Her email came three days later. She BCC’d me on her message to her advisor, as she promised.

ugh stayed up all night working on it . . . and it was still late! but lemme know what you think!!

I had been in the zone, debugging something in the EMBRS logs—and even though I needed to complete my work before the logs rotated, I was so curious I ended up just scp’ing the logs to my own machine so I could look at them later.

Her thesis proposal was good: well laid out and convincing, with strategically placed graphics and pictures from Shanghai. She’s a talented photographer, and I told her so.

d’aw, thanks!

It turned out her project was not archival exactly. It had a digital spin to it, and there was a field for it out there called—what do you know—digital archiving. But she went a little further, cited other works, and said the version she wanted to focus on was called—and I got chills when I read it—memory work. I didn’t really understand what it meant from her proposal. Her advisor likely knew definitions I didn’t. So I looked up some of the works she had cited; even those had a number of technical terms.

She texted again.

well??

I prepared a list of questions and texted her, warning that I was about to call.

finally!

The phone did not even finish its first ring before she picked up.

“Was it okay?” she asked, breathless.

“It looks great. I didn’t understand a lot of it—”

“Oh no . . .”

“But it’s not my background! I only know about computers.”

“You know more than computers.”

“Not really.” I held up my first question. Suddenly, I felt like a journalist, and so I played into it, lowering my voice and articulating clearly. “Memory work. That’s a very striking term.”

“Isn’t it?” There was a smile in her voice. “Archiving has been a thing for ages now. Digital archiving, too. But memory work takes a different approach.”

“By trying to be more ethical?” It was what one of the sources had claimed, though I couldn’t discern what made it any better.

“Maybe. The idea is that one person’s memory is never the whole source of truth. Everyone interprets what happens around them based on their own circumstances. Historians and archivists are most at fault here, since they get to decide what lives on and what doesn’t, and this also goes through the filter of their own experiences. So if you’re in archiving, you have to acknowledge the importance of your role and the impact you have for future generations referring to your work.