Towards Preserving Digital Culture: An interview with Kenneth Seals-Nutt
Towards Preserving Digital Culture series is a contribution to Software Heritage initiative supported by INRIA and UNESCO, The primary objective of this series is to underscore the pivotal role of software heritage preservation in mitigating the loss of digital cultural heritage. Through these interviews, we present diverse perspectives to foster discussions on challenges related to technological progress, obsolescence, legal limitations, and preservation complexities, contributing to addressing current field needs.
Hello Kenneth, thanks for joining this series! Let’s dive in! Could you tell us more about yourself?
My name is Kenneth Seals-Nutt, and I am a technologist based in the US. As a software engineer and computer science researcher, I describe my career as a bridge between industry and academia. My research explores connections between software and cultural heritage, using semantic web technology to improve gender and cultural gaps in the sciences.
Along with Dr. Kat Thornton, I co-founded Science Stories, a research collective dedicated to ‘unforgetting’ legacies of women and underrepresented people in STEM. Our digital storytelling platform collaborates with museums, universities, libraries, and government archives to create open-access, interoperable knowledge graphs of digitized content to build interactive experiences for people of all backgrounds and ages.
Our work led us to partner with Software Heritage in support of the Software Heritage Acquisition Process (SWHAP) by developing a new digital storytelling platform called Software Stories to showcase landmark legacy software. In the tech industry, I lead engineering teams and architect scaled commercial products.
Currently, I am a software engineering manager and technical leader at Wizard Commerce, a NYC-based AI company that gives users a personalized, intelligent shopping assistant through SMS. Before Wizard, I was director of software engineering at Verb Energy and senior software engineer at SiriusXM-Pandora.
Professionally, I am a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), and Institute for Electrical en Electronics Engineers (IEEE) where I am a voting member of the Standard for Shape Expression Schemas working group (P3330). I am also a software engineer for Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) at Yale University Library where I co-developed the Wikidata for Digital Preservation Portal (WikiDP) and the Yale Software Registry Wikibase.
Outside of work, I enjoy traveling, experiencing other cultures, cooking, and learning new things. Some of my favorite research projects have stemmed out of empathy for other communities and challenging myself to find new ways to preserve their stories.
What are the main benefits of software preservation?
One of the common hesitations developers have when making a project open-source is a fear of their work being taken without attribution, and software preservation has a significant benefit by defining and protecting source attribution. When we can credit foundational concepts and algorithms to their originators, we foster an innovative spirit of open-source collaboration. Preservation networks also democratize knowledge. Oftentimes, a preservation initiative gives access to wider audiences while also serving as a secondary mirror to prevent loss.
In my research, I’m always looking at preservation from a cultural heritage perspective. Learning the “who” and “why” behind software is just as important as preserving executables. For example, preserving metadata about the development process, source code, runtime requirements, and usage documentation can ensure future generations will learn from legacy work and (hopefully) avoid repeating pitfalls.
What are the challenges and/or obstacles?
While there are many long-term benefits of software preservation, short-term costs of software acquisition, digitization, and metadata extraction coupled with system maintenance costs can be a real barrier to make as large of an impact as they hope with limited grant funding.
Another challenge with software preservation is ensuring there is always an operating system that can execute the software as the tech industry evolves.
Preserving executables is wasted if there are no operating systems that can run them. Preserving source code loses its utility if nobody understands the language or its compilers. Yet, there are many ways to address this concern such as archiving legacy hardware or with environment emulation that can be configured to execute legacy software.
What would be your advice on collectively moving forward on software preservation?
Build for reuse. Software preservation initiatives often have limited capital or constrained budgets, so the more we can avoid duplicitous efforts, the farther our impact can be realized. Building open-source projects, creating developer-friendly APIs, sharing ideas at conferences and workshops, and joining communities are just some ways we can work together to ensure success in our preservation efforts.
Could you recommend us with a blog, article or publication that you particularly appreciated?
- Replayed: Essential Writings on Software Preservation and Game Histories by Henry Lowood
- The Computer by Jens Müller.
- IT Girls: Pioneer Women in Computing by John S. Croucher.
- Recent Blog post I enjoyed: Building Connected Libraries in Nigeria, Reflexions from the Wikibase Journey.
Thank you, Kenneth for joining this interview series!
