Category Archives: archeology

It Takes a Village to Save a Hard Drive

In the final days of  the XFR STN exhibition at the New Museum, we encountered what was hands-down the most challenging born-digital recovery to have occured during the run of the exhibition. On August 30th, artist Phil Sanders arrived at the New Museum with an amalgam floppy disks, and two external hard disk drives. XFR STN […]

Media Archeology: The VODER

I wrote a piece for Rhizome about an object that is currently on display at the New Museum for the Ghosts in the Machine exhibition: Homer Dudley’s VODER. It’s a really fantastic piece of history that arguably ushered in the modern era of speech synthesis, and influenced culture in some very significant ways. Here’s the full article, […]

Keyboard Archeology

I came across an interesting question on twitter a few days ago that sent me spiraling into a brief bout of research. Via Matthew Kirschenbaum, Matt Schneider posed the question of when the greater than (>) and less than (<) symbols first appeared on keyboards. I managed to come up with two contenders.     Above […]