3. Writings

I began with photographs. The Aftermath of Digitization (2015) and Albums in the Attic (2017) were early attempts to reckon with what I was seeing in collections—family, institutional, colonial—and what those images refused to say. These were essays about metadata, yes, but also about silence. About the difference between having a photograph and knowing what it means.

Later, that question—what remains, and how we read it—shifted into a different register. Jewish Calcutta, Recalled (2024) was written after the archive had already gone offline. It wasn’t meant to be an essay. It was a kind of mourning. But it became something else: a reflection on infrastructure, on what it means to hold stories that aren’t your own. Once they were lost to history; then, again, when their preservation failed.

In Memories and Mixed-Media (2025), I tried to stay with that loss. To ask what happens when the archive fails, and we’re left with forms it never learned to hold: anecdote, cinema, testimony. It wasn’t about rebuilding the archive, but listening for what it excluded.

Alongside this archival thread runs another: labour, structure, and the systems that govern what we call “research.” In Notes from the Transcription Desk (2017), written with Susan Schreibman and Neale Rooney, I reflected on what it meant to build a public project with strangers. Letters of 1916 was a model of participation. But participation is not always inclusion, and transcription is not always transparency. What we saw in the data wasn’t just contribution, it was both revision and care.

Those questions deepened in Validity and Verifiability. It is a critique, yes, but also a record of frustration. Why do institutional frameworks still struggle to recognise digital work which is often collaborative and public facing? Why does so much of what matters slip between categories? I wrote it not as an answer, but as a way of naming the gap I kept running into. The systems that don’t know how to hold the things we build.

Obsolescence (forthcoming) is what followed. It’s the quietest of these essays. It doesn’t argue. It asks: what do we choose to care for, especially when we know it won’t last? It moves through platforms, archives, memory systems, not to fix them, but to stay with them. To pay attention, even as they decay.