Narrative Provenance
Explored in Triage Methodology (Chapter 5), Ethical Preservation acts as the check on the archivist's impulse to save everything. It recognizes that digital artifacts often contain private, sensitive, or non-consensual data that was never meant for permanent storage.
"To archive without consent is to turn a person into a specimen."
Field Notes
The "Should We?" Question: While technical fragility asks "Can we save this?", ethical preservation asks "Should we?" This tension often arises with leaked data, hacked emails, or communities that engaged in "contextual privacy" (public posts meant only for a specific in-group).
Case Study: The Tumblr Purge: When preserving the "NSFW" content purged from Tumblr, archivists faced a dilemma. Much of the content was queer history and art, but some was personal intimacy shared under the assumption of ephemerality. Ethical preservation required a nuanced approach: saving the subculture broadly, but restricting access to individual sensitive artifacts.
Praxis
Ethical Preservation mandates:
- Harm Reduction: Prioritizing the safety of living subjects over the completeness of the archive (e.g., not archiving doxxing threads).
- Contextual Integrity: Preserving the context of data, not just the raw files, so future viewers understand the norms under which it was created.
- Restricted Access: Creating tiers of access (public, researcher-only, dark archive) rather than a binary "open/closed" model.