The Network of Archives for Design and Digital Culture (NADD) takes Amsterdam’s pioneering Digitale Stad (Digital City) project, revisited in the exhibition Designing the Social, as a departure point for discussing the relevance of preserving digital culture. The evening will focus on questions surrounding the social dimensions of archiving in the field. Tjarda de Haan (researcher and archivist) talks about excavating and unlocking De Digitale Stad and Kees Teszelszky (conservator Digital Collections) presents examples from the XS4ALL homepage collection of the National Library of The Netherlands. The evening will be moderated by Katía Truijen.

Digital media structures the ways in which we relate – to others, as well as to ourselves. The platforms, websites, games and countless other virtual environments that frame these interactions are constantly changing. In the process, domain-specific technical developments and design choices bubble over into wider social implications: old formats are deprecated, once unthinkable connections established, or new metaphors introduced.

These ongoing shifts and transformations leave few traces, unless active efforts are made to preserve them. What does the preservation of digital culture mean for future generations? What might we learn from records on communities once active in now obsolete virtual spaces like Amsterdam’s early Digitale Stad? What is the value in maintaining access to (documentation of) past network protocols or data-sharing infrastructures? And, perhaps just as importantly, what memories might be missing from what is kept?

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