Abstract
This paper presents Digital Ghosts, a practice-based research project exploring how creative and tactile approaches to web archives can reimagine engagement with digital cultural heritage and GLAM collections. Using exploratory visualisation of metadata, the project transforms the digital into interactive multimedia installations. Operating within the “post-digital” condition of GLAM, the project investigates how design can mediate between the technical infrastructures of preservation, traditional archivist practice, and the experiential, interpretive needs of users. Rather than treating messy humanities data as a failure, the project frames absence and inconsistency as evidence of the web’s fluid temporality and of institutional decisions about what counts as memory. Through user-testing workshops, visitor surveys and interviews with archivists and users, the research explores the role of visualization and interaction in accessing GLAM data. The paper argues that creative access is effective in sustaining engagement and encouraging data literacy, which are necessary for the sustainability of collections.
Keywords
web archives; data physicalisation; design research; digital heritage
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2963
Citation
Kaufmann, D., and Kocsis, A. (2026) Designing Digital Ghosts: Creative access to web archives, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2963
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Designing Digital Ghosts: Creative access to web archives
This paper presents Digital Ghosts, a practice-based research project exploring how creative and tactile approaches to web archives can reimagine engagement with digital cultural heritage and GLAM collections. Using exploratory visualisation of metadata, the project transforms the digital into interactive multimedia installations. Operating within the “post-digital” condition of GLAM, the project investigates how design can mediate between the technical infrastructures of preservation, traditional archivist practice, and the experiential, interpretive needs of users. Rather than treating messy humanities data as a failure, the project frames absence and inconsistency as evidence of the web’s fluid temporality and of institutional decisions about what counts as memory. Through user-testing workshops, visitor surveys and interviews with archivists and users, the research explores the role of visualization and interaction in accessing GLAM data. The paper argues that creative access is effective in sustaining engagement and encouraging data literacy, which are necessary for the sustainability of collections.