So, Vine announced its shutdown while I was attending a digital preservation conference.
The Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group meeting covered a lot of topics, with the first two days leaning towards technical work. We learned about data preservation initiatives, the infrastructure of The Smithsonian’s very own enterprise DAMS (!), and how MoMA is looking to digitize its film collection which, in total at 4K, would equal 80 Petabytes (!!!). Right before lunch on the second day, the news of Vine’s demise circulated all over the #pasignyc hashtag. I participated in a conversation on curation (“Do we need to save *all* the Vines? How do we choose which ones? Is ‘virality’ an elitist metric?”). Someone even estimated the size of a complete Vine archive. At the same time, non-archivists I pay attention to were reeling from the news. Sam Sanders, a political reporter at NPR, wrote in a series of tweets that Black users of Vine innovated and dominated the medium, and did so without suffering much of the abuse seen on other platforms like Twitter. Towards the end of this series, he said:
8/ But the resounding truth in this is stark: so often, the people who CREATE culture are rarely the ones who ultimately get to control it
— Sam Sanders (@samsanders) October 28, 2016
This ended up being completely relevant to the meeting’s third day. Archivists talked about working to include marginalized voices in digital preservation initiatives. One presenter talked about how “scrubbing” language of its diacritics ruined the context of a collection and showed a Western bias. Another discussed transnational partnerships between Western and non-Western institutions then recommended strategies for mindful and respectful collaborations.
I couldn’t help but think about Sanders’ tweet during these presentations. We as librarians and archivists are the experts in preservation, yes, but it’s important to remember that humans use computers, not the other way around (even if it feels that way sometimes). Mindful stewardship isn’t simply committing to long-term preservation of objects.