The Pararchive Project

It’s easy to become cynical about the current fashion of story as the metaphor for everything from politics to religion to marketing to design. Indeed, I find myself rolling my eyes as another story-centric service is launched at us. However story is at the heart of Pararchive and Yarn and for a good reason. Dean…

Since Imran, Tom and myself started working on the Pararchive project back in October 2013, its working title has been something of a running joke. While it worked as a reminder of what the project aimed to achieve (a ‘parallel archive’ of individual, rather than institutional, commentary on archival material), it was clumsy shorthand. Besides,…

The nation’s sound collections are under threat, both from physical degradation and as the means of playing them disappear from production.  “The Library’s own collections are made up of over 40 formats, from wax cylinders, to cassette players, to reel-to-reel and digital minidiscs. The equipment to play them is no longer being produced, and will…

Though Pararchive’s origins lie in the exploration of archives and heritage, we realised at a very earlier stage that the route through this was storytelling. We always knew that personal narratives and biographies would help to locating our users in what might be otherwise overwhelmingly voluminous collections and historical contexts. I think most of us understand that writing…

  Pararchive was recently invited to take part in the Festival of Ideas in Rusholme, Manchester. More commonly known as the Rusholme Festival of Ideas – which I will henceforth abbreviate as (RFoI) in this piece, the event provided an opportunity for local communities and people to map their ideas and perspectives of how they…

“He said this was archaeology: ‘You’re digging up websites and restoring them to their former glory. You’re recontextualising them and they’re telling us about dotcom culture. What I’m trying to do…is bring back the website together with the technology that it was built in and for. It’s not just about the website itself, but about…

Defunct software artefacts ignored by their creators – with availability, support and copyright often left ignored – has given rise to a culture of Abandonware. Amateur enthusiasts, unofficially and usually with fuzzy legal positions, make older software available through emulation or download. Just a few days ago, the Internet Archive launched a public collection of almost 2400 MS-DOS…

“The public will now be able to search the database of wills from their home, rather than needing to visit the probate registry to search the archives in person. … Every will among the 41 million is a precious historical document that can provide remarkable insight into generations of lives lived and lost.” More at… New…