Darwin's Free Press

Welcome all. It looks like I've found my own little corner here to showcase my efforts as a digital preservationist and kick some culture in the process. Some of you may know me from other places on the interwebs - welcome to my blog! Simply put - I love to scan and I believe in the popular preservation of our printed culture. Preservation means capturing the scarcer, more delicate, and forgotten parts of our printed culture but also pondering their nature. I'll be bringing in a portion of my older scans as I get the time, but I'm all about what's next and a handful of ongoing projects. Right now, my main concern is kick-starting some preservation of the underground/free press papers of the 60s and 70s. These are documents of a peculiar time of turmoil, and a digital library of these papers will make an amazing resource for examination of what seems to be often referred to as The Movement. I have scanned a good number of these papers and will be posting them in the days to come as well as posting new entries. My goal is to get a wide survey of papers from all over the country and ranging in time from their birth to their demise. My personal interest in these papers is largely as a type of media outside of normal bounds. As the number of newspapers shrink and our mass media becomes more and more conglomerated, I am interested in new forms of media that operate outside of corporate or economic channels. What is the future of the people's media? What might it look like? What are it's strengths and limitations? Can this blogosphere touch lives and change society or is it just so much white noise? Stay tuned, perhaps we will find out.