Archiving Digital Objects as Maintenance: Reading a Rosetta Machine

Abstract

Abstract: Archiving digital objects consists of maintenance and conservation: the job of arresting a cultural object in time, maintaining it as closely as possible in the state in which it was created. Hardware and software provide the context in which digital objects are created, and other hardware and software provide the context in which they must be maintained, but practitioners of digital preservation are only now beginning to move seriously into the area of deciding how to perform digital objects for users. In this paper I discuss a personal effort at stopping time for hardware and what it has taught me about approaching construction of preservable platforms that can replicate the context of creation for digital objects. I will also discuss what we lose when we decide to discard environment in favor of some generalized idea of content.

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