Variable Media

Whether red or blue, you need net neutrality

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, …

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Is reinterpretation the new emulation?

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 …

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Reinterpreting the past with 3D scans and DNA

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 …

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How to preserve the world’s longest sentence

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 …

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Still Water publications challenge museums to adapt to digital age

Once dusty storehouses of antique patrimony, today museums are forced to re-imagine themselves for an age where culture is shared from smartphone to smartphone. Recent Still Water publications on reinventing museums for the 21st century are cropping up in anthologies like the International Handbook of Museum Studies and in interviews from The Library of Congress.

Re-collection book tour pleads for digital preservation from Toronto to Taiwan

In 2015 Re-collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory continued to gather attention from libraries, universities, and the press. This just-published MIT Press book by Richard Rinehart and Still Water Co-Director Jon Ippolito surveys new paradigms and techniques for safeguarding culture for future generations in the face of imminent technological obsolescence. Since last summer the …

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Why train with yesterday’s tools for tomorrow’s jobs?

You shouldn’t prepare to be a librarian or curator with outdated tools, any more than you should study to be a doctor with a hacksaw and leaches. That’s why the University of Maine’s Digital Curation graduate program integrates cutting-edge software into its program. It’s also why its faculty chose an innovative tool that’s been called …

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UMaine Digital Curation wins awards for innovative teaching and writing

The University of Maine’s Digital Curation program has already earned acclaim from its students, while the Education Advisory Board recognized it fulfills “a growing need in the public and private sectors” as employer demand for digital curation professionals has grown 60% from 2010 to 2013. Now, professors in the program have earned major awards that …

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Will your obsolete software live on in the cloud?

If you’re over 30, chances are you’ve stumbled on a CD-ROM, game cartridge, or floppy disk in a box that you’d like to access but can’t, because you’ve long gotten rid of the hardware that went with it. Maybe you imagined your local library or museum has been stockpiling vintage Ataris and Mac 512s, but …

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