“Flickr.com is a Gathering of Memory” Insights from the Flickr Foundation’s First Conversation
Susan Mernit & George Oates
On September 26, 2024, we hosted our first-ever public conversation featuring director George Oates and advisors Anasuya Sengupta and Eliza Gregory. The event explored critical questions about preserving digital visual history in our rapidly evolving technological landscape.
The discussion centered on our purpose: to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years. We discussed the long list of technological uncertainties, with George quoting another Flickr Foundation advisor, Temi Odumosu, who said, “We don’t even know what a JPEG will be in ten years.”
Anasuya described social justice issues, emphasizing that digital preservation must address questions of power and representation. She stressed how important it is for marginalized communities to control their narratives , and how we must keep this in the front of our minds as we make tools..
The conversation touched on several key points:
We must balance vast scale with meaningful personal engagement
Using Flickr Commons to empowering communities to define their histories
How we can support smaller cultural institutions in digital preservation efforts
What community engagement brings to enriching digital archives
Myriad curatorial challenges as we consider deciding what to preserve
Preserving Our Visual Heritage: The Flickr Foundation was established in 2022 with the purpose to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years. As part of our work, we look after the Flickr Commons, a unique collection of historical photographs from cultural institutions all around the world.
In September, Tori and I went to Belgium for iPres 2024. We were keen to chat about digital preservation and discuss some of our ideas for Data Lifeboat – and enjoy a few Belgian waffles, of course!
We ran a workshop called “How do you preserve 50 billion photos?” to talk about the challenges of archiving social media at scale. We had about 30 people join us for a lively discussion. Sadly we don’t have any photos of the workshop, but we did come away with a lot to think about, and we wanted to share some of the ideas that emerged.
Some people think we should try to collect all of social media – accumulate as much data as possible, and sort through it later. That might be appealing in theory, because we won’t delete anything that’s important to future researchers, but it’s much harder in practice.
For Data Lifeboat, this is a problem of sheer scale. There are 50 billion photos on Flickr, and trillions of points that form the social graph that connects them. It’s simply too much for a single institution to collect as a whole.
At the conference we heard about other challenges that make it hard to archive social media like constraints on staff time, limited resources, and a lack of cooperation from platform owners. Twitter/X came up repeatedly, as an example of a site which has become much harder to archive after changes to the API.
There are also longer-term concerns. Sibyl Schaefer, who works at the University of California, San Diego, presented a paper about climate change, and how scarcity of oil and energy will affect our ability to do digital preservation. All of our digital services rely on a steady supply of equipment and electricity, which seem increasingly fraught as we look over the next 100 years. “Just keep everything” may not be a sustainable strategy.
This paper was especially resonant for us, because she encourages us to think about these problems now, before the climate crisis gets any worse. It’s better to make a decision when you have more options and things are (relatively) calm, than wait for things to get really bad and be forced to make a snap judgment. This matches our approach to rights, privacy, and legality with Data Lifeboat – we’re taking the time to consider the best approach while Flickr is still happy and healthy, and we’re not under time pressure to make a quick decision.
What should we keep?
We went to iPres believing that trying to keep everything is inappropriate for Flickr and social media, and the conversations we had only strengthened this view. There are definitely benefits to this approach, but they require an abundance of staffing and resources that simply don’t exist.
One thing we heard at our Birds of a Feather session is that if you can only choose a selection of photos from Flickr, large institutions don’t want to make that selection themselves. They want an intermediate curator to choose photos to go in a Data Lifeboat, and then bequeath that Data Lifeboat to their archive. That person decides what they think is worth keeping, not the institution.
Who chooses what to keep?
If you can only save some of a social media service, how do you decide which part to take? You might say “keep the most valuable material”, but who decides what’s valuable? This is a thorny question that came up again and again at iPres.
An institution could conceivably collect Data Lifeboats from many people, each of whom made a different selection. Several people pointed out that any selection process will introduce bias and inequality – and while it’s impossible to fix these completely, having many people involved can help mitigate some of the issues.
This ‘collective selection’ helps deal with the fact that social media is really big – there’s so much stuff to look at, and it’s not always obvious where the interesting parts are. Sharing that decision with different people creates a broader perspective of what’s on a platform, and what material might be worth keeping.
Why are we archiving social media?
The discussion around why we archive social media is still frustratingly speculative. We went to iPres hoping to hear some compelling use cases or examples, but we didn’t.
There are plenty of examples of people using material from physical archives to aid their research. For example, one person told the story of the Minutes of the Milk Marketing Board. Once thought of as a dry and uninteresting collection, it became very useful when there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain. We didn’t hear any case studies like that for digital archives.
There are already lots of digital archives and archives of Internet material. It would be interesting to hear from historians and researchers who are using these existing collections, to hear what they find useful and valuable.
The Imaginary Future Researcher
A lot of discussion revolved around an imaginary future researcher or PhD student, who would dive into the mass of digital material and find something interesting – but these discussions were often frustratingly vague. The researcher would do something with the digital collections, but more specifics weren’t forthcoming.
As we design Data Lifeboat, we’ve found it useful to imagine specific scenarios:
The Museum of London works with schools across the city, engaging students to collect great pictures of their local area. A schoolgirl in Whitechapel selects 20 photos of Whitechapel she thinks are worth depositing in the Museum’s collection.
The botany student at California State looks across Flickr to find photography of plant coverage in a specific area and gathers them as a longitudinal archive.
A curation student interning at Qtopia in Sydney wants to gather community documentation of Sydney’s Mardi Gras.
These only cover a handful of use cases, but they’ve helped ground our discussions and imagine how a future researcher might use the material we’ve saving.
A Day Out in Antwerp
On my final day in Belgium, I got to visit a couple of local institutions in Antwerp. I got a tour of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, which focuses on sixteenth-century book printing. The museum is an old house with some gorgeous gardens:
And a collection of old printing machines:
There was even a demonstration on a replica printing machine, and I got to try a bit of printing myself – it takes a lot of force to push the metal letters and the paper together!
Then in the afternoon I went to the FelixArchief, the city archive of Antwerp, which is stored inside an old warehouse next to the Port of Antwerp:
We got a tour of their stores, including some of the original documents from the very earliest days of Antwerp:
And while those shelves may look like any other archive, there’s a twist – they have to fit around the interior shape of the original warehouse! The archivists have got rather good at playing tetris with their boxes, and fitting everything into tight spaces – this gets them an extra 2 kilometres of shelving space!
Our tour guide explained that this is all because the warehouse is a listed building – and if the archives were ever to move out, they’d need to remove all their storage and leave it in a pristine condition. No permanent modifications allowed!
Next steps for Data Lifeboat
We’re continuing to think about what we heard about iPres, and bring it into the design and implementation of Data Lifeboat.
This month and next, we’re holding Data Lifeboat co-design workshops in Washington DC and London to continue these discussions.
100-year plan workshop – Edinburgh
By Robert Pembleton, George Oates, and Melissa Terras
Imagine a vibrant, student cafe at the University of Edinburgh, on a cold but sunny January day. Imagine a group of academics, students, community leaders, and changemakers gathered in the corner near surreal interpretations of bookshelves, speaking over the excited conversations of a Friday morning. This was the setting for a How to write a 100-year plan workshop hosted by the University’s Edinburgh Futures Institute – a challenge-led multidisciplinary initiative which tackles complex issues to imagine and shape better futures.
We convened to imagine the preservation of our digital heritage for future generations. A sense of excitement filled the room. There was an energy. Everyone was eager to contribute and collaborate, to give what they had to this purpose. 50 billion images; worthy of protection. The horizon was 100 years.
This workshop gravitated to the challenge of continuing access, about what to keep. How do we ensure that the viewers and researchers of future generations can see things both in their raw form, and with contextual colour around single photos? Flickr is interestingly different here because most of the images are described directly by their creators, and have factual EXIF data attached.
We began by trying to step out of time and allow ourselves to think on the scale of centuries. Each of us dug out a picture of a meaningful place: breath-taking landscapes such as Ben Nevis and Zumaya Beach, a now empty hut sometimes buzzing with community vibrancy, and Bobby’s blurry family photo qualified with generational memories:
“It may not be the best picture, but it’s my picture.”
This sentence popped out as we were doing the first exercise, where we ask people to find pictures of places that mean something to them. It’s always interesting to see which places people choose. They’re often of views, or capture a place where good memories have been made with loved ones. They are rarely what you might call spectacular or historic or exceptionally well-made, but they are poignant for their viewer. John Berger has called photographs “observable moments.” Meaningful to maybe just a few people, but no less valuable than a well-constructed photograph of a classical landscape. Vernacular. Flickr is full of pictures like that. Brimming.
We discussed meaning, longevity, humility, and value. What do we value, and how? We tend to show a primacy for personal value. There was once a glimmer that the internet could be a space outside of capitalism , but it has of course become integrated into the machine. Now is a good time to be cautious, as we imagine new systems.
The profundity of the changes at hand causes pause. Perhaps we should leave things in a state where they can be found and used in ways we couldn’t possibly imagine. If we curate this with the lens of the present, there is a threat of sanitisation. Obtuse decision making shrouds bias, and we’re in the midst of a swell of disinformation that’s colliding with wanting to present an unbiased picture.
There are practical considerations for such a large archive. Do we really need 50 billion images plus the infinite amount yet to come? Maybe its value should be measured against the archive’s carbon footprint. Maybe it’s OK for some things to disappear forever. We discussed the simplistic beauty in randomness, and so perhaps an approach could be to keep a random percentage of everything. This would mean we’d keep some of the boring stuff, and history lovers of the future may be most enamoured with the mundane. Libraries, archives and other memory institutions have detailed deaccession policies – where they decide what to no longer look after – but Flickr can be thought of as a vernacular, outside, “fugitive” archive. Any decision regarding deletion of content should be collective, cooperative, collaborative, and transparent. To expose our methods, to help future generations understand how we made our decisions. Then, maybe we can release the weight of our history with joy, with ceremony, with something that could become like a tradition that we encourage, support, revisit, and maintain ourselves collectively.
Thinking about long organisations
We talked about how ritual might help sustain a strong direction across a century. (There were jokes about everyone wearing robes.) Ritual has had a place to play in human society thus far – it seems to have longevity. Imagine a successful 1000 year old pub that never franchised and never exceeded its comfort level; it was just right.
Towards the end of our session we went for a walk and explored the ancient Royal Mile of Edinburgh, passing by the World’s End pub. That was once the perception: there was nothing of value, the end of the world, outside of the castle’s gates. We walked in contemplation with ancient volcanoes which dot the landscape surrounding this beautiful city. A 3.8 billion year old rock? Maybe 100 years isn’t so long after all. There are more species than ourselves, and there is more to come.
We walked past another neighbourhood whose significant industrial heritage is now demolished. The machines of the future may be quite upset indeed that they aren’t able to visit their ancestors.
Few digital photos will survive for a century by accident. A 100 year plan should be a practical, responsive, future facing declaration of intent. We train our lens, knowing that our visions are from fascinating unknowns, impossible perspectives. We do love to play. We should nurture that in ourselves. Play inspires joy. Joy celebrates humanity. The Flickr archive is a record of what it has been like to be in certain spaces, from a certain perspective, at a certain time. It cherishes our sense of identity
“The nature of our identity must not be destroyed.”
The session ended in quiet, contemplative reflection. It elicited poetry, a snapshot of the moment. We could share it, but it wouldn’t really make sense out of context. Nothing really does.
We thank all attendees for their contributions. As with any good, invigorating engagement, our discussions provoked more questions than it answered. Here are some things that we may explore in the future.
Oral histories happen everywhere. Could we or should we figure out how to attach sound to pictures in flickr.org?
When does a story become a history?
Is decentralisation a route to protecting neutrality? If more copies live in more and differently accessed and described spaces, could that diffuse the “truth” of history?
Postscript:Post-it transcriptions
The first section of the workshop is about thinking in centuries. Not something we do often, so we’ve found it helpful to expand our normal timeframes a bit at the start. We have an exercise in three parts, and participants note down their thoughts on post-its and we can all have a look afterwards.
What in your life has lasted for 100 years? Fisherrow Harbour; books, photographs/postcards, documents (incl. design), monuments, environment, buildings/roads/rail; my house ~1910, grandfather’s crown from WWI, great-grandmother’s ring (now mine!); Victorian egg & bird collection, great AUK(?) items, egg at NMS, old paintings; a cannon from a tall ship; the ring I’m wearing; my flat; my house; the ring on my right hand; music (I sing classical music); I have a doll that was my mother’s mother’s from her childhood; my house; copies of vintage books I adore and own, e.g. Lafcadio Hearn’s.
What in your life do you want to last for another 100 years? The same books, some of my pictures, some of my writings; code and info on AI planners, life/work results; my dichroic ring and the story behind it; HOPE; photos of my family; music!; family photographs; international communication; my children; my children, or at least, their children; my house; environment, community/society; how we lived, understanding of how we lived; the house.
What in your life do you not want to last 100 years? The album with my weedy singing made by the band I was in in my 20s; META CRISIS; AI-generated crud; “reinforced divisions,” “Left v Right”; climate change; Tories; all this plastic; videos of my early teaching/lectures (Lecture Capture!); the rest of my pictures and writings; revenge porn!
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