*** Apologies for any Cross Posting ***

Authenticity, Forensics, Materiality, Virtuality and Emulation 
Advances in the curatorship and scholarship of personal digital archives

A Digital Lives Research Seminar from the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project at the British Library

Date and time: Monday 5 July 2010 at 10:00 to 17:00

Venue: Foyle Suite at the Centre for Conservation at the British Library

Booking a place
To attend please contact seminar organiser Jeremy Leighton John at [log in to unmask] indicating which sessions you would like to attend. If there is a place available for you, you will receive a confirmatory email.

Synopsis
Recently there have been some significant and exciting advances in the curation of personal digital archives. Seemingly distinct aspects of computing have come together to yield a vision of future curation and research in the archival context. A combination of novel technologies and processes are making it possible to offer scholars a rich and evocative experience of emulated and virtual environments, both locally and remotely.

This seminar explores and critically reviews some of these advances, a number of which have been made by colleagues within as well as beyond the British Library. In addition to an inspiring group of invited speakers, members of the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project at the British Library will give talks about various aspects of the digital curation of personal archives.

It is anticipated that the seminar will be of interest to all professionals working with personal archives, as well as digital preservation specialists and information scientists.

Sessions
There are four provisional sessions for the day: 

10.00 to 11.30 – Digital media, computers and archives
11.30 to 13.00 – Forensic technologies and digital capture and analysis
14.00 to 15.30 – Digital materiality and emulation 
15.30 to 17.00 – Demonstrations, discussion, issues and suggestions

Invited Speakers

Erika Farr and Naomi Nelson of Emory University will report on the pioneering
use of emulation for the digital archives of Salman Rushdie. In the words of their
introduction to the emulated environment: “Rushdie’s exact directory structure is
available to browse, and each file can be opened in the application in which it
was created, such as MacWrite Pro or ClarisWorks”.

Christine A. Finn writer, broadcaster and researcher will provide an account of
her original research with the vintage computer community and of the classic
computers themselves as contemporary archaeological Artifacts, the title of the
book that arose from her fieldwork in the Silicon Valley.

Vincent Joguin President and CEO of Joguin SAS will provide an overview of the
EU-funded project Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (KEEP) including an
introduction to the Olonys universal virtual machine (which he codesigned for
longterm portability) and the Disk2FDI software for floppy disk imaging.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland will discuss digital
materiality from the perspective of the humanities researcher, arising in part from
his exploration of computer media forensics and restorative activities in capturing
digital creativity, and following on from his ground-breaking book Mechanisms.
New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

Michael G. Olson of Stanford University Libraries will report on his establishment
of a Digital Forensics Lab for digital archives (the first of its kind in the USA) and
the context of his work with personal archives including that of the evolutionary
biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

Jussi Parikka of Anglia Ruskin University who conducted his doctoral thesis on a
media archaeology of computer worms and viruses at the University of Turku will
discuss some of his more recent research as well as a multidisciplinary initiative,
the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute (CoDE), of which he is
Director.

Daniela Petrelli of the University of Sheffield will reflect on the findings of the EU
Marie Curie project Memoir: Remembering Things Past, an examination of
personal digital objects as the source of memories, most especially
autobiographical. The design and impact of digital devices that are integrated in
everyday life and enable ready recollection and reflection will be contemplated.

Gabriela Redwine of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas will
introduce aspects of the Mellon-funded project that is producing a report entitled
Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, of
which she is a coauthor along with Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library of the
University of Oxford and principal author Matt Kirschenbaum of the University of
Maryland. She will briefly consider some of the ethical issues that arise in the use
of forensic technologies.

Seth Shaw, described in a popular account as ‘a new age archivist’, ‘part
detective, part archaeologist’, will outline approaches to digital archiving being
undertaken at Duke University including work with the emails of an economics
Nobel laureate.

Kieron Wilkinson and István Fábián of the Software Preservation Society will give
a talk and a very exciting pre-release demo of the ready-built KryoFlux equipment
that provides for extremely low level and accurate capture and analysis of floppy
disks.

Topics

Attendees will learn about or be able to discuss the following topics:

• Virtual archival computing and the use of bootable forensic disk images and
virtual machines as a means of providing repeatable and authenticated access
to original computer environments

• Personal digital archives as a source of original software for longterm
preservation and as a motivating factor in this endeavour

• Low level capturing of magnetic flux transitions on floppy disks as well as
higher level bitstream capture that is accurate and measurable

• The anthropology and archaeology of the vintage computer community

• Digital materiality? What is it and why does it matter?

• Universal virtual machines and open source emulators that are compliant
with digital preservation requirements

• Why use forensic technologies in the context of digital archives?

• What is enhanced curation?

• Highlights of the Digital Lives Research Project

• The eMSS Server at the British Library

• Issues of licensing and software inheritance and reuse

• Next steps: networked integration?