Jon Ippolito’s presentation “Learning from Mario: Crowdsourcing Preservation” from last March’s DOCAM conference in Montreal has been meshed and is now available online. The essay makes the provocative argument that preservation professionals should be taking cues from the amateur fans who keep vintage games alive.
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This essay contrasts the crowdsourced model of preservation practiced by game emulation fans with the centralized model practiced by preservation professionals. Its recommendations include increasing social and technical access to the documentation of culture and building networks that respect differences between different institutions and communities.
A version of this essay was first presented at DOCAM 2010 in Montreal, 4 March 2010. For background it draws on a book by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito called New Media and Social Memory (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming in 2011).