invisible, likening the rare success to a crystal goblet filled with wine (Warde 11, 13). Imperfect, dog-eared, oxidizing type specimens upend this notion, instead placing emphasis on construction and transformation rather than content. The text included in type ephemera is not meant to convey a message or narrative; rather, it is present to center and sell the type. As letterpresses are no longer the primary means of print production, new styles of letterpress printing have become popular—one example being the “bite” or heavy impression of type into paper—revealing first and foremost, the hand of the printer. 

As an archivist, ephemera is endearing to me because it is a form of printed matter that is not meant to endure. Cataloging ephemera transformed the way I thought about time, decay, and value. Before entering the Archive, I favored examples of pristine letterpress printing and craft. Presently, I have grown fond of and admire the work that reminds us of our own temporality. Ephemera still holds a place in our lives, though its proliferation is diminishing as we move toward a more environmentally conscious world. Digital spaces have overwhelmingly become our personal platforms for documentation, record-keeping and more. Perhaps we live in a city that still issues paper bus tickets, or write our grocery lists on square sticky notes, or cram the free paper maps into our backpacks at the visitor center before a hike. Perhaps not. Think of the lifetimes that these objects live, crumpled into our pockets, or refused at cash registers and kiosks, waiting for their turn to be useful. How might we make meaning of, archive, or begin to transform the ephemera in our lives? What can we learn from historic type ephemera, not just as records of printmaking techniques or bound structures, but as anachronisms of the present? 

* Acidic paper refers to paper manufactured with acids, a method that became popular in the mid-nineteenth century. The long cellulose chains in paper degrade slowly over time due to prolonged exposure to air, but the presence of acids catalyzes the process significantly. The presence of acid impacts the paper’s longevity, making it brittle and more susceptible to tearing.

Works Cited:

Warde, Beatrice. “The Crystal Goblet, Or Why Printing Should Be Invisible.” The Sylvan Press, 1955. Web accessed 15 September 2024. 

About the author

Eve Scarborough is a Vietnamese-American writer and book artist. Her work explores the tension between structure and content, memory and language loss, and information decay as it relates to archives. Her current practice is grounded in critical theory and craft techniques including bookmaking, letterpress printing, and hand papermaking. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Mills College with a minor in Book Art. Presently, she digitizes ephemera, posters, process work, and more at Letterform Archive in San Francisco.

Vanishing Culture: The DuMont Network—America’s Vanishing Television History

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The following guest post from media historian Taylor Cole Miller is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

DuMont Television Network. “Network ID.” 1954. https://archive.org/details/DuMont_Network

            The nesting material of my university office is blank VHS tapes. A few of these tapes were well-worn security blankets with comforting shows I watched over and over to propel myself through childhood and adolescence. Where normal people might have held onto a cherished dolly or baseball glove as nostalgic trinkets of their youth, I kept my jumpy copy of CBS’ live-action Alice in Wonderland along with episodes of The Golden Girls, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Xena: Warrior Princess. These artifacts, the ones I clung to growing up, eventually became the foundation of my research as a media historian. While writing my master’s thesis, a media ethnography of rural gay men, you’d find me at garage and estate sales every month asking if there were any old VHS tapes of Oprah lying around. And in order to even access episodes of his short-lived show, All That Glitters, for my doctoral dissertation, I had to become friendly with and visit producer Norman Lear himself to watch shows in his personal archive. Television culture is inextricably linked with American culture, but most early television is lost forever, a vanishing era of our culture with few traces.

          As a scholar, my specific area of interest is television syndication—the practice of selling content directly to local stations and station ownership groups without going through a network. The stations can air these shows at whatever time and with whatever frequency they desire. There are two primary types of syndication: First-run syndication such as talk shows like The Oprah Winfrey Show or Ricki Lake; game shows like Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune; court shows like Judge Judy or scripted originals like Xena: Warrior Princess or Star Trek: The Next Generation. And second-run syndication, most often referred to as reruns of popular shows. This means my objects of study are often limited by what is available and how. Many television shows from the last 50 or 60 years have been officially released on physical media like VHS, Betamax, LaserDisc, or DVD, or made available via streaming or on-demand services, but these are primarily primetime network or cable programs, not daily syndicated talk shows, game shows, public affairs programs, or kids’ TV. Despite its own ephemerality, syndication remains television’s best archivist: It preserves shows that can still turn a profit in reruns, even if it doesn’t always ensure their accessibility or proper care. While syndication keeps certain programs alive in archives, they often remain unaired or improperly preserved without enough demand. Those that no longer generate revenue, no matter how innovative, tend to disappear—left to decay on shelves or locked away in obsolete formats under the weight of copyright restrictions–or worse. One of the most tragic examples of this vanishing culture, allegedly twenty feet below the surface of the Upper New York Bay, is the lost archive of the DuMont Television Network.  

Cavalcade of Stars. “The Honeymooners.” 1951. https://archive.org/details/Cavalcade_Of_Stars/.

DuMont Television Network

            In television’s beginning, three familiar companies expanded their operations from radio: NBC, CBS, and ABC. But there was also a fourth company competing with these fledgling television efforts—DuMont, a television and equipment manufacturer that contributed numerous innovations in the technology of TV itself. Although big commercial television was still years away, DuMont was selling television sets by the 1930s. Its 1938 set, for example, the DuMont 180, featured a massive 14-inch screen and retailed for $395-445. To help sell his sets, Allen B. DuMont opened an experimental television station (W2XVT), which operated programming that the showroom models could display to demonstrate picture quality, a practice that continued with the launch of the commercial DuMont Network in 1946.

            That year, DuMont gave the greenlight to the half-hour show, Faraway Hill. Although “firsts” are hard to claim given that much of early TV history is lost, Faraway Hill is often thought to be the first network television soap opera. The show was created by David P. Lewis, who adapted it from his unfinished novel. According to Elana Levine in her history of soaps, Her Stories, like with radio soaps before, the show included “stream-of-consciousness” style voice-overs that allowed women to look away as needed under the social expectations of household duties. As reported in his obituary, Lewis said DuMont was desperate for programming, particularly during the nine hours of weekly programming it aired in competition with NBC. The show aired only ten episodes, and reportedly made no money, with Lewis claiming he did it to “test the mind of the viewer.” Through Faraway Hill, Levine argues that DuMont “experimented with visuals, including set changes, establishing shots, and some visual effects while, narratively, it tried a recapping strategy that would become a fixture of daytime TV soaps, repeating the last scene of the previous episode as the start of the next.” A second soap effort, A Woman to Remember, ran daily for five months in 1949, with half of that run appearing in daytime. Although Faraway Hill is recognized as the first primetime television serial—a format that would define all Primetime Emmy winners for Outstanding Drama Series in the 21st century—it has vanished because DuMont broadcast it live and, as far as we know, never recorded it. 

           Faraway Hill wasn’t the only first in its genre from DuMont. The network also aired Captain Video and His Video Rangers from 1949 to 1955, considered the first popular sci-fi television show and DuMont’s longest-running program. If you’re a fan of television comedy, you can thank Mary Kay and Johnny, often thought to be the first network sitcom—a multi-camera comedy that premiered on DuMont in 1947. DuMont was also the first network to broadcast the NFL championship game in 1951, launched Jackie Gleason’s career, and aired the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954.”

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Vanishing Culture report.

        While television was predominantly white at the time, DuMont produced pioneering shows led by women of color. In 1950, the phenomenally talented Hazel Scott likely became the first Black woman to host her own television show, decades before Oprah Winfrey’s debut in national syndication. The Hazel Scott Show, which aired thrice weekly on DuMont, showcased Scott—a piano prodigy and accomplished musician who had won an early Civil Rights case–a racial discrimination lawsuit against restaurateurs Harry and Blanche Utz in February 1949. However, after she was blacklisted in Red Channels (a publication that accused entertainers of communist sympathies during the McCarthy era), a smear campaign led to the show’s cancellation, and Scott’s groundbreaking contributions to early television history have largely been forgotten.

Also lost to history is DuMont’s The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong in 1951, featuring legendary actor Anna May Wong in probably the first American television series with an Asian-American lead. Wong’s character was an art dealer whose investigative art history skills also helped her become a crime solver. There are no known recordings or even scripts of the show still in existence. The only information we have on these programs is what remains of it in schedules and TV listings. For this article, I audited several TV History textbooks from respected scholars, and I could find no mention of either The Hazel Scott Show or The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong.

DuMont Television collapsed in 1955 after clunky UHF (Ultra High Frequency) regulations hammered the final nail in its coffin. These rules limited the reach of UHF stations, putting DuMont at a disadvantage compared to the more accessible VHF (Very High Frequency) channels. Still, before its demise, DuMont produced a rich schedule of innovative programs—many of which may never be seen again. According to testimony in a report for the Library of Congress, DuMont’s television archive was intentionally destroyed as a result of the negotiations of a sale in the 1970s. Reportedly, the parties were concerned about who would be responsible for the sensitive archival needs, like temperature control, of such a massive collection. In the report, Edie Adams, a talented performer and a key figure at DuMont, along with her husband Ernie Kovacs—who hosted his own show on the network—shared what she heard about its demise while trying to archive her husband’s career. “At 2 a.m., [one of the lawyers] had three huge semis back up to the loading dock […] filled them all with stored kinescopes and 2” videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty, and dumped them in the Upper New York Bay. Very neat. No problem.” While this is the commonly reported lore of DuMont’s demise, no one really knows for sure what happened. Could some materials still exist? True or not, DuMont’s metaphorical watery grave nevertheless serves as a poignant reminder for how easily traces of our past can vanish.

DuMont Network and the Internet Archive

            The Internet Archive is an important repository where saved DuMont programs have been collected and made available to the public. Many of these programs survive from personal collections of performers or producers who kept copies in their personal files. The Internet Archive houses a few surviving examples of DuMont programming, including clips from Cavalcade of Stars, where The Honeymooners and Jackie Gleason made their first appearances in sketches. The archive also includes Okay, Mother, a game show that premiered in 1948, and one of the earliest daytime network TV shows, with one surviving episode available to watch. 

Okay, Mother. 1950. https://archive.org/details/Okay_Mother/. 

Also in the Internet Archive are one or a few episodes each of DuMont shows now in the public domain, including The Adventures of Ellery Queen, The Arthur Murray Show, Flash Gordon, Front Page Detective, The Goldbergs, Hold That Camera, The Johns Hopkins Science Review, Kids and Company, Life is Worth Living, Man Against Crime, Miss U.S. Television Grand Finals, The Morey Amsterdam Show, The Old American Barn Dance, On Your Way, Public Prosecutor, Rocky King- Inside Detective, The School House, Sense and Nonsense, Steve Randall, They Stand Accused, Tom Corbett- Space Cadet, Twenty Questions, and You Asked for It. 
            Beneath the surface of the Upper New York Bay might rest DuMont’s legacy, forgotten by most but not entirely lost. But while its kinescopes may have submitted to a watery grave, the efforts of open-access archives like the Internet Archive—storing the personal collections of those who saw value in preserving their histories—offer glimmers of hope. Perhaps, like my cherished collection of VHS tapes, some forgotten episode, script, or production material is still out there, waiting to be discovered, languishing in an old filing cabinet, on a neglected shelf, or in a dusty attic. Or maybe we’ll unearth some other unknown broadcast treasure in the search. With the ongoing work of archivists, collectors, and historians, maybe we can work to piece together the remnants of America’s vanishing early television history and provide to future generations. I want to believe.

About the author

Taylor Cole Miller is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and a media history content creator under the handle tvdoc. His research focuses on television histories, syndication, and queer media studies and can be found in journals like Camera Obscura and Television and New Media as well as numerous anthologies and popular press outlets. He is co-editor of the forthcoming collection The Golden Girls: Essays from the Lanai from Rutgers University Press.

Vanishing Culture: Preserving Forgotten Music

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The following interview with singer-songwriter Elliott Adkins is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Elliott Adkins has a passion for recording old songs that have largely been forgotten. The 23-year-old musician was inspired after finding boxes of sheet music in his parents’ basement when they moved from his childhood home in Atlanta last year. 

“I thought it would be cool if somebody took the time to record these obscure pieces of music that had never been recorded…so I did,” Adkins said. “I put it online really not expecting much of it, but it took on a life of its own.”

Most of the collection of more than 1,000 pieces of music, which were his late grandmother’s, are old enough to be in the public domain. That allows him to remix, record and share the music. Adkins records himself singing and playing the songs on guitar, posting the never-before recordings online. His video of the 1927 song, “Yesterday,” went viral on Instagram and propelled his social media presence.

“I feel like the public domain is often overlooked. It’s a great way to preserve our cultural legacy,” Adkins said. “There are people who had great ideas in the past, but the way our copyright system is set up, it’s hard to expand on those ideas. The public domain allows you to have a certain amount of time to make as much money as possible…then it becomes something greater than yourself. It removes the ego from art.”

Adkins said he’s drawn to these vintage tunes, in part, because he “naturally craves mystery” and likes the challenge. It’s a stretch to figure out the music, understand the lyrics, and put his own twist on the songs, he said. He unpacks the history of the songs and often shares some of their backstory in his videos. 

“I feel like the public domain is often overlooked. It’s a great way to preserve our cultural legacy.”

Elliott Adkins, singer-songwriter

“I find the [old] songs to be a lot more sophisticated than popular music today, with their chord progressions and harmony,” Adkins said. “There’s a blend of genres – early jazz and forms of classical music – that’s very interesting.”

In October, Adkins was invited to perform at the Internet Archive’s annual celebration in San Francisco. He made musical history singing “Tell Her I’ll Love Her,” an English sea song from the early 1800s. It was the first time the song had ever been recorded. Adkins was the closing act for the event, playing his guitar and singing before a live audience—and getting the crowd, which surpassed 400 people, to sing along.

“It was great. I could tell the audience was primed for anything I was going to throw at them,” said Adkins. “It was nice to have such an attentive audience. There was an ideology attached to what I was performing, a mission behind it, and those people were very much ready for that.”

Tell Her I’ll Love Her (audio)
The audio version of “Tell Her I’ll Love Her” is available under CC0, meaning you can “copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.” DOWNLOAD NOW

Adkins, who also writes original alternative country and Americana music, said he’s become fascinated with the community of music preservationists he’s encountered since venturing into this niche of music. He’s met people old and young, online and in the Atlanta area who are committed to reviving forgotten songs.

To research music, Adkins uses the Internet Archive and the Discography of American Historical Recordings Database from UC Santa Barbara.

Staff at the Internet Archive spotted Adkins on Instagram and reached out to invite him to participate in the October event. Since much of his material he uses is in the public domain, he’s said he’s a “big fan” of the Archive and was happy to collaborate on the project.

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

A few songs were considered before the decision was made to go with, “Tell Her I’ll Love Her.” Adkins worked on the arrangement, wrote new lyrics, and said he practiced it for 30 minutes every day leading up to the performance in San Francisco.

The feedback after the performance has been overwhelmingly positive and Adkins said he’s picked up new followers on social media as a result of the event. 

“It’s a way to get in touch with the past,” Adkins said. “Most people, especially my age, are so unaware of what music sounded like 100 years ago. It’s really cool to see what songs did make it, what songs didn’t.”

Adkins said he enjoys thinking of new ways to present the old tunes.

“I see music as something that is constantly trying to be pushed forward,” he said. “I think you can grab a lot more people if you adjust it for the modern audience.”

At the end of his Internet Archive performance, Adkins led the audience in singing additional verses to the sea song that he wrote just for the event:

Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song
A song that may be old, but is not yet gone
The past isn’t dead ‘til it can’t be read
So, celebrate with us, speak of days of yore
Here we all are gathered to maintain what came before
So, it isn’t just my ghost that can visit this sweet shore

Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song
A song that may be old, but is not yet gone
The past isn’t dead ‘til it can’t be read
‘cause some will remember though the world may forget
Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song
(So, thank y’all very much for singing right along)

Vanishing Culture: Preserving Gaming History

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The following guest post from legendary software designer Jordan Mechner is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

In 1993, I was trying to learn everything I could about the 1914 Orient Express, to help our team recreate it accurately in The Last Express (the game I did after Prince of Persia). We were dumbfounded when the French railway company SNCF told us they’d dumped most of their pre-war archives for lack of warehouse space in the 1970s. The train timetables, floor plans and photographs we coveted had gone to landfill.

Watch a demo trailer for The Last Express

Like most kids of my generation, I grew up assuming that things like books, video games, music and movies, newspapers and magazines, once published, wouldn’t just disappear. If I ever wanted to revisit that 1981 issue of Softalk magazine, or read The Manchester Guardian‘s front page the day World War I broke out, surely some library somewhere would have a copy?

In reality, cultural artifacts are findable only so long as someone takes on the active responsibility to preserve, catalog and share them. Once gone, they’re gone forever. Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception.

That summer of 1993, as a last resort, we placed a classified ad in a French railway enthusiasts magazine: “Seeking information about 1914 Orient Express.” One issue later, our phone rang.

The voice on the other end proposed that we meet in their club, in the basement of Paris Gare de l’Est. We passed through a glass door marked “No Access” to discover a cavern of rooms filled with vintage railway posters, books, and the biggest working model train set I’ve ever seen. Our informants—a pair of retired French railway employees—were waiting. 

We explained what we were looking for, and what SNCF had told us. A glint appeared in the two gentlemen’s eyes. The elder of the pair leaned forward. “They think they destroyed the archives,” he said. “We took ‘em home. We’ve got ‘em.”

Resources
Play The Last Express, preserved at Internet Archive and emulated in the browser.
Play Prince of Persia, preserved at Internet Archive and emulated in the browser.
Learn more about Mechner and his body of work at https://www.jordanmechner.com/

If you’ve played The Last Express, you know that they came through for us. Our Smoking Car Productions team in San Francisco was able to spend the next four years creating a faithful interactive 3D recreation of the historic luxury train, thanks to two trainmen in Paris who’d preserved a part of their company’s legacy that management didn’t consider worth saving.

Thirty years later, The Last Express has in its turn become a relic. The cutting-edge 1990s technology we used to model and render the train is now antiquated, like 1890s steam engines. Today, retro-computing enthusiasts, academics, online libraries and archives volunteer their resources to curate and preserve games like The Last Express, and the documents and artifacts that contain the behind-the-scenes stories of how they were made.

Sadly (but unsurprisingly), it’s rare for game development studios and media companies who own the underlying materials to prioritize preservation of their legacies any more than the SNCF did in the 1970s. Old server backups are routinely deleted. Internal information about a title’s development is often unfindable a decade later even if management asks for it.

As a game developer, I’ve been in the rare and fortunate position of being able to archive and share source code, assets and development materials from many of my games. One reason is that my publishing contracts let me keep the copyrights (unusual even in the 1980s, almost unheard of today). In 2012, the Strong National Museum of Play agreed to receive a large pile of cartons that were taking up significant shelf space in my garage. When I turned up a long-lost box of 3.5” floppy disks containing Prince of Persia’s 1989 source code, a team of experts descended on my house with a carful of vintage hardware to extract and upload it to github. Wired magazine sent a reporter and photographer to cover the event. Few game studio employees can expect such privileged treatment.

Play Prince of Persia

A more ordinary course of events is exemplified by the abrupt closure of Game Informer magazine in August 2024. Its website with three decades’ worth of industry coverage disappeared overnight from the internet—removed by its parent company, GameStop, with no advance warning to the magazine’s subscribers or even to its staff. In this case, a robust network of game fans and journalists (and the Wayback Machine) quickly sprang into action to archive past issues. But similar erasures happen constantly around the world, largely unnoticed by the public. Game studios, local newspapers, and other companies disappear every week, taking their history with them.

As a lifelong author, game developer and graphic novelist who makes my living primarily from royalties, I understand publishers’ desire to control and profit from content they own. But all of the games and books I’ve created were made possible by what came before—including other games, books, movies, and history I could access when I needed it, thanks to archivists and librarians. Their work is unsung, and often unpaid. I’d like to see it unpunished. Having benefited so much from their efforts, it’s painful to me as a creator to see them under attack.

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

The Internet Archive’s recent removal of 500,000 books from its online library, after being sued by a group of big publishers who called scanning and lending their books piracy, is now the subject of an ongoing court case. The decision (which may come down to the U.S. Supreme Court) will have a major rippling impact on future preservation efforts and online archiving, including within the video game industry. 

I believe in fair use, and I fear for a society in which our ability to document and preserve our history (including books and games we’ve purchased) is effectively hamstrung and blocked by large companies seeking to expand their control of digital platforms. For these reasons, I’m firmly on the archivists’ side. 

I can’t help thinking that if the SNCF employees who took home those file boxes of train floor plans and route maps in the 1970s were to do the equivalent today—scan and upload them to a vintage railway enthusiasts’ website, say—they might well find themselves hit with a takedown notice and legal threats. Theft of intellectual property, violation of non-disclosure agreements, conspiracy to commit piracy. In today’s climate, I wouldn’t blame them for hesitating, or for letting their employer consign that history to oblivion.

The little corner of our world to which I’ve dedicated my working life—making video games, books and graphic novels—is just one small niche. But it depends on, and is connected to, all the rest. I hope that the French railway enthusiasts’ club still exists. I hope GameStop allows the readers and former staff who treasured their magazine to preserve its legacy without interference. And I hope the Internet Archive wins their case.

About the author

Jordan Mechner is an American video game designer, graphic novelist, and screenwriter. He created Prince of Persia, one of the world’s most beloved and enduring video game franchises, and became the first game creator to successfully adapt his own work as a feature film screenwriter with Disney’s Prince of Persia (2010). With game credits including Karateka, The Last Express, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, he is considered a pioneer of cinematic storytelling in the video game industry. Jordan made his debut as a graphic novel writer/artist with the autobiographical Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family (recipient of the 2023 Chateau de Cheverny prize). His graphic novels as writer include the New York Times best-selling Templar (with LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland), Monte Cristo (with Mario Alberti), and Liberty (with Etienne Le Roux).

Vanishing Culture: Archiving Community Care Work Online

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The following guest post from researcher Amanda Gray Rendón is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

When asked to consider women’s care labor, people likely think about feminized gender roles within “the domestic sphere” where labor has historically been invisible and undervalued. For women of color, the lines between public and private have often been blurred, as evidenced by the family photo of my great-grandmother picking beets in a field while caring for my two-year-old grandmother. Sixty years later the roles would reverse and my grandmother would serve as the primary caregiver for her mother with Alzheimer’s dementia. I could not begin to quantify in dollars the thirteen years of 24/7 care she provided our family.

In U.S. culture, women have historically been thought of as “natural” caregivers or predisposed to caring for others, so little to no concern has been given to assigning monetary value to the labor that women are expected to perform.

This begs the question: how can we adequately archive a history that is designed to be hidden and undervalued precisely because of how invaluable it is to our social, cultural, and economic fabric? 

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

Women’s care work—both paid and unpaid—serves as the foundation on which the world’s postindustrial economies have functioned. Working mothers and caregivers often participate in what scholars refer to as the “double-day,” or the “double shift.” This is when (predominantly) women have an income-earning day job followed by unpaid caregiving labor they provide their families when they get home in the evening after “work.” Some have argued women’s care work has expanded into a triple shift whereby women have taken on more caregiving roles within their communities, adding significantly to gendered burdens of care.

The invisible, and at times isolating, nature of care work contributes to the precarity of archiving women’s care labor history. To preserve this aspect of our cultural history, it’s vital to engage with those performing care work, as well as to understand the different ways that community care work is performed. Documenting caregiver culture on social media allows us to identify the contributions that caregivers and care communities make, along with the barriers they face.

No one has helped me to understand this more than Cynthia “Cindy Ann” Espinoza. Cindy Ann and I met when we both attended Metropolitan Community Church in San Antonio. She graciously offered to participate in my research when I spoke at a community education session on Alzheimer’s disease that the church sponsored in collaboration with the local chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. We became Facebook friends shortly thereafter and I observed firsthand the virtual care work in which Cindy Ann participated, as well as the archive she had created of the “real world” care she provided her mother who passed from complications of Alzheimer’s dementia several years earlier.

On January 17, 2017, about a week before PBS aired the documentary Alzheimer’s: Every Minute Counts, Cindy Ann posted a video excerpt from the film to her wall on Facebook. The three-minute video, with 4.4 million views and over 5,000 comments, was originally posted to Facebook by Next Avenue, a PBS digital publication dedicated to issues facing individuals over 50 years old in the United States. The documentary follows Daisy Duarte, a Latina in Minneapolis, as she cares for her mother, Sonja, who is living with early-onset Alzheimer’s dementia.

Next Avenue’s original post reads, “Millions of Americans will be able to relate to this story.” Cindy Ann identified herself as one of those millions of Americans almost five years after her mother’s passing from complications of Alzheimer’s dementia. Her post included the message, “I can relate to this woman in this story. Its the hardest thing to see ur parent dealing with Alzheimer”s ..but i did it for 9 yrs caring for my Mom i have no regrets. I would do it all again even if she didn’t remember who i was. I love & miss you dearly Mommy..” Cindy Ann watched Daisy wash her mother’s clothes, brush her teeth, apply her makeup, do her hair, show her how to hold a spoon, sit her in a recliner to watch television—all while exclusively speaking Spanish. The invisible care work Cindy Ann provided her mother nearly a decade before was publicly visible for the world to see.

I also related to the family portrayed in the film. As I viewed the video, I was reminded of my own experience helping my grandmother care for my great-grandmother when the three of us lived together in San Antonio. This personal connection prompted me to comment with a note of: “thanks for sharing.” I appreciated the connection Cindy Ann created in that moment.

Several of her other Facebook friends left comments in response to her post. There was one from an employee at a local adult daycare facility: “Yup and ur mama was a beautiful blessing for us at seniors 2000! I loved her so much <3;” and another from a current caregiver, “Aww I’m doing it right now. My heart aches every time I leave my mom. I pray for her mind to heal. It’s one of the ugliest diseases ever encountered! I pray they find a cure very soon.” Others were comments of support, such as: “Super hard, girl.” and “Amen.” 

The commenters were all women who either acknowledged Cindy Ann’s experience as their own or validated it with words of empathy and support. That winter morning, Cindy Ann’s public Facebook page was a place where women came together to share a commonality of experience in an online space.  The care community helped to make visible their friend’s caregiving labor, as well as their own—in effect becoming a part of care labor history.

Though the internet seems to be “forever”, the ephemeral nature of certain online spaces—such as social media pages and posts that can be deleted or websites that are no longer supported—necessitates an archival space such as the Internet Archive, which on May 9, 2017 captured the full-length documentary Cindy Ann posted about. Nowhere else on the internet can I access this film without a subscription, rental, or purchase. As a researcher, the Wayback Machine is an invaluable archival research tool that I rely on to provide accurate records of historical online spaces I can no longer access. However, we must find a way to better preserve social media pages such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and others where caregivers post and provide community care. The sheer volume of pages and posts may have made this a challenging task previously, but with new AI language learning models, we can begin to conceive of ways to more pointedly target and capture the rich history of online care communities and women’s virtual care work.

To preserve a more complete and inclusive history of women’s caregiving labor, digital archivists must seek out the spaces where women are performing the work. The Internet Archive serves as a record that women’s care communities exist, have always existed, and will continue to exist. Documenting the challenges women caregivers face, the support they need, and their shared spaces of communal experience helps to create a more complete historical record of their cultural impact for future generations.

About the author

Amanda Gray Rendón is a community-based researcher, writer, oral historian, and documentary filmmaker. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Narrative Medicine and Digital Health Humanities at Wheaton College. She received her PhD in American Studies with concentrations in Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to her work in academia, Gray Rendón was a project manager in implementation services for a medical software company followed by several years in case management for a mediation and arbitration firm in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of fellowships and appointments at several institutions, including the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, Earlham College, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Saint Louis University. Her scholarship centers the lived experiences of Latina professional and family caregivers. Her commitment to social justice and accessible community-based knowledge production is a core principle of her scholarship and pedagogy.

Vanishing Culture: Q&A with Philip Bump, The Washington Post

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The following Q&A between writer Caralee Adams and journalist Philip Bump of The Washington Post is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Philip Bump is a columnist for The Washington Post based in New York. He writes the weekly newsletter How To Read This Chart. He’s also the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.

Caralee Adams: What does it mean for an individual journalist to have their work preserved? Why is it important to have easy access to news stories from the past?

Philip Bump: One of the nice things about my career has been that I’ve worked for outlets that I feel confident are doing their own preservation, like The Washington Post. I’m not particularly worried about losing access to my writing. However, it’s less of a concern for me than it is for other outlets, unfortunately. It is unquestionably the case that I find the Internet Archive useful and use it regularly for a variety of things—both for its preservation of online content and collection of closed captioning for news programs.

Any recent examples of when you’ve found the Internet Archive particularly useful?

I use the search tool on closed captioning more than anything else. The other day I was trying to find an old copy of a webpage. I was writing about Donald Trump’s comments on Medal of Honor recipients. As it turns out, there is not an immediately accessible resource for when Medals of Honor were granted to members of the military. You can see aggregated—how many there are—but you can’t see who was given a medal and when they served. I actually used the Internet Archive to see how the metrics changed between the beginning of Trump’s presidency and by the end of it. I was able to see that there were medals awarded to about 11 people who served during the War on Terror, three who served in Vietnam, and one during World War II. Then, I was able to go back and double check against the Trump White House archive, which is done by the National Archives, and see the people to whom he had given this award. That’s a good example of being able to take those two snapshots in time and then compare them in order to see what the difference was to get this problem solved.

Why is it important for the public to have free public access to an archive of the news for television or print?

It’s the same reason that it’s important, in general, to have any sort of archive: it increases accountability and increases historical accuracy. The Internet Archive is essential at ensuring that we have an understanding of what was happening on the internet at a given point in time. That is not something that is constantly useful, but it is something that is occasionally extremely useful. I do a lot of work in politics and get to see what people are saying at certain points in time, which are important checks and accountability for elected officials.  The public can know what they were saying when they were running in the primary as compared with the general [election]. The Archive allows anyone to be able to get information from websites that are no longer active. If you’re looking for something and you have the old link to Gawker or the old link to a tweet, you can often [find] it archived.  The Internet Archive doesn’t capture everything—it couldn’t possibly do so. But it captures enough to generally answer the questions that need to get answered. There’s nowhere else that does that. There are other archiving sites, but none that do so as comprehensively, or none with an archive that goes back that far.

Download the full Vanishing Culture report.

Has any of your journalism vanished from the public? Do you have any examples where you’ve been looking for something and it’s been missing?

Yes. One of the challenges is that multimedia content has often, in the past, been overlooked. There are old news reports that I’ve been unable to find because they’re on video in the era before there was a lot of accessibility and transcripts. Therefore, yes, there are certainly things like that which come up with some regularity. Also, particularly in the era of 2005 to 2015, there were a lot of independent sites that had useful news reports—particularly since we’re talking about the cast of political characters that have been around in the public eye at that point in time. It’s often the case that it’s hard to track those things down. Or if you’re trying to track down the original source or verify a rumor, you might need to dip into the Archive. There are a lot of sites from that era of “bespoke” blogs that the Internet Archive often captures. 

How does limited access to historical data or previous coverage impact you as a journalist?

It is hard to say, because relatively speaking, I am advantaged by the fact that I live in this era.  If I were doing this in 1990, [I’d use] basically whatever was at the New York Public Library and on microfiche. It is far better than it used to be, but the amount of content being produced is also far larger. It is both a positive and a negative that it is far easier to do that sort of research here from my desk at home than it would possibly have been 30 years ago. In fact, I was working on a project where I relied heavily on a local newspaper in a small town in Pennsylvania that wasn’t available online. I literally had to hire someone in the town to go to the library, find [coverage from] the particular date and the local paper and to get the scans done. It cost me hundreds of dollars, but that was the only way to do it. You can see how getting these things done is problematic and challenging.

When Paramount deleted the MTV News Archive in June, there was a lot of dismay, but some say it was frivolous, disposable, and kind of meant to be thrown away. How do you feel about that?

My first writing gig online was at MTV News in college, so that actually had a personal resonance for me. I was at Ohio State in the early to mid 1990s, and I got this little internship with MTV News. I wrote one piece about this band called The Hairy Patt Band. It ended up on the MTV News website. I was very excited. I haven’t seen that in 30 years. It’s one of those things where I wondered what ever happened to that story or if it exists anywhere, in any form. So, that [news] actually had resonance. It’s a bummer. Is it as important to maintain the archives of MTV News as it is The Washington Post? I’m biased, but I would say, no. But it is still a loss of culture—and it is a unique loss of culture. This was a unique and novel form of information that was emergent in the 1990s and now is lost. In the moment, its very existence captured the culture in a way that is worth preserving.

How do you feel about the future of digital preservation of news, data, and information?

I’m more pessimistic than I used to be. I came of age with the internet. When it was new, I used to describe it as the emergence from a new dark age. We had all this information and there was no more going back. All this existed. Everything was online, and we had archives. Now, we see, in part because the scale has increased so quickly that economic considerations come into play, and all of a sudden… the internet isn’t just an endless archive anymore. There are very few places that are doing what libraries do to capture these things on microfiche or store books for the public’s benefit. There is so much of it and that becomes the problem.

Why is it important to pay attention to this issue and preserve journalism for future reporters?

It is obviously the case that we are creating information, culture, and benchmarks for society faster than we can figure out how we’re going to make sure they’re preserved. I think that’s probably always been the case, except that what’s different now is that we are more cognizant of the process of preservation and the challenges of preservation. We expect there to be this thing that exists forever. We don’t yet know how to balance the interest in having as few things be ephemeral as possible, versus the value in doing that… maybe it’s not even possible to preserve everything in the way that we would want to at scale. We have created a process by which it is possible to record and observe nearly everything, and now we’re realizing that that is potentially in conflict with our desire to also store and preserve all this information indefinitely.

Anything you’d like to add?

I think it’s worth noting that preservation is one of the few areas in which I think artificial intelligence bears some potential benefit. One of the things that I’ve long found frustrating is that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major news outlets, have enormous storehouses of information—not all of it textual. The New York Times must have, in its archives, photos of every square inch of New York City at some point in time over the course of the past 100 years. Artificial intelligence is a great tool for indexing and documenting. We now have tools that allow us to go deeper into our archives and extract more information from them, which I think is a positive development, and is something I’ve advocated for a long time publicly. Only with the advent of artificial intelligence does large-scale preservation become something that seems feasible. One can go through the National Archive and extract an enormous amount of information that is currently stored there in an accessible form, which saves someone from having to stumble upon a particular image. I think that is beneficial. I don’t think that necessarily solves the storage at scale issue, but it does address the fact that so much information is currently locked away and inaccessible, which is another facet of the challenge.  

About the author

Caralee Adams is a journalist based in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a graduate
of Iowa State University and received her master’s in political science at the
University of New Orleans. After working at newspapers and magazines, she
has been a freelancer covering education, science, tech and health for a
variety of publications for more than 30 years.