Data Recovery Shops and Retro-Computing Labs

Here’s a session idea that complements the one proposed by Tim Carmody on the “hardware turn,” with maybe more of a digital preservation and access slant.  It’s inspired in part by talks with my colleague Bruce Ambacher and in part by Doug Reside and Matt Kirschenbaum’s ongoing efforts at MITH to collect obsolete hardware, cables, and other parts in the service of cultural heritage data recovery. The idea revolves around regional or institutional “rescue and repair” shops that could function as non-profit, academic counterparts to commercial ventures such as Mueller Media Conversions in NYC, whose clients include (among others) the National Archives in Washington DC.  The shop(s) would help historians/humanists/curators/archivists/teachers/scholars rescue data from legacy storage media, such as 3 1/2 or 5 1/4 floppy disks, and transfer it to newer media.  The discussion could easily be expanded–and I hope it would!–to include retro-computing labs, such as the Archeological Media Lab at U of Colorado directed by Lori Emerson, or its counterpart at MITH, with the aim of identifying where the two types of projects overlap with and differ from one another (and how they might be combined).  We could also think about how to source or scavenge the necessary hardware (e.g., campus surplus stores, donations, or places like Goodwill Computer Works in Austin or WeirdStuff in Silicon Valley) and student curricula (e.g., teaching students how to create disk images of the bitstreams on obsolete storage media in the context of videogame and elit studies).  Any thoughts on what else we might cover?