2022 MIAP Thesis Week

**IN ACCORDANCE WITH NYU GUIDELINES AND MEASURES REGARDING THE STATUS OF THE COVID-19 VIRUS, ALL PRESENTATIONS WILL BE HOSTED VIA ZOOM.**

Please join us Tuesday, March 29, Wednesday, March 30 and Thursday, March 31, as students in the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program present their M.A. thesis projects. This year, students will share insightful overviews in video game preservation, archiving podcasts, shared storage practices, home movies, international collections, and archiving digital porn.

Registration is now closed. If you have already registered, links to join each individual Zoom meeting will be sent from tisch.preservation@nyu.edu the morning of each event. Please check your spam folders if you haven't received an invitation including these links at least one hour prior to the session. If you have any problems, please email tisch.preservation@nyu.edu.

Tuesday, March 29th

9:30 - 10:30 AM EST Michael Stetz - Leveling Up Emulation: The Benefits of Field Programmable Gate Arrays in Video Game Preservation

Over the past few years, there has been a push in hobbyist circles to create cycle accurate video game emulators utilizing programmable integrated circuit boards. This paper investigates the history of hardware emulator development, tests their accuracy in emulating original 16-bit consoles, and makes an argument for their use in video game preservation.

10:45 - 11:45 AM EST Kayla Henry-Griffin - Pressing Restart 2.0.1: Planning the Future of Video Game Preservation

Kayla Henry-Griffin's thesis focuses on advocating for particular video game preservation topics to be discussed within both the archiving and game enthusiasts communities. The thesis also provides a project plan for another Pressing Restart Video Game Preservation Conference in the future.

12:00 - 1:00 PM EST Alyosha R Nowlin - Through the Light Beam: Preserving the Crazy Films of François Miron

This thesis outlines a preservation strategy for seven short works by Canadian experimental filmmaker François Miron. Selected by the filmmaker for a decade-long retrospective, these films comprise the finest of Miron’s optical printing experiments.

Wednesday, March 30th 

9:30 - 10:30 AM EST Sarah Hartzell - Home Movies, Genealogy, and Family History 

As valuable documents of domestic life in the 20th century, home movies can serve as genealogical records for building family trees and writing family histories. Improving access and discovery of home movie and genealogical collections in archives can lead to the emergence of rich family stories, especially for non-traditional families who are underserved by standard forms of recordkeeping.

10:45 - 11:45 AM EST Ana Salas - Archiving "The Drive": An Audiovisual Preservation Exchange (APEX) Case Study

Archiving "The Drive" is a case study centered around the Audiovisual Preservation Exchange (APEX) Google Drive. This thesis looks into Google Drive as an organizational tool and its potential uses in Personal Digital Archiving. 

12:00 - 1:00 PM EST Lindsay Miller - F***ing with the Canon: Preserving Pornography in the 21st Century

This thesis aims to examine pornography in the digital age, specifically how changing technologies and persistent censorship continue to influence how both memory institutions and individuals preserve pornography.  This thesis is not a call to preserve all pornographic material online.  Instead, its central goal is to discuss past collecting practices and challenge the notion that there is no place for today's porn in the archival canon.

Thursday, March 31st 

9:30 - 10:30 AM EST William Plotnick - Audiovisual Preservation and the Construction of Regional Identity in Brazil: A Case Study of Espírito Santo and Paraíba

This project will aim to connect regional film histories within the Brazilian states of Paraíba and Espírito Santo to film archives that exist in these regions, such as NUDOC (Paraiba) and Arquivo Publico do Espírito Santo (Espírito Santo). The focus of this project is the correlation between regional film histories, digital access, and archives. 

10:45 - 11:45 AM EST Amal Ahmed - Diaspora and Migrant Memories in the Archive: Preserving the George Eastman Museum's "Pakistan Film Collection"

The recently acquired Pakistan Film Collection at the George Eastman Museum now holds one of the largest collection of 35mm exhibition copies of commercial Pakistani Cinema from the 1950s-1980s. The transportation of the prints from Pakistan were used for exhibition in South Asian community cinemas in the UK. In my research I argue that these films are examples of a cross-cultural South Asian cinema culture and address post-colonial archival infrastructures that have resulted in the creation and migration of this accidental archival collection. Moreover, this research provides the current status and contents of the collection. Through community archiving this research utilizes the South Asian diaspora, as a method of obtaining accurate appraisal metadata identifying films of cultural and heritage value for preservation and redistribution.

12:00 - 1:00 PM EST Esther Rosenfield - Wherever Podcasts Are Found: Towards a Podcast Preservation Plan

While podcasts have become a ubiquitous form of creative expression in the 21st century, they remain a niche topic in preservation circles. With millions of creators relying on unstable corporate platforms like Spotify and Apple to hold their materials, it is more urgent than ever to assist these independent producers in archiving and preserving their own material. This project synthesizes multiple forms of media preservation combined with practices from large-scale podcast productions to create a comprehensive yet comprehensible podcast preservation plan that anyone can use.