title: Digital Storytelling as Preservation
creators: Syreeta Gates Jamie Lee James Lowry
abstract: Mimi Onuoha’s Library of Missing Datasets catalogues datasets that were never created and captured, illuminating how cultural values are represented in absences of care, of data and of memory. The “archival silence” trope is well recognized today, yet in the present some lives, experiences and events continue to be ghosted by record-making and institutional collecting and preservation. Digital storytelling is one set of techniques that are being used to transmit memories into the future. Digital storytelling encompasses a range of formats and methods, from geospatial and timeline media, to video essays and podcasts, to simple blogs. In the creation of these digital objects, which themselves require preservation, digital storytellers can preserve traces of analogue or lived culture and experience, so that preservation is enacted by and enacted upon digital stories. Exploring what lost media and memory mean for communities today and in the past, this panel presentation will present examples of digital storytelling work that is both a means for and an object of preservation. By positing digital storytelling as a preservation method, the panel will consider issues related to working in community, accessing tools and know-how, finding a home for digital objects, and sharing (and deleting) these products of memory work.