The Pararchive Project

Have a read of Jake Witz’s piece on how ever-changing technology is threatening digital music archives.

G. Clay Whittaker reports on groundbreaking research that is working toward developing a digital data storage system that is capable of surviving for billions of years.

Loss of control of the personal archive means a loss of societal control of the cultural record. … The job of an archivist is work outside interfaces, working with the documents outside their native context, often to make sense of a previous generation’s cast-off data for the interest of the current and future ones. thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-collection-and-the-cloud

  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…

  Following on from the First World War Engagement Centres Everyday Lives in War and Hidden Histories we now look at Voices of War and Peace: the Great War and its legacy. Voices of War – or Voices as it will be referred to henceforth in this piece – is based in the Library of…

At last week’s Connected Communities Festival, we finally met some of the team behind Tangible Memories, notably Tim Lloyd-Yeates from their project partner Alive! The project is using stories, artefacts and media to help improve the quality of life for the elderly in care homes; what struck me immediately were the parallels between our co-design workshops for Pararchive and their…

“…to help improve the quality of life for residents in care homes by building a sense of community and shared experience through a cooperative exploration of their life history stories. Rather than put these stories on a website, the project seeks to find creative ways to attach stories to objects that are personally meaningful to…

This is because it’s hard to know what images or stories will spark a memory and when. Often it’s the things people pass everyday in their lives — landscapes and landmarks — rather than specific moments. Downie’s own grandmother, 97, has been diagnosed as suffering from dementia. And for her it was not photos of…