Call For Papers

At the end of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist meets a living library: a community of people who have each memorized a classic book to protect its contents from conflagration. Their mission is similar to the Internet Archive’s goal “to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge”—i.e. to do, in digital form in real life more or less what Bradbury’s “bookmen” do for fictional human culture. Beloved authors have always been committed to the preservation and transmission of ancient, timeless truths: think of how such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis revived or created mythologies, believing that such wisdom was also inspirational to the human imagination. 

For this inaugural conference at the Internet Archive, we invite proposals for presentations on ideas worth saving. If you were to choose a work of literature, religion, film, or art and ensure that it would still be available in the year 2451, what work would that be? Talks may be wide-ranging, coming from any number of disciplines, talking about the what, why, or how of knowledge preservation and dissemination. In particular, we seek to highlight the Archive’s theological holdings, so projects that draw from those resources will receive special attention. 

We are looking for lively, interesting presentations that take advantage of a live, synchronous, hybrid gathering, rather than merely papers read aloud, which is boring and could be done more efficiently in a printed medium. Consider how you might take advantage of the gathered attendees’ collective knowledge, involve your audience, include embodiment, or otherwise bring your material to life in memorable ways.

We are interested in questions like the following:

• What are the challenges of preserving sacred works in a digital era?
• What are the benefits of knowledge retention? 
• What genres, media, forms, or even themes lend themselves to ready conservation? 
• What barriers exist to protecting the works of certain demographics? 
• What role do religious rituals play in keeping wisdom alive for future generations?

Topics might include these sorts of concepts:

• Safeguarding Sacred Texts in the Age of Information
• Ancient Scriptures in Posthuman Discourse
• Digital Memory: Online Archives as a Modern Library of Alexandria
• The Role of Oral Tradition in Knowledge Preservation
• AI and the Future of Literary Reliability 
• Hobbits in the 25th Century: Enjoying Tolkien’s Legendarium into the Future
• The Rings of Power and the Ethics of Adaptation
• How Fantasy Inspires Activism Today for a Better Tomorrow 
• Superheroes as Modern Mythology
• Sci-Fi Futures: Predicting or Shaping Tomorrow?
• The Jedi Archives vs. The Borg Collective: Lessons in Knowledge Preservation
• Shakespeare’s Moral Framework for Future Generations

You get the idea!