Category Archives: Upcoming Event

Coming to DWeb Camp? Archive a Memento at the Migration Station

We have a new pop-up space at DWeb Camp this year: the Migration Station, a space for archiving migration mementos and self-organized workshops. The exact location is TBD, but it will be located near the Library and rock climbing station.

Planned layout of the Migration Station

Our theme of this year’s Camp is Migration: Moving Together — to touch upon what is a pertinent reality for so many worldwide, and relate their experience to the DWeb. Beyond a poetic metaphor for moving people from the centralized web to the decentralized web, we’d like to acknowledge how masses of people are displaced due to war, genocide, climate change, and other reasons, for the sake of survival. We want to reflect on how network technology can address their needs amidst catastrophe.

And along this theme, we’re inviting all Campers to bring a small memento (up to 5×5 inches/120×120 mm) to reflect on their own personal, or resonant, migration stories. At the Migration Station, you will be able to photograph the item, write a note, and record an audio story using the Custodisco and Audiovisco kiosks.

Photo of the Custodisco Kiosk, where you can photograph and add your migration story to the digital memento archive.

Over the course of the week, you will have an opportunity to add your objects and stories. After Camp, we will take this archive, as well as a carefully selected set of small objects folks are willing to part with, and create both a digital and physical time capsule to be buried for 24 years and unearthed in 2048. The physical time capsule will be buried at the Internet Archive. The digital time capsule will be preserved using a variety of different DWeb tools and protocols in order to practically test different approaches for cultural preservation.

The exact location where we’re planning on burying the physical time capsule, at the Internet Archive garden.

Memento Ideas

Possible mementos include: A copy of family photo or historical document; a shawl, scarf or other textiles that was worn or used to carry objects; hand made art, small statues, talismans or other religious artifacts; an interesting rock from a special place; jewelry, baskets, bags, or even an old key and the story of what it once unlocked.

If you’re unable to bring a memento, you can always visit the Art Barn to create something at Camp.

A very limited number of objects will fit into the time capsule, so if you’d like your object to be considered for inclusion, please bring a memento that is no larger than a CD and is robust enough to survive for 24 years underground (i.e. no low quality paper or organic material). If your object is larger than a CD, or you don’t want to part with your object for sentimental reasons, you will still have the opportunity to create an entry in the digital archive recording your object and its story.

Above is a photo of DWeb Camp’s Executive Producer, Wendy Hanamura’s grandmother and grandfather. Wendy will be archiving the story of how both of her grandmothers came to the United States as picture brides through Angel Island in California.  

Migration Station Workshops

Throughout the week, the space will also offer self-organizing workshops, including:

  • Collective story sharing/listening
  • Archive exploration sessions
  • Discussions on archiving experiences
  • Map drawing workshops
  • Working with the archival material (ex. noise cleaning, translations)
  • Reviewing favorite archived materials
  • Discussions on the future significance of the archive

We hope you bring your mementos, stories, and dreams.

See you at the Migration Station.

Book Talk: Attack from Within by Barbara McQuade

Join us for a VIRTUAL book talk with legal scholar BARBARA McQUADE on her New York Times bestseller, ATTACK FROM WITHIN, about disinformation’s impact on democracy. NYU professor and author CHARLTON McILWAIN will facilitate our discussion.

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“A comprehensive guide to the dynamics of disinformation and a necessary call to the ethical commitment to truth that all democracies require.”

Timothy Snyder, author of the New York Times bestseller On Tyranny

American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation—the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth—and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It’s endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility.

In Attack from Within, legal scholar and analyst Barbara McQuade, shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it. The book includes:

  • The authoritarian playbook: a brief history of disinformation from Mussolini and Hitler to Bolsonaro and Trump, chronicles the ways in which authoritarians have used disinformation to seize and retain power.
  • Disinformation tactics—like demonizing the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts; stoking violence—and why they work.
  • An explanation of why America is particularly vulnerable to disinformation and how it exploits our First Amendment Freedoms, sparks threats and violence, and destabilizes social structures.
  • Real, accessible solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, increasing media literacy in schools, criminalizing doxxing, and much more.

Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2021 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country’s hard-won democracy.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS

BARBARA McQUADE is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, where she teaches criminal law and national security law. She is also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. From 2010 to 2017, McQuade served as the U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. She was appointed by President Barack Obama, and was the first woman to serve in her position. McQuade also served as vice chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and co-chaired its Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee.

Before her appointment as U.S. Attorney, McQuade served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit for 12 years, including service as Deputy Chief of the National Security Unit. In that role, she prosecuted cases involving terrorism financing, foreign agents, threats, and export violations. McQuade serves on a number of non-profit boards, and served on the Biden-Harris Transition Team in 2020-2021. She has been recognized by The Detroit News with the Michiganian of the Year Award, the Detroit Free Press with the Neal Shine Award for Exemplary Regional Leadership, Crain’s Detroit Business as a Newsmaker of the Year and one of Detroit’s Most Influential Women, and the Detroit Branch NAACP and Arab American Civil Rights League with their Tribute to Justice Award. McQuade is a graduate of the University of Michigan and its law school. She and her husband live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and have four children.s an assistant professor of English at Emory University with a courtesy appointment in quantitative theory and methods. He is the author of American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse (2020). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of BooksThe RumpusDissent, and other publications.

CHARLTON McILWAIN
Author of the recent book, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter, Dr. Charlton McIlwain is Vice Provost for Faculty Development, Pathways & Public Interest Technology at New York University, where he is also Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. He works at the intersections of computing technology, race, inequality, and racial justice activism. He has served as an expert witness in landmark U.S. Federal Court cases on reverse redlining/racial targeting in mortgage lending and recently testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services about the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on the financial services sector. He is the author of the recent PolicyLink report Algorithmic Discrimination: A Framework and Approach to Auditing & Measuring the Impact of Race-Targeted Digital Advertising. He writes regularly for outlets such as The Guardian, Slate’s Future Tense, MIT Technology Review and other outlets about the intersection of race and technology. McIlwain is the founder of the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies, and is Board President at Data & Society Research Institute. He leads NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology, is NYU’s Designee to the Public Interest Technology University Network, and serves on the executive committee as co-chair of the ethics panel for the International Panel on the Information Environment.

Book Talk: Attack from Within by Barbara McQuade
Thursday, June 6 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now for the virtual event!

Weird Tales from the Public Domain: Freeing Culture from Corporate Captivity

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The mouse that became Mickey will finally be free of his corporate captivity as the copyright term of the 1928 animated Disney film, Steamboat Willie, expires along with that of thousands of other cultural works on the first day of 2024.

The year 1928 brought us a host of still relevant, oft-revived and remixed culture, from H.P. Lovecraft’s classic horror story, “Call of Cthulhu” (originally published in Weird Tales; now currently a popular video game), to the Threepenny Opera, a critique of income inequality and the excesses of capitalism that is surprisingly on point for our current era.

And further, classic works of literature such as Orlando by Virginia Woolfe, Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, and Black Magic by Paul Mourad; children’s literature like House on Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, which introduced the character Tigger, and Millions of Cats by Wanda Gág; movies like Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, and Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman; and music like Dorothy Field’s “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” and Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” will grow the rich set of materials that are freely available to all of us as part of the public domain.  

Join us for a virtual celebration at 10am PT / 1pm ET on January 25, 2024, with an amazing lineup of academics, librarians, musicians, artists and advocates coming together to help illuminate the significance of this new class of works entering the public domain!

Of course our program wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of Generative AI, which to some has become a new kind of Eldritch God unleashed upon humanity—a Chtulhu of sorts—out to alter or control human reality. New AI technologies have raised all kinds of questions about human creativity, and the various monsters we must vanquish in order to preserve it. We’ll get into all that and more in our panel discussion of AI, Creativity and the Public Domain.

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This event is co-hosted by Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, Library Futures, SPARC and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

More ways to celebrate the public domain!

In addition to our virtual event on January 25th, we are also hosting an in-person party & film screening at the Internet Archive on January 24th for our Public Domain Remix Contest.

Public Domain Day Party in San Francisco! Celebrate 1928

Step into a time capsule of creativity on January 24, 2024, at the Internet Archive, as we celebrate the release of new cultural treasures into the public domain. Join us for an unforgettable evening filled with period tunes, classic cocktails, and a cinematic journey into the past. These works, once bound by copyright restrictions, will be released into the wild, opening up new opportunities for artistic expression, adaptation, and innovation.

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Discover the enchantment of animation with a special screening of Steamboat Willie on the large screen. Come together to witness the beloved icon, Mickey Mouse, as he enters the public domain. Let’s rejoice in this moment that commemorates the lasting legacy of a cultural gem that has captivated hearts across generations. Film Historian Eric Smoodin will explore the history of Steamboat Willie and how a mouse changed the entertainment world.

Be captivated by the cinematic brilliance of our annual short film contest winners. These films, inspired by the vast public domain materials on the Internet Archive, showcase the boundless possibilities of reimagining classic works.

Embrace the spirit of 1928 by dressing in your finest flapper dresses, dapper suits, and don’t forget the feathered headbands. You’re not just attending an event; you’re stepping into a world where every outfit tells a story. Be the “Bee’s Knees” and the “Cat’s Pajamas” as you immerse yourself in the glamour of a bygone era.

No celebration from the Jazz Age is complete without a classic cocktail. Let the clink of glasses echo the liberation of creative works now set free in the public domain.

Come share an evening of revelry, inspiration, and artistic freedom with us. Be part of a celebration where the past becomes the canvas for the future. Let the reimagining begin, and together, let’s toast to a world of boundless creativity in the public domain. See you there in your finest attire!

Where: Internet Archive – 300 Funston
When: 6pm to 8 pm
Cost: $15
Register now!

More ways to celebrate the public domain

In addition to our in-person event on January 24th & our film remix contest, we are also hosting a virtual celebration on January 25th, “Weird Tales from the Public Domain: Freeing Culture from Corporate Captivity”—register now!

Join Us for Our Annual Celebration – Thursday, October 12!

We are just one week away from our annual celebration on Thursday, October 12! Party in the streets with us in person or celebrate with us online—however you choose to join in the festivities, be sure to grab your ticket now!

What’s in Store?

📚 Empowering Research: We’ll explore how research libraries like the Internet Archive are considering artificial intelligence in a live presentation, “AI @ IA: Research in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” Come see how the Internet Archive is using AI to build new capabilities into our library, and how students and scholars all over the world use the Archive’s petabytes of data to inform their own research.

🏆 Internet Archive Hero Award: This year, we’re honored to recognize the incredible Connie Chan, our local District 1 supervisor, with the prestigious Internet Archive Hero Award. Supervisor Chan’s unwavering support for the digital rights of libraries culminated in a unanimously passed resolution at the Board of Supervisors, and we can’t wait to present her with this well-deserved honor live from our majestic Great Room. Join us in applauding her remarkable contributions!

🌮 Food Truck Delights: Arrive early and tantalize your taste buds with an assortment of treats from our gourmet food trucks.

💃 Street Party: After the ceremony, let loose and dance the night away to the tunes of local musicians, Hot Buttered Rum. Get ready to groove and celebrate under the starry San Francisco sky!

🎟️ Register now for in-person or online attendance!

Internet Archive’s Annual Celebration
Thursday, October 12 from 5pm – 10pm PT; program at 7pm PT
300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Register now for in-person or online attendance

Book Talk: Sparks by Ian Johnson

Join author Ian Johnson and sociologist Li Jun for an IN-PERSON discussion about “Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future”

Click Here to Watch the Recording

Sparks tells the resonant story of writers, filmmakers, and artists who use history to challenge Communist Party rule.

6:00 PM — Doors Open
6:30 PM — Book Talk: Sparks by Ian Johnson
7:30 PM — Book Signing

Please note that this event will be held in person at the Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco.

Click Here to Watch the Recording

About Sparks
Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (to be published by Oxford University Press on September 26, 2023) describes how some of China’s best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.

The past is a battleground in many countries, but in China it is crucial to political power. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism’s triumph. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and glorify its rule. Indeed, one of Xi Jinping’s signature policies is the control of history, which he equates with the party’s survival.

But in recent years, a network of independent writers, artists, and filmmakers have begun challenging this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China’s legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a regular pattern of disasters: from famines and purges of years past to ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present–powerful and inspiring accounts that have underpinned recent protests in China against Xi Jinping’s strongman rule.

Based on years of first-hand research in Xi Jinping’s China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity’s great struggles of memory against forgetting—a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.

Ian Johnson is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has lived more than twenty years in China as a student, journalist, and teacher. His work appears regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and other publications, and for five years he was on the editorial board of The Journal of Asian Studies. He has won numerous prizes for his coverage of China, including a Pulitzer Prize.

Li Jun (who writes under the penname Li Sipan) is a Ph.D. in political sociology, and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Before entering academia, she was an investigative reporter for the liberal newspaper group Southern Daily Press and a recognized feminist activist. In 2004, she founded the feminist communications NGO Women’s Awakening Network (新媒体女性), which has played a leading role in China’s anti-sexual harassment campaigns and in the process of legislating against domestic violence. Li’s research focuses on the intergenerational differences in the feminist movement as well as the relationship between the media and the feminist movement in China.

Book Talk: Sparks by Ian Johnson
October 19 @ 6pm PT
IN-PERSON @ 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Register now!

Book Talk: Memory, Edited

Join archivist Rick Prelinger and author Abby Smith Rumsey for an IN-PERSON discussion about “Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History.”

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An exploration of historical memory and networks of meaning in the context of today’s crises of extremism and polarization.

6:00 PM — Doors Open
6:30 PM — Book Talk: Memory, Edited
7:30 PM — Book Signing

Please note that this event will be held in person at the Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco.

REGISTER NOW

About Memory, Edited
As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about what has happened and what is happening become ever more relevant. In Memory, Edited, Abby Smith Rumsey examines collective memory, how it binds us, and how it can be used by bad actors to manipulate us. Bringing forward the voices of a rich cast of Eastern European artists from the past two hundred years—from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Gerhard Richter—Rumsey shows how their work and lives illustrate the devastation wrought by regimes dependent on entrenched lies to survive. This hijacking of the narrative polarizes communities even as it commandeers our future.

Through an interdisciplinary lens that includes the best thinking from history, the arts, cognitive science, psychology, and political philosophy, Rumsey lays bare our narratives, showing how they are constructed and how they have changed over time. Ever-aware of resisting the false promise of utopia, Rumsey argues that only by confronting the past and reckoning with the crimes that were committed can we ever hope to heal and gain self-knowledge. Memory, Edited is an indispensable text for anyone who cares about democracy, equality, and freedom in our current age of crisis.

Abby Smith Rumsey is an intellectual and cultural historian. She chairs the board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and is the author of When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future.

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator.

Book Talk: Memory, Edited
September 20 @ 6pm PT
IN-PERSON @ 300 Funston Avenue, SF
Register now!

The Best Things in Life Are Free: Two Ways to Celebrate Public Domain Day in 2023

The moon belongs to everyone, so says the 1927 hit musical composition, “The Best Things In Life Are Free.” We agree! In January of 2023, a treasure trove of new cultural works will become as free as the moon and the stars, and we at Internet Archive, Creative Commons and many other leaders from the open world plan to throw a party to celebrate!

Next year, works published in 1927 will join the myriad creative building blocks of our shared culture heritage. The public domain will grow richer with books from authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, silent film classics like the controversial The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson and Fritz Lang’s dystopian Metropolis, and snappy musical compositions like You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream.

You can welcome new public domain works and party with us two ways:

Join us for a virtual party on January 19, 2023 at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern time where we will celebrate our theme, The Best Things In Life Are Free, with a host of entertainers, historians, librarians, academics, activists and other leaders from the open world, including additional sponsoring organizations Library Futures, SPARC, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. REGISTER FOR THE VIRTUAL EVENT HERE!

The Internet Archive will also host an in-person Film Remix Contest Screening Party on January 20, 2023 at 6pm at 300 Funston Ave in San Francisco. We will celebrate 1927 as founding year of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, while watching this year’s Public Domain Day Remix Contest winning entries, eating popcorn and ice cream. Come dressed in your best golden age of Hollywood inspired costume and walk the red carpet with the Internet Archive as we celebrate the entry of “talkies” into the public domain. REGISTER FOR THE IN-PERSON PARTY IN SAN FRANCISCO HERE!

Public Domain Day 2023 Remix Contest: The Internet Archive is Looking For Creative Short Films Made By You!

We are looking for artists of all levels to create and upload a short film of 2–3 minutes to the Internet Archive to help us celebrate Public Domain Day on 20 January 2023!

Public Domain Day is a celebration of all the rich materials that will be newly available to the public free of copyright restrictions. On January 1, 2023, most works published in 1927 will ascend into the Public Domain in the United States. We want artists to use this newly available content to create short films using resources from the Internet Archive’s collections from 1927. 

The uploaded videos will be judged and prizes of up to $1500 awarded!! (Please see details below)

Winners will be announced and shown at the in-person Public Domain Day Celebration at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco on 20 January 2023. All other participating videos will be added to a Public Domain Day Collection on archive.org and featured in a blog entry in January of 2023.

Here are a few examples of some of the materials that will become public domain on January 1, 2023:

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:  

  • The Best Things in Life Are Free
  • Sleuthing the Public Domain
  • What can 1927 teach us about 2023?

Guidelines

  • Make a 2–3 minute movie using at least one work published in 1927 that will become Public Domain on January 1 , 2023. This could be a poem, book, film, musical composition, painting, photograph or any other work that will become Public Domain next year. The more different PD materials you use, the better!
    • Note: If you have a resource from 1927 that is not available on archive.org, you may upload it and then use it in your submission. (Here is how to do that). 
  • Your submission must have a soundtrack. It can be your own voiceover or performance of a public domain musical composition, or you may use public domain or CC0 sound recordings from sources like Openverse and the Free Music Archive.
    • Note: Sound recordings published before 1923 are in the public domain. Sound recordings published later than Jan 1, 1923 are NOT public domain, even if the underlying musical composition is, so watch out for this!
  • Mix and Mash content however you like, but note that ALL of your sources must be from the public domain. They do not all have to be from 1927. Remember, U.S. government works are public domain no matter when they are published. So feel free to use those NASA images! You may include your own original work if you put a CC0 license on it.
  • Add a personal touch, make it yours!
  • Keep the videos light hearted and fun! (It is a celebration after all!)

Submission Deadline

All submissions must be in by Midnight, 16 January 2023 (PST)

How to Submit

Prizes

  • 1st prize: $1500
  • 2nd prize: $1000
  • 3rd prize: $500

*All prizes sponsored by the Kahle/Austin Foundation

Judges

Judges will be looking for videos that are fun, interesting and use public domain materials, especially those from 1927. They will be shown at the in-person Public Domain Day party and should highlight the value of having cultural materials that can be reused, remixed, and re-contextualized for a new day. Winners’ pieces will be purchased with the prize money, and viewable  on the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons license.

  • Amir Saber Esfahani (Director of Special Arts Projects, Internet Archive)
  • Rick Prelinger (Board Member, Internet Archive, Founder, Prelinger Archives)
  • Yuanxiao Xu (Deputy Counsel, Creative Commons)

Previous Winners: