Sixteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

This study introduces the Data Lifeboat, a novel curatorial tool developed by the Flickr Foundation to address critical challenges in social media collecting. Traditional archival methods falter when confronting the scale, ephemerality and platform dependencies of social photography — leading to significant gaps in our shared digital cultural heritage. Developed through a series of co-design workshops with archivists, librarians, technologists and curators, the Data Lifeboat enables lightweight, durable, portable downloads of Flickr images with their valuable social metadata (comments, tags, EXIF data etc) preserved. Designed to remedy losses from the ongoing ‘Digital Dark Age’, where digital records often prove more fragile than physical ones, Data Lifeboat facilitates citizen-driven collections of networked social photography: a distinct entity in photography’s history. We explore the tool’s democratic potential through our Data Lifeboat documenting the 2019 Notre Dame fire. While media outlets produced uniform coverage, Flickr’s community revealed multidimensional perspectives — bystanders documenting flames along the Seine, workers capturing reconstruction efforts, locals sharing views of their transformed neighborhood. This citizen-generated content captures overlooked narratives that expand representation in digital preservation, creating richer historical records than institutional documentation alone provides. This approach can counter collecting biases by empowering communities themselves to determine what merits preservation and provide contextual annotations often absent from official archives. Put more broadly, Data Lifeboats can distribute collecting power, allowing communities and individuals to hold their own collections. Thus Data Lifeboats represent both technical innovation and an opportunity to develop more inclusive, community-driven digital preservation practices.