A comprehensive archive of terms and concepts from the discipline of Digital Archaeology—excavating meaning from the digital dust.
The distinct discipline dedicated to the study, preservation, and defense of digital artifacts threatened by platform death.
A discrete unit of digital information from a past technological epoch. The foundational artifact of Digital Archaeology.
The vast, chaotic, and uncataloged field of digital artifacts from which Archaeobytes are excavated.
The central act of Digital Archaeology—classifying an artifact's current state as Living, Liminal, or Petrified.
The dual nature of the discipline: preserving the past (Archive) while forging the future (Anvil).
🌱 A Living Archaeobyte—function is intact. The gold coin that still spends.
👻 A Liminal Archaeobyte—file is alive, ecosystem is dead. The fly in amber.
🗿 A Petrified Archaeobyte—function is extinct. The complete fossil.
The cognitive bias where living artifacts appear "current" due to continued function.
Declaration ("I Am"), Connection, and The Ground—the foundational principles of the hand-built web.
The First Pillar: The ability to assert one's identity and existence without permission.
The Second Pillar: The right to communicate directly without platform mediation.
The Third Pillar: Ownership of the infrastructure where one's data resides.
An evergreen ritual—direct creator-to-user communication bypassing algorithmic mediation.
The canonical example of the Digital Homestead and the Umbrabyte ecosystem.
A high-friction act of acknowledgment—a Conceptual Petribyte.
A curated, circular network of related websites—human curation over algorithms.
The fossil of a lost social contract: it was acceptable to be "away."
A public declaration of "these are the voices I read and respect."
The Archaeobyte as the first tool—what allows practitioners to see artifacts in the dust.
The act of analysis in The Triage—turning a "find" into an insight.
The study of file formats, metadata, and storage media—not just content.
The crisis of the second era—abundance without meaning.
A digital dark age not of loss, but of overwhelming, uncurated preservation.
The mandatory ethical framework applied before preservation (Privacy, Legality, Ethics).
The principle that individuals should have agency over their digital past.
A copyrighted artifact whose owner cannot be identified or located.
Balancing historical value with individual privacy and consent.
When a biological platform is killed by its corporate owner, creating instant mass extinction.
The mandatory preliminary phase of digital excavation: mapping the site before digging.
Analyzing a digital ecosystem as a series of deposited layers (Content, Metadata, Code).
The eight-phase protocol for moving artifacts from discovery to preservation.
The standardized documentation template for all excavations.
The six mandatory checks before beginning an excavation.
The scientific recovery and analysis of digital artifacts (The "Crime Scene" approach).
The material traces (glitches, padding, headers) that reveal a file's history.
Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe—the peer-to-peer model of distributed preservation.
The diagnostic tool for assessing infrastructure resilience and capture risk.
The collective term for libraries, archives, museums, and memorials in the digital age.
The structured repository of excavated and triaged Archaeobytes.
The documented history of an artifact's origin, custody, and modifications.
Building institutions capable of 50-year stewardship.
Strategic framework for designing resilient memory institutions.
Strategic framework for designing sovereign businesses (Foundries).
Preservation path for Vivibytes—living artifacts maintained as working blueprints.
Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe—the peer-to-peer model of distributed preservation.
The 6-level framework for assessing preservation depth (from Documentation to Resurrection).
Preservation path for Umbrabytes—documenting lost ecosystems and contexts.
Preservation path for Petribytes—fossils analyzed for the lessons they hold.
Re-animating dead artifacts by simulating their original hardware environments.
File formats that maintain integrity across epochs through simplicity and open standards.
The "Don't Break the Web" principle—new systems supporting older artifacts.
The status of creative works that are no longer protected by copyright—the goal state of information.
Architecture where the primary data copy lives on the user's device, ensuring longevity.
Technological transitions that render entire classes of artifacts obsolete.
The definition of digital preservation space: a liminal landscape of ghosts, zombies, and corpses.
The academic discipline of excavating "discursive formations" and "epistemological strata."
The structural failure of digital preservation caused by the isolation of its practitioners.
The rhetorical process of defining a discipline by clarifying what it is NOT.
The ethical obligation to preserve not just files, but cultural contexts.
The curatorial process of deciding what is "significant" enough to save (and what is left to rot).
Zittrain's framework: platforms enabling user innovation versus vendor-controlled ecosystems.
Eric Raymond's metaphors for centralized vs. decentralized software development.
An archaeological mound containing stratified layers of human activity—the digital past as dig site.
From Latin "limen" (threshold)—a state of being "betwixt and between."
Managing shared digital resources without centralized control.
The 8 design principles for sustainable commons governance.
The study of funding models that support (or destroy) user autonomy.
The study of who owns infrastructure and how they enforce power.
The 6-layer framework (Physical, Network, Identity, Storage, App, Economic) of digital control.
The resilience strategy of mixing State, Market, and Commons infrastructure.
The degradation of platform quality to continuously extract value from users.
The state of being compromised or structurally dominated by an external platform or infrastructure.
The realization that users never owned their digital homesteads—the GeoCities lesson.
Why some artifacts survive—non-proprietary formats outlive corporate control.
The technical standard governing digital exchange—the DNA of the independent web.
The ongoing conflict between open standards and proprietary, centralized platforms.
The 5-dimension strategy (Knowledge, Institutions, Careers, Visibility, Policy) for discipline formation.
The risk of an emerging field being absorbed and neutered by existing departments.
Physical homes (Centers, Labs, Programs) that provide stability for the discipline.
The alliance of Librarians, Hackers, Activists, and Scholars against the "Digital Dark Age".
The proposed legal right to preserve digital artifacts, overriding copyright and TOS.
The scholar who translates technical threats (platform death) into public values.
A framework for translating one insight for 5 audiences: Academic, Practitioner, Policy, Public, Social.
The strategy of owning independent distribution channels (blogs, domains) to ensure sovereignty.
The ladder of legislative impact: White Papers -> Briefings -> Testimony -> Legislation.
The systemic risk where public scholarship is undervalued by promotion committees.
The path of Digital Sovereignty, rejecting both Platform Feudalism and Containment.
The current era where users are tenants on corporate land, subject to eviction without cause.
The right to own one's Identity, Connections, and Ground independent of central platforms.
The founding principles: "We preserve the past to forge the future."
The 30-year vision where sovereign, federated infrastructure becomes the default.
The new epoch defined by the dominance of synthetic, AI-generated content (The "K-Pg Boundary of 2022").
Synthetic content that mimics organic expression but clogs the ecosystem without nutritional value.
The practitioner who unites Archaeobytology (Excavation) and Sentientification (Creation).
The disciplined protocol for preventing AI hallucination from contaminating the historical record.
The bias that leads institutions to study Pompeii while ignoring the digital mass extinction of GeoCities.
The belief that historical validity requires physical substance (atoms > bits), rendering digital culture invisible.
The focus on technical file integrity ("saving the fly") while missing cultural context ("the amber").
A sovereign, purpose-built artifact forged to preserve a specific cultural thesis (The Anvil's answer).
The "Participatory Web" era (2004-2012) that centralized power into platform silos.
The architectural vulnerability of building on APIs you don't control (the root cause of Petrifaction).
When living artifacts die because their external dependencies (embedded maps, widgets) are severed.
The bedrock of resilience: public, non-proprietary protocols (HTML, RSS) that prevent vendor lock-in.
The "Pompeii of the Internet"—the lost civilization of 38 million homesteads destroyed in 2009.
The defining medium of the early 2000s that became a massive "Petribyte" fossil layer in 2020.
The "Read-Only" web (1991-2004)—the era of the Homepage and decentralized sovereignty.
The "Social Web" (2004-2012)—the era of platform centralization and user-generated content.
Friending, Liking, Lurking—the user-defined verbs that became the landmarks of an era.
The "Decentralized Web"—the movement to reconstruct the web on blockchain protocols.
The "Symbiotic Web"—the emerging integration of AI and the fading of the screen interface.
The slow, spontaneous decomposition of storage media—the entropy of the bit.
The phenomenon where hyperlinks point to deleted or moved resources—the erosion of the web's connective tissue.
The gradual obsolescence of data due to changing software environments or hardware failure.
The physical degradation of optical media (CDs, DVDs) rendering them unreadable.
The loss of functionality in stable code caused by changes in its external environment.
The structural isolation of data within closed, proprietary platforms.