I have always been fascinated with what happens to our digital data after our lives end. There were so many questions I had on this topic and found many of them answered when I attended a symposium on Digital Afterlives at the Bard Graduate Center. There were four speakers who presented their papers on digital afterlives: Abby Smith Rumsey, Robin Davis, Tamara Kneese, and Margaret Schwartz. Each presenter explored the various ways that we preserve, resurrect, and prolong the lifespan of digital data. They also delved into the challenges and complexities of technologies and how we understand our mortality.

A Mere Shadow of the Past: How Memory Creates Identity

Abby Smith Rumsey is a historian and archivist and she presented on the way memory defines us in regards to digital data. She first explained that there are two types of memories: 1. Memory that is embedded in our DNA and how humans are able to survive based on recalling information. 2. Acquired memory that we utilize in our day to day life. Rumsey stated that this form of memory leads to predictions on what is going on around us and helps us function in the world.

Rumsey also stated that our imagination is memory in the future tense and that imagination forces us to think outside of our immediate surroundings and past behaviors. Rumsey then went on to discuss how books are the prosthetics of knowledge because they are extensions of our memories which we can return to over and over again. She also believes that the digital space can work in the same way.

She stated that the Web was initially created as a bulletin board, not a memory bank and that if we want to utilize it as a placeholder for memories, each of us needs to be trained in digital literacy to curate our lives. Each of us has to learn the tools needed to take action to preserve our digital memories so that it does not fade away. Rumsey believes that we cannot assume that our digital memories will live on without our active participation in making it so.

I found that Rumsey’s discussion on preserving memory relates to Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook’s article Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory. In this article, Schwartz and Cook state that without preservation “memory falters, knowledgement of accomplishments fades, pride in a shared past dissipates.”¹ Whether an individual is uploading travel photos to a website or blogging about a family reunion, the need for preservation is paramount to in order to retain that digital information so that the memory of it is not forgotten.

The Final Death(s) of Digital Scholarship: An Ongoing Case Study of DH2005 Projects

Robin Davis is the Emerging Technologies and Online Learning Librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. For her presentation, Davis focused on the digital afterlife of Digital Scholarship. Firstly, she discussed how the final death of digital data leads to it dissolving and then disappearing. Davis stated that digital data decays faster and digital scholarship requires ongoing active management to keep the website from breaking down.

Davis provided several examples of Digital Scholarship projects from 2005 and tracked their digital decay over a period of years. She demonstrated how each project showed examples of digital decay and an unexpected afterlife. One website had simply disappeared while another website was a fraudulent site where all of the text was copied and pasted from the original 2005 project website. This incident reminded me of the point that Roy Rosenzweig was discussing in his article Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era when it comes to digital information’s susceptibility to alteration and forgery. Rosenzweig writes “Digital information because it is so easily altered and copied, lacks physical markings of its origins, and, indeed, even the clear notion of an ‘original’”.² The forgery of another website can lead to confusion for the user especially when trying to deduce an original document from a plausible counterfeit document.

Davis then went on to explain the various reasons why a website for a digital scholarship project can go down such as project team changes, hosting issues, lack of reliable funding, and not updating the Content Management System.

At the end of her presentation, Davis went on to discuss the importance of preservation and that it should start at the beginning of the digital scholarship project. She stated that there is nothing worse than doing all that work to just let a website crumble especially if future users want to utilize the information. She also provided preservation tips such as web recording the website or submitting the URL to the Internet Archive.

Death, Disrupted

Tamara Kneese is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco and for her presentation, she focused on a deceased individual’s social media accounts and the rise of death startups. Kneese began the lecture by stating that social media accounts such as Facebook and Instagram can become treasured family heirlooms. These accounts can become a place where the relatives and friends of a deceased person can celebrate the life of that individual.

Kneese then discussed how Facebook has become a ritual graveyard and that the dead outnumber the living on the social media site. She went on to explain that in the early years of Facebook, the social media site would deactivate a deceased person’s account. After the school shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, there was a proliferation of memorial pages on Facebook which allowed family members and friends to remember those that were lost. It also allowed journalists to find information on Virginia Tech students who lost their lives in the shooting. In response to this, Facebook created a memorialization feature for users to reconnect with the dead.

Kneese then went on to discuss the rapid rise of digital death apps in the 2000s such as Legacy Locker, DeathSwitch, and VitalLock. These apps were created so that people can plan what to do with passwords, social media accounts, and emails in the event of their death. She discussed how many of these apps quickly became defunct as there weren’t much interest by consumers in death apps.

At the end of her speech, Kneese went on to talk about how people should include their digital data when doing estate planning so that they can preserve and share their online accounts with family members. She discussed the importance of having final wishes when it comes to your passwords, emails, blogs, and websites so that family members can handle your digital remains properly.

The Haptics of Grief: A Taxonomy

Margaret Schwartz is a Professor at Fordham University and her presentation was on the taxonomy of grief and its relationship to the digital space. Schwartz began her lecture on the spectacle of suffering which she linked to deaths as the result of public executions, beatings, and hangings. She pointed to the open-casket viewing of Emmett Till’s mutilated body as a striking exhibition on sorrow.

Schwartz went on to discuss the history of preparing a dead body and stated that throughout the centuries women usually cared for the dead before burial. She explained the meticulous process of how women would wash and wrap the body in cloth. Schwartz then discussed the embalming process and how this changed the body’s physicality by providing a glamour to the corpse.

Schwartz concluded her presentation by sharing her viewpoint that our digital presence should emulate the preparation of a dead body. We should take care when accessing the digital space and treat it with respect. She believes that touch lingers in technological spaces and this is our mode of understanding. Schwartz also stated that the popular conception that the digital is non-physical is woefully inaccurate. She explained that the physicality of the digital is in the form of server farms, packets, and when we are utilizing a computer. Schwartz declared that everything that is online is tactile.

Conclusion

Each speaker brought various insights on the topic of digital afterlives that I found interesting and made me reflect on the steps I should take with my own digital data. I did notice that the key point that was continuously mentioned was the importance of preserving your digital data or memories. Several of the presenters stated that preservation of digital data should be done by everyone because that information may not only have tremendous significance to you but also to your family members and friends after you have departed from this world.

References:

1. Schwartz, Joan M. and Terry Cook. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2 (2002): 1-19.
2. Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity of Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” Oxford University Press (2003): 735-762