What Are Digital Cultural Artifacts?
Culture is something we do, a performance which fades into memory then disappears, but the record of culture consists of artifacts which we make, which persist but inevitably decay. Like other media, digital cultures are simultaneously performances and artifacts, although digital artifacts are profoundly different from physical artifacts. We will not attempt a formal definition of something that is still being shaped by experimentation and practice, except to describe some of the parameters differentiating digital artifacts from other kinds of cultural artifacts that may be useful in building digital archives. Most notably, while things occupy places (and are therefore always local), digital documents are electronic signals with local storage but global range. As things, digital cultural artifacts are dramatically different from those in other media, as illustrated by these estimates of size. Type Example Size When Digital Newspaper Wall Street Journal 100Mbytes/year (text) Computer di
