Welcome to The Archive Project
A bit about why I’m archiving my digital life, which, really, is my whole life right now.
I live in Boston, and one thing to know about Boston is that everyone moves on the exact same day. I’m sure I could do a deep dive to understand why every landlord decided that an entire city should be upended at the same time, but I digress. I, of course, also moved. During the move, my mom handed me the box of all my yearbooks, journals, and even my baby book. It’s a physical archive that I honestly do not know what to do with. I remember how transformative my 5th grade moving-up ceremony felt. Between the pages of my elementary school yearbook is the delicately preserved flower I was given as I crossed the stage into middle-schooldom. But now? It’s a flower, sitting between pages of a yearbook full of faces and people and things I don’t really remember anymore.
As I unpacked the boxes, I wondered what my digital archive would look like. For a while, I’ve been thinking about the space our memories, memorabilia, photos, yearbooks, feeds — all these things that help prove the worthiness of life — occupy and why we feel so compelled to save everything digitally. I had a whole shelf dedicated to the first 18 years of my life. But in the nine years since I graduated high school, I’ve amassed enough digital files and “memories” to potentially take over an entire room.
I have saved hundreds of videos on social media, I have thousands and thousands of photos that I never return to, I have screenshots of things I meant to review but never did, and I have so many notes in my notes app it’s comical. If the Cloud ever failed, I would lose it all. So I’m going to try to clean it up and turn it into something physical. If I wanted to save all these things then I should save them properly and reckon with my own need to hit “save”.
This is not a guide to deleting social media. Rather, it’s an investigation into how much space we’re taking up and why.
That’s how this project started. I barely could stand the weight of yearbooks and journals from when I was a teenager, so how am I supposed to withstand the crushing hundreds and hundreds of saved gigabytes of my digital self? The more I thought about it, the heavier it became.
I have a background in books and journalism, which puts The Archive Project at a perfect intersection of all I know and care about. I am slowly but surely collecting the information from each social media site I belong to, every profile I made, every post, every bookmark I saved, and compiling them into physical books. I want to visually depict this weight. I want to comb through my Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Substack, and any other social media I ever made. Even my Google Photos, which I don’t know how to tackle yet, will be included. I will turn all of this too-easy-to-save digital data on myself into physical books. I want to archive myself and understand this moment.
This journey will be a long one. My hope is to come out of the archive with a new understanding of how I want to fit into the digital world, and how I want to be a part without losing myself. If I am going to save something digitally I want to save it for the right reasons; I want to get to a point where I read that article or watch that video instead of saving it for later (and eventually forgetting about it).
I’ve already started and captured the tiniest percentage of my Twitter (currently known as X) bookmarks. I have 650 screenshots. We’re just at the tip of the iceberg.
Inspired? I’ll share some files if you’re interested in starting your own archive project.
Some topics I’ll also explore in future essays:
The Struggle to Delete the Digital Self
Archiving vs. Curating
The Search Engines We’ve Made of Ourselves
Storage Space
Artifacts of the Month: My personal favorites from digging