{"id":1596,"date":"2022-06-27T15:42:15","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T14:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hosting.northumbria.ac.uk\/warephemera\/?p=1596"},"modified":"2022-06-27T15:57:07","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T14:57:07","slug":"reflections-on-digital-ephemera-by-ann-marie-foster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hosting.northumbria.ac.uk\/warephemera\/reflections-on-digital-ephemera-by-ann-marie-foster\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Digital Ephemera, by Ann-Marie Foster"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever wondered what the term ‘digital ephemera’ might comprise? Our project Research Fellow Ann-Marie Foster<\/a> sets out to answer this question.<\/h3>\n

What are digital ephemera? There are two answers to this question.<\/h4>\n

On the one hand there are born-digital ephemera \u2013 the word document I am typing this blog on, a pdf, or even a website. On the other hand there are digitised ephemera \u2013 physical pieces of paper that have been digitally captured and are now available in the digital realm. Both can be available either online or accessed in archives using locally networked computers.<\/p>\n

As with physical ephemera, there are curatorial difficulties when using this sort of material.<\/h4>\n

Coding languages change, software advances, and files corrupt. Cutting edge research into the digital humanities are keeping these digital files in use, and specialised curatorial staff work to maintain these important ephemera.<\/p>\n

Born digital material had a shaky start within archives, but is now regularly collected.<\/h4>\n

Archivists speak of a \u2018digital dark age\u2019, where technology was being used for everyday communication, and our lives increasingly moved online, but evidence of this was not kept by archives. Emails and texts, for example, replaced letters, but early records of this are, probably, lost to time. For those seeking to understand the ephemera of the early internet, this is quite a problem!<\/p>\n

Archivists now try, in some cases, to show born-digital ephemera how it would have originally appeared. In 2006 Salman Rushdie donated his archive to Emory University, including old computers and born digital material. His archive is now shown as it was donated – users log onto a computer and see the files in a mock-up of the software packages he used to write with. Behind the scenes the files have changed and been adapted to look like the original. This means that it keeps the \u2018historic\u2019 experience of viewing the archive as it was originally presented but means that a digital humanities scholar interested in the types of file used will struggle to find the information they need.<\/p>\n

The main thing about digitised ephemera, as opposed to born digital, is that it is selective.<\/h4>\n

We already know that archives do not keep everything that ever existed, and a selection process is used to check what is kept in each archive. Digitisation takes this even further. Because it is so expensive a process not everything in a collection is digitised, so what we see on our computers is only the tip of the iceberg. Similarly, not everything born-digital can be kept. It too, as with physical items, needs storage space and the server space simply does not allow for everything to be harvested or kept.<\/p>\n

Why bother with digital ephemera anyway?<\/h4>\n

For all the problems I just flagged, born digital and digitised ephemera is an enormous boon to researchers. We have an enormous wealth of information at our fingertips, be it in digital archives or through computers in physical archives. But we need to be wary of what we keep and how it is kept. Now is an exciting moment to shape the future primary sources that historians will one day pour over for information about how we lived!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever wondered what the term ‘digital ephemera’ might comprise? Our project Research Fellow Ann-Marie Foster sets out to answer this question. What are digital ephemera? There are two answers to this question. On the one hand there are born-digital ephemera \u2013 the word document I am typing this blog on, a pdf, or even a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criticalreflections"],"yoast_head":"\nReflections on Digital Ephemera, by Ann-Marie Foster - War Ephemera<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/hosting.northumbria.ac.uk\/warephemera\/reflections-on-digital-ephemera-by-ann-marie-foster\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reflections on Digital Ephemera, by Ann-Marie Foster - War Ephemera\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ever wondered what the term ‘digital ephemera’ might comprise? 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