Centuries’ worth of important information is stored on paper – which can decay, burn or get eaten by pests. Peek inside the process of making all that data digital.
When the University of Cape Town discovered skeletons in its archive that had been unethically obtained and used, they set about restoring justice to the bones and the community they came from.
Wolf Gruner, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Most histories highlight the shattered storefronts and synagogues set aflame. But it was the systematic ransacking of Jewish homes that extracted the greatest toll.
Davide Tanasi, a digital archaeologist, thinks it’s a pity when historical artifacts are locked away in storage. He’s working to fix this by sharing them as 3D models.
Patient information dumped on the side of the road in Brisbane recently has raised the issue of how hospitals and clinics manage their old paper records.
Hidden for decades in a vault at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, the photographs depict a regime fixated on establishing order, meting out punishment and stoking nationalism.
Ennigaldi-Nanna is largely unknown in the modern day. But in 530BC, this Mesopotamian priestess worked to arrange and label various artefacts in the world’s first museum.
MySpace users were recently shocked to learn that the company lost 50 million user files. It’s a harsh lesson in not leaving your intellectual property unprotected on the information superhighway.
Scholars continue to debate what, exactly, happened to Emmett Till the morning of his murder. But that hasn’t stopped a poor Mississippi community from trying to profit off one version of the story.
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation and Nina Maile Gordon, The Conversation
Mukurtu: an online dilly bag for keeping Indigenous digital archives safe
The Conversation71.5 MB(download)
Mukurtu - Warumungu word meaning 'dilly bag' or a safe keeping place for sacred materials - is an online system helping Indigenous people conserve photos, songs and other digital archives.
The story of María invites us to consider how the powerless could assert personal autonomy in their lives and how we can hear traces of the voiceless in the archives.