Digital Ghosts

Digital Ghosts is a data-driven exhibition that invites audiences to explore and interact with web archive data through a series of visual, tactile, and embodied experiences. The project began with a simple question: how do you visualize disappearance? While web archives are often understood as tools of preservation, they are equally records of loss, capturing traces of websites, communities, and digital cultures that have changed, vanished, or become inaccessible over time. Most methods for visualizing data are designed around presence - charts, maps, and networks that help us count, compare, and classify what exists. But what happens when the thing we want to understand is missing, fragmented, or decays over time? Rather than treating absence as an error, Digital Ghosts explores how gaps, silences, and missing traces can be made visible and meaningful. Drawing on web archive datasets from the National Library of Scotland, the exhibition transforms metadata into interactive visualizations, projections, and data physicalisations that reveal patterns of digital decay and preservation. By treating missing data as a meaningful part of the story rather than a flaw to be corrected, the project encourages visitors to consider why certain digital histories disappear, what those absences reveal, and how design can help us understand the fragile and incomplete nature of our online memory.

#Digital Humanities#Uncertainty Visualization#Physicalization

https://feelingdata.studio/digital-ghosts/