As we celebrate the 21st birthday of Flickr.com today, it’s a good day to share an introduction to our newest major project at the Flickr Foundation: Digital Daybook.
When we were strategising in 2021 about what we are for, we came up with a purpose to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years. As we continue developing our shorter-term strategies to meet this – like Data Lifeboat – we are developing internal practices dedicated to making sure we are also visible in 100 years.
As part of our Creative Archives program, we are initiating Digital Daybook in tribute to prior art, where a clerk would have been employed at an organization to record daily events or important moments in the life of the organization. This is regular, indefatigable, and careful work determined to keep an image of the organization visible, and delightfully, these daybooks from previous centuries can still be read and enjoyed today. Tori will be reporting on her research on daybooks in upcoming posts – stay tuned for that – she has found some wonderful and odd examples to share.
Why “Digital Daybook”?
One of my biggest professional regrets is that I didn’t keep a good record of my design work in the early days of the Flickr.com UI. (I was lead designer there from the outset for a few years.) The best I have now are a few screenshots of early UIs captured by other people.
There is certainly a lot of lore around Flickr and the workplace where we made it (and still make it). Kittens, babies, sunsets, flowers, finger darts, deploys late on a Friday… even though everyone who uses Flickr has a slightly different image of it in their heads, the team culture has stood the test of time quite well, and it’s stories and artefacts that do it. We even wonder if we should archive the flickrhq tag, or conduct oral histories with the Flickr team to record the story of it all.
by Aaron Straup Cope
But, in terms of our actual work, or its digital record, really the only thing that remains is the huge codebase, and I think that’s erroneously imagined as an archival record these days, by some, of the group and its work. I was lucky enough to be commissioned for the New Archive Interpretations Het Nieuwe Instituut back in 2015 to think about the digital archive of the Rotterdam architects, MVRDV, and as I explored their physical archive of models, boxes, drawings, and images, and surveyed the staff on their own memories and highlights of the firm, the “digital archive” of a hard drive in a drawer fell massively short of the narratives and recollections of the people there.
Today, companies don’t have a cupboard or a book that holds all our work. If you think about it, and you work on a computer in your job, you probably use several digital services in the course of your work. Here’s a very quick list of the things most of us in this group use: the Google, Slack, web browsers, Github, code editors, wordpress, password managers, and any number of online software services, like Flickr, to do our everyday work. We don’t (yet) have a way of drawing all this work back into something like a daybook, something that represents what we do every day, week, month, quarter, year. We all have phones and laptops and backup drives and all that, but the work is diffuse and decaying.
It’s lucky that we’re currently a group which enjoys writing and reflecting. We try to blog a lot about where we’re at, and produce reports and reflections on how things are going. It’s been gratifying to hear from people that they’ve enjoyed reading that, so we’ll keep doing it. It reminds me a bit of that piece James Bridle made, where he printed out all the edits to the Wikipedia entry in The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs.
So, that’s the problem we’re working on: How do we gather our work into a representative sample or log that future team members will be able to read later? How should we describe it? What structures does it need? What privacies should we build in?
