News about projects of the Still Water lab at the University of Maine
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Demand for professionals who can manage collections of digital heritage and data continues to climb rapidly as related job postings rose by 130% in 2022, according to an analysis by UMaine’s Digital Curation program. This is a dramatic surge compared to the 61% increase over the pandemic years between 2019 and 2021.
Tags: digital curation, economics, study
NFTs and TikTok, two of the biggest digital trends in recent years, came under fire in 2022. Research by Still Water researchers helped to explain their advantages and vulnerabilities in over a dozen venues, including publications from Wired to Forbes and presentations from London to Shanghai. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: blockchain, network, New Media, presentation, preservation, press, publication, social media, Still Water, variable media
A three-year analysis of jobs advertised on Twitter suggests that the pandemic increased demand for digital curation professionals, which has grown by almost two-thirds since 2019. Despite the maturity of the field–UMaine’s Digital Curation graduate program was launched in 2021–there still appears to be no consensus on what to call these positions, whose titles have ranged from the prosaic (Digital Archivist) to the esoteric (Emerging Data Practices Librarian).
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Tags: digital curation, economics, study
As more of our work and entertainment moves online, the challenge of preserving websites and social media becomes increasingly urgent. In an interactive discussion on Friday 17 April at 1pm EDT entitled “Web Archiving for Everyone,” the latest guest speaker in UMaine’s Digital Curation program presents new tools and techniques for saving Internet culture for posterity.
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Tags: digital curation, education, history, memory, network, presentation, preservation, social media, University of Maine, web
Buffing your digital credentials just got easier with UMaine’s impending approval of a fast track for its all-online Digital Curation certificate. The program will still deliver professional training in the complete workflow of collecting digital materials, from acquisition and representation to access and preservation. The new, streamlined curriculum option, however, enables students to complete the certificate in as short a time as nine months.
Tags: archive, collection, digital curation, education, library, museum, University of Maine
In the past year, the Internet has become a place where strong opinions clash. Yet there’s one priority that should matter to both sides: the health of the platform on which these debates take place.
The free and open Internet is under attack again by opponents of net neutrality. Whether your political tastes are right, left, or center, net neutrality is the closest thing to a guarantee your voice won’t be drowned out by someone else’s agenda.
Reinterpretation as a preservation strategy has been called “radical” and “dangerous,” yet this unconventional approach has seen a surge of interest in preservation communities in the past year. In a departure from conventional wisdom about conservation, a group of European preservation experts recently invited Still Water’s Jon Ippolito to reassess this controversial technique as a mainstream model for conserving cultural heritage.
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Tags: art, digital curation, europe, memory, New Media and Social Memory, presentation, preservation, press, Re-collection, sharing, variable media
Interpreting the past has long been the province of historians, but reinterpreting it has recently become a concern of conservators. This most powerful, and most controversial, of preservation strategies can demand techniques not found in the traditional conservation lab, from 3d scanning to DNA computing. Several international conferences from Mexico City to Amsterdam recently spotlighted Still Water’s ongoing research into reinterpretation as a means of prolonging or resuscitating the past.
Tags: Americas, digital curation, europe, New Media and Social Memory, presentation, preservation, University of Maine, variable media
The latest guest presenter for UMaine’s Digital Curation program uses digital tools to scour sites of trauma to recover stories of the traumatized.
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Tags: digital curation, education, geography, history, map, memory, presentation, University of Maine
In 1994 artist Douglas Davis hit upon a surefire way to write a preposterously long sentence. He and his collaborators created a page on what was then a fledgling World Wide Web through which anyone could add words and phrases onto a growing string of HTML. Two decades later, it fell to digital conservator Ben Fino-Radin to restore this landmark of Internet art. He described the process–along with his work to recover the earliest Macintosh icons and manage digital collections at the Museum of Modern Art–in a teleconference this spring with students of the University of Maine’s Digital Curation program.
Tags: collection, digital curation, emulation, migration, museum, preservation, reinterpretation, variable media