Digital Ghosts

As part of the Being Human Festival and the ESRC Festival of Social Science, the Digital Ghosts event series explores digital history through an interactive exhibition, workshop and museum late. By transforming Scottish web archive data into multimedia experiences, this series reveals the contested nature of archival processes as visions of the digital past, present, and future.

Exhibition

This exhibition invites the public to step into the forgotten corners of the internet through interactive data-driven artworks that transforms real web archive data into though-provoking, embodied experiences. From vanished websites to fading digital traces, this exhibition prompts reflection on what’s preserved, what’s lost, and what that reveals about Scotland’s identities and values.’

This exhibition is the outcome of an interdisciplinary project led by Dr. Andrea Kocsis in collaboration with multimedia artist Dorsey Kaufmann. Together, they assembled a team of archivists and librarians from the National Library of Scotland along with visualization developer Parker Kaufmann and Informatics MSc (Master of Science) students to explore novel computational and creative visualization techniques that enable public engagement with web archives.

Using exploratory visualization and interaction techniques, the exhibition pieces seek to uncover insights within the data and craft compelling visual narratives to engage wider audiences in the cultural significance of past, present and future web archives.

Three of the works were first created by Informatics MSc students Mansi Manoj, Qianhui Meng, and Shuyu Zhang under the supervision of Dorsey Kaufmann. Feeling Data, led by Kaufmann, adapted and expanded the students’ projects for public interaction, as well as producing two new works. The ‘Digital Ghosts’ centrepiece is an artist commission in which Kaufmann experiments with physicalising web archive data through UV projection onto cyanotype.

Events

Exhibition Late and Panel Discussion

During the Exhibition Late, the team behind the project hosted a panel discussion on Scotland’s digital footprints. Together, they explored how web archives are created, what gets included or left out, and why those choices matter, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the politics of web preservation.

Visualising Presence and Absence in Scotland’s Web Archives

This workshop explored the concept of “digital ghosts”: data that evolves, disappears, or behaves unpredictably. Led by artist Dorsey Kaufmann, whose work transformed Scottish web archive data into immersive visual experiences, the group examined how visual design can reveal patterns of digital disappearance and questioned how cultural memory is shaped by what is saved and what is lost.