I was lucky enough to spend most of the day yesterday at a symposium put on by a group of UT graduate students entitled “Queer Archives, Queer Affect.” The symposium was the culmination of a seminar taught by Ann Cvetkovich exploring the intersections of queer theory, affect theory, and theories of “the archive.”  The presenters were graduate students from English, Women’s and Gender Studies, Radio/Television/Film, and the School of Information, and the day was capped off with a keynote talk by Heather Love.  It was a really great symposium, and a pretty wonderful way to wrap-up my life as a graduate student.

This semester, I took a class on Digital Archives and Preservation, taught by the inestimable Dr. Pat Galloway.  One of distinctive things about this course is that students are assigned into teams that spend the semester tackling a real digital preservation problem.  This semester, groups worked with materials from the School of Information and from the Videogame Archives at the Briscoe Center for American History.  Each group researched the technical and policy challenges of their collection, worked with stakeholders, ensured the long-term stability of their materials, and ingested them into a digital repository.  So not only do we learn about the theoretical bases of digital archiving, we also have the chance to gain practical experience and contribute to the actual preservation of our digital heritage.

I have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks installing software.  Or, to put it more precisely, I have spent a lot of time trying to install software.  Some of my attempts have been successful; some, less so.  The time I spent tinkering with various programs (and occasionally wanting to bang my head against a wall) has led me to reflect on the evolution of my own technical skills and the ways that software programs and documentation encode certain expectations of their users.