The Pararchive Project

adj. Of or relating to a physical object that has been digitized and stored in an online archive, making it more readily accessible. wordspy.com/index.php?word=reborn-digital

As Palestinian history is erased, its archive becomes a nomadic war machine … What happens when the colonial archive, with its deletions and partial erasures, tells a story that clashes so intensely with lived history? When the archive actually obfuscates the past instead of elucidating it (a fantasy we entertain of the recording of history),…

The reality is that much of our digital history is in the hands of companies that could disappear tomorrow. If archivists are blocked as they were here, can we expect a company like Twitter to keep those artifacts alive every time one of these services is threatened? And should we even want that to happen?…

We may believe that recent history is safely tucked away in the digital fortress, but electronic content actually faces far greater threats than traditional materials like diaries, files, and letters. Whether as a result of bit rot, unstable storage devices, technical failures, or systemic obsolescence, Burn and other scholars fear that “potentially great letters or…

“…while facts are facts—and you don’t want to mess with them too much—crafting the story of your life is not an exercise in reporting. It is about creating a narrative, and the difference between a news report and a narrative is meaning. It is your job to invent the meaning of your life and then fit that meaning…

“…all writers are mapmakers and that all writing is like a map. For Turchi, the map is more than metaphor: it is an organizing principle of narrative.”  The Allure Of The Map Throughout our deliberations on Pararchive, the team has always understood that the articulation of place would be intrinsic to the storytelling tools we…