CLIS Home > Research & Projects > Seminar Series

CLIS Research Seminar Series

February 19, 2008 @ 10-11 Am
"The Aleph in the archive: appraisal and preservation of a natural electronic archive"

María Esteva

Tuesday, February 19, 10-11 am
Room 2119 Hornbake Building, South Wing

Abstract

In his story The Aleph, writer Jorge Luis Borges describes a point in the cellar of an old house where the entire universe, past, present and future can be seen simultaneously, “without superposition and without transparencies.” I use the idea of The Aleph as a metaphor for the potential of digital archives and libraries, and to envision the research that needs to be undertaken to discover and preserve them.

This research explores how people create, organize, and interact with digital information; how information reflects their roles and activities, and how information can be preserved to reflect these activities over time. Specifically, I explore whether digital records created and maintained in environments without explicit record-keeping rules and whose creation and maintenance were never formally documented provide evidence of their creators and can be preserved in the long term. This research is relevant because it includes a large proportion of digital materials now extant that are at risk of being overlooked. I draw upon theoretical perspectives from Archival Science, Digital Humanities Research, Social Network Analysis, Information Retrieval, Preventive Conservation, and Material Culture and use a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods including: case studies, interviews, formation process, metadata extraction, text mining, analysis of social networks, and visualization.

I study the formation process of a digital archive created in the late 1980’s and maintained until 2005, a period during which, as information technologies were being massively adopted in the work-place, new problems were compounded by the nature and conditions of its electronic records. The attributes characterizing the archive at hand led to developing the concept of a natural electronic archive that allowed transforming the entire archive into a unit of analysis. The study revealed knowledge about the technologies and social practices used in the archive’s development; providing a path from its past to its present form and to insights about how to preserve it.

About the speaker

Maria Esteva is a doctoral candidate and assistant instructor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She has a master's degree in Information Studies and a certificate in Preservation Administration from the same school. Her research is on digital archives, digital preservation, and use of text mining and visualization for archival appraisal.