Activists Archiving the Internet: Social Justice Informed Approaches to Digitally Born Content

Abstract

This panel takes up the central unifying question of how to archive the unrelenting amounts of data produced online, while also attending to the techno-political structures shaping digital culture. Beginning broadly with a discussion of strategies for the unruly and “untraditional” archives that have emerged within the digital moment, this panel will look at case studies of feminist meme archives, social movement archives, and COVID-19 mis- and disinformation archives, discussing the methods for digital archiving they use that take up activist, feminist, and queer approaches and frameworks. In different ways, panelists consider what counts as archivable, what often gets erased or overlooked in archiving digital content, and how we better attend to the power dynamics at play in our digital archival practices.