Happy to announce that my personal favorite article to date is out! If you are interested in understanding how the precarity of born-digital media artifacts, the imagination of queer folks, and Furby tell us something about information worldbuilding, then you should read this! tinyurl.com/4afvv7sm

I have joked about destroying a book at the beginning of my archives and digital preservation courses as a sort of metaphor for the inability to save everything. Obviously different than the AI consuming text issue but books are weeded and books are sometimes destroyed.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 7d ago

Terry Belanger would begin his Rare Book School classes by physically destroying/dismantling a (well-chosen) old book. This is NOT the same as what Anthropic is doing! But there is a popular culture of preciousness around books that is belied by the material realities of their circumstances. +

Terry Belanger would begin his Rare Book School classes by physically destroying/dismantling a (well-chosen) old book. This is NOT the same as what Anthropic is doing! But there is a popular culture of preciousness around books that is belied by the material realities of their circumstances. +

Daniel Bellingradt@dbellingradt.bsky.social · 7d ago

AI companies scanning and shredding old and rare books is bad, but you should be aware that shredding new, old, and used books is an established practice of selling and marketing books. In fact, hundreds of millions of books are shredded every year discretly, and legally, in Europe alone. #booksky

🪶New in Murmurations: K.R. Roberto's “Operationalizing Bias.” In this piece, the author describes "the problems in classification that I was personally experiencing" during an LIS PhD program, "namely, the ways in which my transness inexplicably led to medical issues and confused classmates."

It's International Non-Binary People's Day! Celebrated here, on my Pentium with VGAPride.

Favorite: .wad Least favorite: .key Two very different proprietary formats that bring very different feelings to the world

Melanie Walsh@mellymeldubs.bsky.social · 3w ago

Favorite and least favorite file formats? I'll start. Favorite: TXT Least favorite: HEIC

Riffing on a few potential logos/ads for the Undead Media Lab, but honestly we might have struck gold already 📺👾

Ryan Cordell@ryancordell.org · 4w ago

At @skeuomorphpress.org strategizing with @drtlwagner.bsky.social about the official launch of the Undead Media Lab this fall & they convinced me we had to test out the new digital clock font—it’s everything I dreamed!

Congratulations to #iSchoolUI Assistant Professor @drtlwagner.bsky.social, recipient of the 2026 ASIS&T James M. Cretsos Leadership Award! 🎉   The award honors a new ASIS&T member who has demonstrated outstanding leadership in professional ASIS&T activities.   ▶️ bit.ly/3RfeWxS

Honored to learn that I received this year's Crestos Leadership Award from ASIS&T. It is truly my favorite academic community, and being recognized in this way means so much! www.asist.org/2026/07/01/w...

Wagner to Receive 2026 James M. Cretsos Award for Leadership

The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is delighted to announce that Travis Wagner is the recipient of the 2026 James M. Cretsos Award for Leadership. The award’s purpose is to ...

asist.org

Truly honored to be one of the first contributors to this new journal. I can’t wait to see it expand and evolve and to see what other birds get featured in promotional posts!

murmurations@murmurationsjrnl.bsky.social · last mo.

🪶New in Murmurations: “What Is Trans Information Work in Trying Times?” by Travis L. Wagner. This conceptual article explores the material, affective, and communal labor that attends the creation and circulation of trans information, both inside and beyond information institutions.

My scholar alert on zines turned up this nerdy gem from LIS professor @vamanu.bsky.social "the materiality of DIY zines is not merely a technical property but an onto-political dimension" journals.library.ualberta.ca/ojs.cais-acs... 📚

Our Misfits book is off to the printer! Our designer, my friend Elaine Lopez, said she always wanted an opportunity to use Roger Excoffon's Banco (of Thrasher fame) in a project — and THIS WAS HER CHANCE! 😜

If you’re a healthcare provider or community health worker and you’ve worked with women who use drugs, consider participating in my PhD student’s dissertation research to understand more about the barriers and opportunities for working together: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

A+ book cover, no notes

I noticed this lil dude on the side of a Maxwell home recording tape I was digitizing and have to convince @ryancordell.org that we should riff on it as part of our eventual logo/design for the Undead Media Lab

Ask me how recruitment is going for my current research project 🙃

Say what you will about Urbana-Champaign, but in no other town/city that I have lived in have I seen a person with a full bumper decal on their car reading "See You, Space Cowboy..."

It is the last day of my Preserving Information Resources through Media Archaeology class and students are reading @jameshodges.net new article on historicizing data from Surfrider. The article is 🔥 or perhaps more accurately 🌊. Either way, it is worth your time! www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Historicising web-based environmental data dashboards: surfrider.org, 1997-2025

Web-based data dashboards provide critical points of access for users hoping to gain knowledge concerning environmental phenomena, yet their historical development has not been explicitly tracked i...

tandfonline.com

I got to do some early use tests for the Undead Media Lab that I am co-creating with @ryancordell.org It was great to sent he students gravitate to both familiar and unfamiliar technologies and chat about how we might use it as it takes a more official form

Only *slightly* overshadowed by the papal encyclical...the proceedings for next week's ISIC (Information Seeking in Context) conference have just been published. Open access. Really intriguing work here! publicera.kb.se/ir

Didn't want to wade into the citation discourse, but just reviewed an article playing fast and loose with what my own work was about. It is necessary to read the stuff you cite beyond the title and, preferably, the abstract. I get it, publish or perish is real, but so is citational misinformation.

Apropos of nothing

Hackers 90s: The Plague Emerges

ALT: Hackers 90s: The Plague Emerges

static.klipy.com

Time to spend a few hours in floppy disk prez documentation 💾👾

Ryan Cordell@ryancordell.org · 3mo ago

Did @drtlwagner.bsky.social & I acquire a Greaseweazle card for @skeuomorphpress.org / The Undead Media lab that will—theoretically—allow us to connect floppy drives to modern computers via USB-C? Yes, yes we did.

CU folks: if we don’t blow away tonight, remember we’ve got Jess Whyte speaking in our “Media Necromancy” series @skeuomorphpress.org tomorrow—“What the Disk Remembers: Traces, Forensics, and Care in Media Recovery" ischool.illinois.edu/news-events/...

"Media Necromancy" Series: Jess Whyte

Jess Whyte, digital assets librarian at the university of Toronto, will present "What the Disk Remembers: Traces, Forensics, and Care in Media Recovery" as part of the "Media Necromancy" Series at Ske...

ischool.illinois.edu

After a short break, we'll turn to our NOSTALGIA panel. Presenters include Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org, Sabina Fazli, Tegan Pyke @tegan.online, Justine Provino, and Travis L. Wager @drtlwagner.bsky.social

🚨BIG NEWS🚨 I just signed a contact with MIT Press for my book "Psychedelic Software" 🥳 We all know the 60s counterculture influenced home computing conceptually, but this book uses digital forensics to show how hippie theories of consciousness were baked into software at a technical level too

Soon to be set up is a CRT which will help with era-specific media preservation and, hopefully, a bit of game/digital worlds emulation as well 😎

Ryan Cordell@ryancordell.org · 3mo ago

It’s amazing what a few shelves can do. @skeuomorphpress.org’s forthcoming Undead Media Lab collab with @drtlwagner.bsky.social is starting to look like a real place folks can tinker & research!

Is reading the intro to Browne and Nash' Queer Methods and Methodologies in an airport T.G.I. Friday's a form of praxis?

Excited to be working on this and to slowly add smaller and weirder screens to the mix 💀💀📼📼

Ryan Cordell@ryancordell.org · 4mo ago

I can never resist: a little preview of the new lab we’re building @skeuomorphpress.org with @drtlwagner.bsky.social The “Undead Media Lab” has a pretty catchy ring to it