News/Research

Revisited: "Rogue Archives" Book Launch

16 Dec, 2016

Revisited: "Rogue Archives" Book Launch

We were so thrilled to support Abigail de Kosnik's launch of Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom at University Press Books on December 9th, 2016! Jane McGonigal, a game designer and author, joined Gail to discuss archives, fandom, and representation.

Rogue Archives examines the practice of archiving in the transition from print to digital media, looking in particular at Internet fan fiction archives. She explains that media users today regard all of mass culture as an archive, from which they can redeploy content for their own creations. Hence, “remix culture” and fan fiction are core genres of digital cultural production. She also explores, among other things, the anticanonical archiving styles of Internet preservationists; the volunteer labor of online archiving; how fan archives serve women and queer users as cultural resources; archivists’ efforts to attract racially and sexually diverse content; and how digital archives adhere to the logics of performance more than the logics of print. She also considers the similarities and differences among free culture, free software, and fan communities, and uses digital humanities tools to quantify and visualize the size, user base, and rate of growth of several online fan archives.

You can purchase a copy directly from MIT Press at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/rogue-archives