"Media Necromancy" Series: Jess Whyte

When we image a floppy disk, we don’t just recover files. We summon an entire media object back into legibility. Deleted notes, invisible marginalia, third-party correspondence, sensitive personal information: the disk remembers things its donor may not have known they were donating. Forensic disk imaging is less an act of neutral preservation than a revelation of digital traces, one that demands we reckon carefully with what we’ve called back and why.

In this talk, Jess Whyte draws on hands-on casework from the University of Toronto Libraries’ Digital Preservation Lab to walk through imaging, analyzing, and providing access to born-digital content on obsolete media, from floppy disks to magnetic tape to whole systems. Whyte will show how forensic recovery surfaces traces that complicate the preservation instinct to “take and keep it all,” including remnants of deleted drafts, private notes, and materials whose donors never anticipated posterity. Drawing on past works with Monique Lassere on radical empathy approaches to disk imaging, and with Tessa Walsh on research into how Canadian cultural memory workers navigate these challenges in practice, Whyte argues that best practices are not axioms. The labour of ethical, empathetic decision-making in preservation work is itself a form of care, and one that institutions must make visible.

Questions? Contact Ryan Cordell.