Event Title
FSA06 - A Digital Graveyard and Monument to Lost Data
Location
CB1-107
Start Date
3-11-2017 1:45 PM
Description
As our society shifts its archival media from print to digital, an unintended consequence results; we lose a great amount of data. The effects of data loss can be profound; without access to vital data, our access to history may be severely diminished. Data loss threatens to undermine individual lives and major institutions. The project described here — the monument to lost data and its accompanying digital graveyard — is relevant to those cases in which data cannot be recovered and must be considered lost. In these cases, it is appropriate and healthy to embrace mourning, which is the process whereby one achieves a measure of detachment from a lost person or object. The monument to lost data foregrounds critical reflection in the mourning process and to recognize data loss as a collective experience and not just a personal one. The proposal for this monument recognizes lost data not as an accident, an avoidable mistake, but as an unavoidable loss that we may choose to designate as a sacrifice and that we will see this sacrifice as a price we pay for our collective values and behaviors. We might then choose to reconsider the wisdom of our collective values and behaviors in relation to data storage. Monumentality does not seek ways to avoid loss, though it has no quarrel with rationalist efforts to reduce or eliminate data loss. Monumentality aims to represent the values for which the losses occurred. Values are determined by the price we are willing to pay to sustain our behaviors. What values might be honored by data loss? A provisional answer: we suffer data loss because our society demands progress, which we define as increased efficiency and storage capacity. Efficiency and capacity are values for which we are willing to pay. Our roundtable will discuss ways of visualizing lost data, particularly as it affects scholars, in terms of its quantity, its quality, and its impact. What does data rot look like? Staley is interested in data visualization, and has recently begun to create physical objects that visualize humanistic data (see, for example, FHQ III: a 3-D printed data sculpture of the Florida Historical Quarterly, currently on permanent display at the University of Central Florida). He is at work on a monumental installation called "Leaves of History," a large-scale visualization of the entire run of the American Historical Review. Those projects are monuments to big data: in this panel, Staley will present preliminary designs for a "monument to lost data," a large-scale visualization of patterns of absence in data. If Stephen Ramsay has argued "in praise of pattern" as a key feature of visualization in the digital humanities, the designs presented at this panel will "commemorate data voids."
FSA06 - A Digital Graveyard and Monument to Lost Data
CB1-107
As our society shifts its archival media from print to digital, an unintended consequence results; we lose a great amount of data. The effects of data loss can be profound; without access to vital data, our access to history may be severely diminished. Data loss threatens to undermine individual lives and major institutions.
