The “Media Necromancy” speaker series unearths what Alan Liu describes as “the déjá vu haunting of new by old media”—the many ways that historical media technologies are woven into the design, function, and reception of newer media technologies.
Sponsored by Skeuomorph Press & BookLab, each talk in the series traces one such entanglement, showing how rich media archeologies can help scholars better understand, contextualize, analyze, and design information systems.
Spring 2026 Speakers:
What the Disk Remembers: Traces, Forensics, and Care in Media Recovery
When: Tuesday, April 28 from 10-11am
Who: Jess Whyte, University of Toronto Libraries
Where: Skeuomorph Press, CU Community Fablab, 1301 S. Goodwin Ave. Urbana, IL 61801
Also: There will be snacks!
When we image a floppy disk, we don’t just recover files. We summon an entire media object back into legibility. Deleted notes, invisible marginalia, third-party correspondence, sensitive personal information: the disk remembers things its donor may not have known they were donating. Forensic disk imaging is less an act of neutral preservation than a revelation of digital traces, one that demands we reckon carefully with what we’ve called back and why.
In this talk, Jess Whyte draws on hands-on casework from the University of Toronto Libraries’ Digital Preservation Lab to walk through imaging, analyzing, and providing access to born-digital content on obsolete media, from floppy disks to magnetic tape to whole systems. Whyte will show how forensic recovery surfaces traces that complicate the preservation instinct to “take and keep it all,” including remnants of deleted drafts, private notes, and materials whose donors never anticipated posterity. Drawing on past works with Monique Lassere on radical empathy approaches to disk imaging, and with Tessa Walsh on research into how Canadian cultural memory workers navigate these challenges in practice, Whyte argues that best practices are not axioms. The labour of ethical, empathetic decision-making in preservation work is itself a form of care, and one that institutions must make visible.
Bio: Jess Whyte (she/her) is a librarian and Coordinator of ITS Library Services at the University of Toronto Libraries, where her work has spanned a series of roles in digital preservation and broader library technology services. She previously held the positions of Digital Assets Librarian and Digital Preservation Intake Coordinator at UTL, and worked with the Digital Curation Institute as a Research Assistant. Whyte is the recipient of the Society of American Archivists Preservation Publication Award (2022) for her article with Monique Lassere, “Balancing Care and Authenticity in Digital Collections: A Radical Empathy Approach to Working with Disk Images,” and is currently working with UofI iSchool Professors Emily Maemura and Karen Wickett on the Archives as Data project. Before coming to librarianship, she worked in community and public radio, as a resource coordinator with the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group (NSPIRG), and co-authored one of the first books on developing applications for social networks (Building OpenSocial Apps).
“As Usual You Have Produced Yet Another Installment Worthy of Archiving”: The Persistence of Obsolescence in Queer Information & Media Technologies
When: Tuesday, February 17th, 2026. 1-2PM
Who: Travis Wagner, Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences
Where: Skeuomorph Press, CU Community Fablab, 1301 S. Goodwin Ave. Urbana, IL 61801
Also: There will be snacks!
Download a poster about this talk here.
Abstract: Queer communities are early adopters of emergent technologies, whether video cameras to document the HIV/AIDS epidemic or microblogging platforms like Tumblr to explore new identity categories. Yet the same technologies queer communities foster are subject to the most rampant obsolescence, making the formats of these objects difficult to preserve & make accessible. As a question of archival materials, queer history seems inextricably linked to obsolescence. In this talk, Dr. Travis Wagner (they/them) asks, what might it mean to take this question of queer archival obsolescence seriously? Through a series of archival object case studies, Wagner will call attention to how data exists within the objects of queer history, how they represent the circulation and use of information within queer communities in their historical moments, & how they pose challenges to ensuring their long-term preservation. Wagner will interrogate the sociotechnical nature of queerness & obsolescence as co-constitutive forces & argue that obsolescence can serve as a generative tool to think about the past, present, & future of queer archives in an age where the promises of technology seem limitless, yet prove deeply biased & exclusionary.