We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World (Book)
Title: We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World
Author: Brian Michael Murphy
Abstract: Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America’s most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. We the Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family, while contemporary technologists seek ever more durable and denser materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469668284/we-the-dead/
Primary URL Description: University of North Carolina Press
Secondary URL: https://www.amazon.com/We-Dead-Preserving-Data-World/dp/1469668289/
Secondary URL Description: amazon.com
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1469668284
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Panic at the Library (Article)
Title: Panic at the Library
Author: Brian Michael Murphy
Abstract: The sinister history of fumigating "foreign" books.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/panic-library
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Magazine
Periodical Title: Lapham's Quarterly
Publisher: Lapham's Quarterly

Data Storage Is Reaching the Limits of Physics (Article)
Title: Data Storage Is Reaching the Limits of Physics
Author: Brian Michael Murphy
Abstract: To improve hard drives, engineers are looking to new technologies and factories in orbit.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/data-storage-is-reaching-the-limits-of-physics-11661435363
Format: Newspaper
Periodical Title: The Wall Street Journal
Publisher: The Wall Street Journal

We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World (Book)
Title: We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World
Author: Brian Michael Murphy
Year: 2022
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph

Permalink: https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/products.aspx?gn=FT-270775-20