When you join an academic department, you are just one body and mind among many others doing what you do: teach, write, go to conferences, answer a lot of student emails, advise, etc. However, what you don’t get to do is really see your colleagues very often. While we come together far too frequently for faculty meetings, once you are done, you just want to scuttle out of the room (and as quickly as possible) to continue what seems to be an endless stream of work. But over the course of months and years, there are times and moments when you do come across your colleagues and their work: you may assign some of their work in your class class, go see them speak at an event, or learn about their work over coffee.

This weekend during a PhD prospective weekend, I finally got to learn about what is probably one of the coolest projects to come out of my department, The Dead Media Archive run by Ben Kafka and Alex Galloway for their Dead Media Archeology Class.

Loosely inspired by a mailing list by the same name started years ago by Bruce Sterling (which eventually suffered its own death), they are collecting information and analyzing the significance of all sorts of Dead Media, some of which were quite present and important for our economy and communication systems, others which flickered much more briefly as a bright idea but never really caught on. As part of their class assignments, students have to write in-depth descriptions, histories, and analysis’ of these objects and they are fantastic; so if you are into dead media, do check out the archive.