What Cartoonists Know About Erased Public Records

The cartoonist Lynda Barry has a simple, brilliant exercise for her students: draw a bicycle from memory. Almost everyone fails. They draw a schematic, a symbol of a bike, not the thing itself—the chain is on the wrong side, the pedals unconnected, the frame a childish rhombus. The memory is there, but it’s a ghost, a placeholder. It’s only when we try to physically reconstruct it that we realize how much we’ve forgotten, how much the true, functional complexity has been erased by our mental shorthand.

I think about this exercise constantly when I look at public records requests, or the gaps in a web archive. We assume the record—the meeting minutes, the dataset, the deleted webpage—exists in our collective memory as a complete object. We have its symbol. We remember it was there. But when we go to reconstruct it, to hold it accountable or to understand its context, we find the chain is missing, the pedals don’t connect. The functional truth of it is gone.

The Ink of Absence

Cartoonists are masters of a related principle: the line that isn’t there. The space between panels, the ‘gutter,’ is where the reader’s mind does the work. It’s where time passes, where causality is inferred. The cartoonist trusts that the viewer will connect Panel A (a raised fist) to Panel C (a bruised cheek). But if you remove Panel A entirely, the story breaks. The bruise becomes an unexplained event, a mystery without a cause.

This is precisely what happens in poorly managed digital preservation and opaque public records systems. The gutters become too wide. Crucial panels—the draft document, the earlier version of a dataset, the preceding email in a thread—are deleted or deemed ‘non-records.’ The viewer is left with the bruised cheek of a policy decision, or the empty lot where a community website once stood, with no way to animate the sequence that led there. The story is broken because the essential connective tissue of process has been erased.

The cartoonist’s lesson is that preservation isn’t just about keeping the impactful final frame. It’s about safeguarding the sequence, the rough sketches, the annotations in the margin that show why a line was drawn *here* and not *there*. It’s about preserving the gutters, not as voids, but as documented transitions.

So, what do we borrow? First, the ethos of the memory-drawing exercise: proactively test your archives. Try to ‘draw the bike.’ Can you, from the records you’ve kept, reconstruct the full process of a key decision? If not, what’s missing? Second, embrace the cartoonist’s reverence for sequence. Metadata should do more than describe a single item; it should actively link it to what came before and after, panel to panel. A record without its precedent and successor is often just a symbol, devoid of its true, functional meaning.

In the end, both fields are about fighting the natural drift toward symbol over substance. The cartoonist fights it by making us see the specific, awkward, true line. The archivist fights it by preserving the specific, messy, true record. Because once the detailed memory of how the wheels actually turn is gone, we’re all just riding symbolic bicycles, going nowhere.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: