![]() ![]() Like Benjamin, I focus on the process, seeking to re-animate my experience of archiving, and interacting with my own archive of flash mobs. I frame this attempt through the work of Walter Benjamin, whose Unpacking My Library essay serves as the foundation for my initial attempts to discuss and document my archival process of a digital collection. What follows is an initial attempt to do just that, based on my work with flash mob performances, particularly the original eight flash mobs that occurred in New York City in 2003, and the various documents, discussions, and artifacts that exist (or have existed) about them. Yet, despite all this marking a problem emerges, one I encountered throughout the last ten years, as I studied the growing flash mob performance phenomenon and tried to keep track of the various sources I found – personal accounts, photographs, videos, newspaper coverage, interviews, and more – How? How do I construct an archive out of so much information, especially when archiving isn’t really what I set out to do? How do I mark my choices in creating that archive as choices, even as I am making them? How do I deal with vanishing, slippery artifacts – digital files whose authorship is sometimes uncertain and whose existence is unreliable in nature? How do I perform the traces of those artifacts, once vanished, as part of my scholarship? How do I perform, on the page, my own failure to capture items, to back up my own work? Thus I try to mark my choices, so that such work, when it happens, is easier for those who follow me. As I do so, I realize that my choices inevitably limit those scholars who may follow my trail, yet my choices also act as productive spaces for further work – work that extends, questions, and critiques my own. Just as I must find a way to organize and create a narrative of my friend’s digital files, so too must I find a way of organizing and structuring all the materials that makeup my own digital research library. This particular reality of the digital archive is especially relevant to my own research, which focuses on performances created, staged, and often catalogued in both digital and physical spaces, such as flash mobs and other events similar to what Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi deem “mixed reality performances” (1). Sorting through my friend’s files reminded me of the multitude of issues unique to archival creation and maintenance in a digital age, as well as how the modern scholar’s research library often exists more on a screen than a shelf. Much of my friend’s research centered on archives and their creation, so I was both touched and daunted by such an important task. The family requested that I sort through my friend’s files and help make sense of them, so they could be of use to other academics interested in similar research topics, as well as more intelligible for family members looking through them in the future. Recently, about a year after the death of a dear friend and fellow academic, I received a hard drive he owned in the mail from a family member. ![]()
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