Developments in Critical Archival Studies and Critical Data Studies have arisen as new disciplinary formations that provide critical frameworks and interdisciplinary methodology to areas regarding archives and data, respectively. In our two-part project, we reimagine how critical archives can lend to and learn from concepts of Critical Data and vice versa in creating better practices of care and reimagining our collaboration in stewarding information on the internet. Intersecting with the work of Critical Information Studies, as defined by Siva Vaidhyanathan and further developed in the work of Safiya U. Noble, Sarah T. Roberts, André Brock, and more. These multi-disciplinary scholars offer crucial theoretical foundations for bridging these necessary discussions (Vaidhyanathan, 2006). We make the claim that the artificial distinctions between archives and data have resulted in siloed approaches on how to handle "rupture" and "absence" in data and evidence. In our two-part project, we build our research around the question: What are the ruptures and absences that continue to fracture collaboration between scholars and practitioners who engage in Critical Studies and Critical Data Studies? The first portion of our project is presenting a paper where we investigate the way practices of fabulation, and ethics of care emerge in these areas of research to bridge new dialogue between scholars and practitioners. Next, we propose to facilitate fishbowl discussion to put our theory into practice. Critical Archival Studies in conversation with Critical Data studies will help us as Internet researchers and scholars to deepen methodological care and praxis.

By searching for the term “ television ” on the Playground and Artbreeder artificial intelligence platforms , a set of resulting technical images is used to analyze how certain televisualities emerge in the technical-aesthetic memory that results from the imbrications of the user- promptist with the technocultural dimensions of the platforms. As a theoretical basis, the work of Manovich and Arielli (2023) and Kilpp (2018) is called upon . Methodologically, we use the printscreen and data scraping as excavatory attitudes , focused on the perspective of media archaeology that values the problematization of the memory of media objects. It is tentatively concluded that televisualities emerge in a valorization of the television set as equipment/hardware as a TV basic-image, situated in diverse scenarios and, in a complementary way, in relation to the Hollywood Star System and other minority references to the generic content content of television programs.

This paper investigates how Covid-19 digital archives may function as critical repositories for memory institutions and consequently lead to a better understanding of the role of digital technologies in mediating memory during future crisis events. To investigate this question, I utilized focus groups to understand how adults from a major American city responded to a selection of oral pandemic stories from Corona Diaries, a digital archive that was launched in March 2020. Findings suggest that engaging with the audio stories from the digital archive helped participants process their own pandemic experiences and reflect on the politicization of the pandemic. The content of the recordings also triggered new epiphanies among participants, helping them recalibrate their relationship to illness, loss, and memory. However, the personal dimensions of the digital archive at times fostered, and at other times challenged participants’ ability to connect to the stories, leading to competing opinions about the utility of digital archives. Overall, I argue that as memory culture becomes increasingly digitized and globalized, meaningful ways of concretizing local groups’ connections to traumatic disasters and crises must be prioritized within commemoration practices.

This paper offers a critical analysis of “Big Data Time Machines,” platforms built on AI and Big Data that use metaphors of time travel in relation to large historical datasets and digital archives. Drawing on decolonial perspectives that aim to unsettle western power structures around Big Tech, the paper focuses on the EU-funded large-scale research initiative (LSRI) called “Time Machine Europe,” a large collaborative international alliance devoted to using machine learning to extract the “Big Data of the Past for the future of Europe.” Through a material-semiotic analysis of the discourses and design strategies that structure archival encounters with five Local Time Machine projects (in Algiers, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Vienna and Ybbs), the paper identifies how “archive aesthetics” are used to organize historical journeys that reinforce long-standing white settler positions, but can also be used to creatively challenge these knowledge monopolies. The paper concludes by turning to speculative fiction about time travel by Queer, Black, Indigenous and Latinx storytellers whose work might help internet scholars, artists, archivists and historians to work together in rupturing the western temporal imagination and imagining alternative and more just data histories and futures.