This Week in Preserving the Feminist Internet
Our feminist approach and A.I.R Gallery's capture
As some of you may know, TFI recently launched our new project, Preserving the Feminist Internet, alongside our Kickstarter campaign! Your donations go twice as far as an anonymous donor is matching dollar-for-dollar.
As this project develops, we’ll be ingesting our web captures into our digital archive and posting updates on our Substack and blog. This post will specifically explore the ethics and practices that guide this project.
Our Feminist Approach
We approach our work within feminist ethics of care. For this project, that looks like gaining all appropriate permissions and building trust while capturing feminist individuals and organizations’ digital presence. Websites are identified for different thematic capsule collections and by risk of website longevity.
Our web-archiving policies ensure that our practices are aligning with our organizational values. TFI practices non-intrusive harvesting and gets permission from all website owners before capturing any digital material. Website owners also maintain all rights to their materials.
We use Webrecorder’s open-source web archiving tools, including Browsertrix Crawler and ArchiveWeb.Page. The selection of open-source systems and software was a deliberate choice; the Feminist Principles of the Internet advocate using open-source software tools and platforms as feminist praxis. Using community-based open-source systems aligns with TFI’s mission and the user community we serve.
This Week’s Capture
This week, we captured A.I.R Gallery’s website! Since its opening in 1976, A.I.R. has been crucial to the careers of many women artists and curators who are now household names, allowing them to experiment and show their works in ways that the traditional gallery and institutional models would not allow. The gallery continues to feature the works of its members include women and non-binary artists from across the United States.
TFI. A.I.R’s Homepage. 2023.
Our Director of Archives and Special Projects, Marie Williams Chant, used Webrecorder’s open-source web archiving tools to capture A.I.R’s entire website. A.I.R has an important digital feminist presence as an organization that champions women and non-binary artists. This capture will help illustrate digital feminist art in our digital archive and provide a copy of this contribution to feminist culture online.
TFI. A.I.R’s Homepage. 2023.
Keep an eye out for weekly updates on Preserving the Feminist Internet!
