Workshop with Steven McLaughlin: Large-scale digital preservation under adversarial conditions

Over the past three decades, academic librarians and archivists have developed a rigorous, yet circumscribed, set of best practices for long-term data preservation. Meanwhile, amateur file sharers have worked out their own approaches to the preservation problem, often with little concern for institutional authority or the strictures of copyright law. Unfortunately, these two groups rarely cross paths.

In this workshop, Steven McLaughlin will present several techniques for distributing and preserving large-scale data collections under adversarial conditions, drawing primarily on methods used by shadow libraries and among individual collectors. His aim is to foster critical awareness of each of these systems' benefits and limitations. First, he will teach participants to use rsync for real-time mirroring from a centrally hosted data collection. He will then walk through the process of launching a decentralized BitTorrent repository, using Docker and Transmission to create torrents on a virtual private server. Finally, he will discuss the promise and pitfalls of emerging blockchain storage systems.

Stephen McLaughlin is a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. He has worked as a Senior Editor at the PennSound poetry archive and hosts the podcast "Into the Field" for Jacket2.org. His writing has appeared in Gauss PDF, The Volta, and "Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing". Stephen’s current work is focused on alternative distribution channels for academic articles and books.