Against Empathy: The Case for Impartial Preservation
The common refrain in digital preservation, especially when dealing with public records and personal archives, is laced with a profound sense of empathy. We are urged to "humanize the data," to seek out the personal stories, to prioritize the records that speak to the human condition. This seems like an unimpeachable good. Who could argue against preserving the intimate letters of a community leader or the poignant diary of a forgotten figure? But I want to challenge this. I want to suggest that this well-intentioned empathy is, paradoxically, one of the greatest threats to creating a truly representative and lasting public memory.
Our empathetic impulses are not neutral algorithms; they are human, and therefore, they are prejudiced. They are drawn to drama, to tragedy, to the easily understood narrative arc. We preserve the words of the eloquent activist, but not the sprawling, mind-numbing transcript of the zoning board meeting that approved the demolition of their neighborhood. We archive the poignant blog of a dying artist, but not the daily, automated output of a municipal air quality sensor. The former tugs at our heartstrings; the latter is just data. Yet, which one provides a more objective foundation for a historian fifty years from now to understand the environmental pressures of our time?
By letting empathy guide our archival choices, we are building a digital memory that mirrors our present-day sentimentalities and biases. We are creating a curated gallery of what we deem "important" or "moving," rather than a comprehensive warehouse of what actually happened. The inconvenient, the boring, the impersonal—this is the raw ore of history. The dry legal filing, the server logs of a defunct social media platform, the unedited footage of a city council session: these records lack a sympathetic protagonist, but they contain a truth untainted by our desire for a good story. They are the fossilized bedrock, not the polished gemstone, and it is the bedrock that future generations will need to build their own interpretations.
The Tyranny of the Compelling Narrative
This empathetic curation leads to what I call the "tyranny of the compelling narrative." It creates a feedback loop where the types of stories we know how to tell with data are the only ones we bother to save. We become storytellers instead of stewards. The goal of a public archive should not be to pre-emptively write the history books, but to faithfully preserve the raw materials from which a thousand different, conflicting histories could be written. An archive shaped by empathy is an archive that has already taken a side.
Instead, we should champion a kind of methodological coldness—an impartiality that intentionally resists the pull of a good story. This doesn't mean abandoning ethics or ignoring the preservation of marginalized voices. On the contrary, it means creating systems that are systematically fair. It means developing protocols that capture the entire haystack, not just the shiny needles we happen to spot. It means investing in the infrastructure to preserve the "data exhaust" of our society with the same fervor we apply to preserving its poetry.
In the end, the most radical act of preservation may be the least empathetic one. It is the act of valuing the trivial tweet as highly as the profound novel, the corporate annual report as much as the personal journal. It requires us to trust that the meaning of these artifacts will be determined not by our present-day sensibilities, but by the unknown questions of the future. It’s a pledge to preserve not what we love or what moves us, but simply what is. The most honest archive might just be the one that feels, to us today, the most alien and the most indifferent.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: