The Internet is forever, it is said. It is an aphorism cautioning us to safeguard our privacy, safety and reputation. Our words and actions on the internet carry an indelible digital footprint. Nude selfies, screenshots of private conversations, personal information leaked in a data breach, among other things, once posted on the internet are notoriously hard to scrub off. Still, the curious reality is that “digital permanence” does not necessarily extend to the things that we want published online and preserved forever. For example, some websites shut down, suffer link rot, or become unreadable owing to a lack of maintenance. Digital storage formats become obsolete, sometimes intentionally, a phenomenon known as planned obsolescence. Cloud storage isn’t any different either – in 2018, the image and video-hosting service Flickr reduced its free storage from 1 Terabyte per account to only 1,000 photos or videos. Users had roughly one month to back up the content they stood to lose after which Flickr actively deleted the content above the free limit. Writer and designer Michael Steeber tweeted, “...The photos are mundane, but document the history of our culture. Flickr is burning a digital Library of Alexandria.”
The solution is to open-licence the works and make one or more copies. (LOCKSS -- Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe – is the literal name of a program at Stanford Libraries that provides open-source technologies and services for digital preservation.) However, with it comes a two-fold problem. One, digital preservation is challenging; it requires money, expertise, know-how, other wherewithal, maintenance and careful attention. Two, once a work becomes openly and easily accessible to everyone, how does one deter and respond to plagiarism, unattributed use, and other unethical uses of it? How does one protect one’s work while upholding openness?
In terms of the first, the implication of the loss of digital records is more than what we’d imagine. A study published in 2020 by Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, and Najko Jahn identified “174 open-access journals that, through lack of comprehensive and open archives, vanished from the web between 2000 and 2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world.” The researchers go on to state, “Our results raise vital concern for the integrity of the scholarly record and highlight the urgency to take collaborative action to ensure continued access and prevent the loss of more scholarly knowledge.”
Feminist knowledge, information, stories, opinions, art and media must be produced, disseminated and preserved in a way that acknowledges and visibilises us and our contributions, and is easily accessible to the world at large.
With regard to the second, feminist methods and processes of the production, publication, dissemination and preservation of knowledge and information must reflect the principles and philosophies we embrace. Feminist knowledge, information, stories, opinions, art and media must be produced, disseminated and preserved in a way that acknowledges and visibilises us and our contributions, and is easily accessible to the world at large. As a Wikimedian and supporter of the concept and philosophies of openness, I want my contribution to be accessible and not go in vain. I licence all my work and play, even the photos of encyclopaedic value that I take while on holiday. It makes me proud and happy to see others put my contributions to use, build on them, make them richer and better, and take them far and wide. At the same time, like many researchers, I believe that research is reliable when it is transparent and reproducible. The integrity and veracity of my research are sacrosanct to me and I ensure that my work is thorough, rigorous and independently verifiable.
Screenshot of a tweet by lecturer Clément Canonne creatively urging for rightful attribution.
I often find that my work is plagiarised or otherwise used in unethical ways with nary a footnote or attribution to me. Not only are such practices unethical, they also invisibilise feminists and their contributions, knowledge and creativity in the exact form that it was released to the world. There is a possibility that these practices create a perception that I plagiarised from or built upon the ideas, unattributed, of those who, in reality, plagiarised from me. Therefore, it is even more imperative to record, publish and disseminate my work in ways that maintain its integrity, credibility and veracity, and in turn, my reputation as a researcher. If necessary, I want to be able to conclusively prove that it is my own work, which I created and published before the plagiarised or unattributed work appeared.
I save a copy of all my published work on the Internet Archive. The Wayback Machine through the tool Wayback Changes allows making a comparison between different versions of an archived web page, in case it changes. A few other freely available tools allow page comparison of content in different online archives.
This has saved my work from being lost. For example, recently, I found that a website where one of my articles was published had suffered a technical glitch because of which its text had become unreadable. While I requested the website admin to fix it, I was still able to reference and instantly share a perfectly readable copy of my article from the Internet Archive.
I often find that my work is plagiarised or otherwise used in unethical ways with nary a footnote or attribution to me. Not only are such practices unethical, they also invisibilise feminists and their contributions, knowledge and creativity in the exact form that it was released to the world.
I also save a copy on the Internet Archive of all the references I cite in my work and maintain a reference list on Zotero. That way, in case the references disappear from the internet or undergo unexpected changes, I continue to have access to the sources I cited. This also allows me to establish and exhibit that my work is informed by and is an extension of the work that others have done before me – a practice that is critical to me as a feminist researcher.
In one instance, I used the Internet Archive and Perma.cc (another tool for archiving) to preserve evidence of the false claims that someone had repeatedly made about some work done by me and others. It bolstered our response to the falsehoods and misrepresentation in ways that taking screenshots would not have.
Perma.cc, which is free for some entities and available with a paid subscription for individuals, is another method of archiving a snapshot of a web page in a way that the snapshot is unchangeable. Perma.cc is developed and maintained by the Harvard Law School Library and other university libraries and organisations.
For my works that require a digital object identifier (DOI), I upload and publish them on Zenodo. It either generates a DOI or accepts an existing one. A digital object is a piece of digital information, e.g,, a text file or a video. A DOI uniquely identifies a digital object accompanied by information such as who created it and when (the exact timestamp). DOIs make it easy to track and attribute the official, published version of an article, dataset, academic paper, book etc. All files uploaded on Zenodo can be freely downloaded. From Zenodo, it propagates to other open repositories and thus becomes more widely available and discoverable. One can indicate that certain works are related to or dependent on each other, for example, this article that my co-author and I wrote, which is based on this dataset that we created. When a record is deleted, Zenodo displays its metadata and the reason for its removal and not a 404 error message. That a certain record once existed, why and when it was removed and by whom, is critical information that contributes to integrity and credibility.
Zenodo is built and operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and OpenAire. Zenodo states that it will exist as long as CERN does, which means that there is a reasonable guarantee that works published on Zenodo will remain safe and accessible for a considerable time. Among other options for obtaining a DOI, organising all the material related to a published work or project, maintaining a record of different versions of files in a transparent manner while sharing them with others are the Open Science Framework (OSF), ResearchGate and GitHub. There are several DOI registration agencies, such as the non-profits CrossRef and DataCite. Whereas, ORCID uniquely identifies authors and their works, and Scholia creates visual scholarly profiles (hat tip: Jens Bemme who introduced me to Scholia).
Feminist research, advocacy, art and journalism are done by people who are often on some of the highest difficulty settings in the game of life, those who are excluded, invisibilised or oppressed owing to their class, gender, caste, colour, disability or other identities. To be denied attribution via a tiny 9-point-font size footnote or a hyperlink, let alone a direct reference, robs our work of recognition and legitimacy, diminishes the value of our labour and expertise, and appropriates our life’s experiences and realities.
In addition, it is possible to practise gradations of openness. For example, at RightsCon 2023, the speakers (including me) and the facilitator decided not to have the session live streamed or its video recording published. The session was on a sensitive topic and we wanted everyone there to be able to speak freely. Later, we licensed and published a redacted transcript and a slide deck from the session, both with a DOI.
Wikimedia Commons is a media repository and a sister project of Wikipedia. The popularity and easy searchability and discoverability of content on Wikimedia projects makes it an ideal place for media that carries a Creative Commons licence. (Wikimedia Commons does not allocate or accept a DOI). A word cloud of some major Indian scripts that I created and uploaded on the Commons more than a decade ago is present on hundreds of web pages and a book. A Commons video I shot with a native speaker of Uipo (also called Khoibu) is the only licensed video on the internet of someone speaking the language. Uipo is an endangered language in India with only about 25,000 speakers.
Plagiarism, lack of attribution, and acts such as denying the creator status/authorship of legitimate contributors is problematic for many reasons, and especially so, when done by persons who are more privileged socially, economically or politically than the ones whose work has been stolen or diluted. Many of our ‘outputs’ are achieved on pay that is peanuts, shoestring budgets for projects, gruelling work conditions or environments, and professional hazard and personal risk, sometimes to life and limb. Even the work that is entirely intellectual and emotional may result in vicarious trauma for researchers, activists, media professionals, artists, et al. Feminist research, advocacy, art and journalism are done by people who are often on some of the highest difficulty settings in the game of life, those who are excluded, invisibilised or oppressed owing to their class, gender, caste, colour, disability or other identities. To be denied attribution via a tiny 9-point-font size footnote or a hyperlink, let alone a direct reference, robs our work of recognition and legitimacy, diminishes the value of our labour and expertise, and appropriates our life’s experiences and realities.
Harking back to the question of the virality and permanence of violative content such as non-consensual nudes on the Internet: it comes from strong drivers such as monetary gain, vendetta, misogyny, and voyeurism, among other things. Open initiatives for the digital preservation of knowledge and information, on the other hand, tend to be underfunded, neglected and de-prioritised. They require commitment and significant and careful investment of time, money, expertise, effort and attention. It is a case of skewed incentives and motivators.
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