It is time to start thinking about how to design the future archival repository of virtual world artifacts. This repository could be a digital repository filled with files and metadata, or it could  be an extension of the bricks-and-mortar repository constructed with virtual world technology. Just as the technologies of virtual world production and the activities that took place inside them grew out of technologies of simulation, entertainment, and gaming, this virtual repository will deploy these technologies to accept models and maps from other spaces, and to make it possible also to construct and engage experiences.  When Ivan Sutherland argued in his famous essay on the "Ultimate Display" (1965) that, “By working with such displays of mathematical phenomena we can learn to know them as well as we know our own natural world,” he was advancing a possibility for historical knowledge as well. The history of virtual worlds is the perfect vehicle for beginning the work of building such archives and cultural repositories.

Speaker bio:

Henry Lowood is Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, as well as Film & Media Studies, in the Stanford University Libraries. He is also a lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology and Society Program and the Introduction to the Humanities program at Stanford. Since 2000, he has been director of the How They Got Game Project in the Stanford Humanities Laboratory (SHL), a research project focused on the history of computer games and simulations; since 2004, he has been co-director of the SHL, as well. Among the many initiatives undertaken by the How They Got Game Project, he is curator of The Machinima Archive, a collection of game-based movies hosted and preserved by the Internet Archive, and is hard at work on the preserving virtual worlds project, funded by the U.S. Library of Congress, to develop practices for preservation of digital games and virtual worlds.