All posts tagged: Archiving

Reflections on Mapping an A–Z Philosophy BlackList

Reflections on Mapping an A–Z Philosophy BlackList

Published by Jenni Sidey

Introduction First launched in 2025 as part of Black History Month programming, the project has grown into what is now titled the A–Z Philosophy BlackList, an expanding intellectual archive that currently features 158 names and counting. Led by Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse alongside two Southwestern undergraduate students, Jayden Dawson and Raven Waugh, this list names Black intellectuals whose contributions have informed both philosophy and wider academic fields. While not exhaustive, the list is designed as an invitation to engage with a diverse range of thinkers whose ideas continue to shape knowledge production. Moreover, we acknowledge that any such project reflects the situated perspective of its producers and may inevitably leave some folks out. Importantly, Blackness in this project is framed as a political identity drawing from the South African Black Consciousness philosophy as espoused in Bantu Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like, and N.C. Manganyi’s Being-Black-In-The-World. Each thinker respectively defined Blackness as a political identity, a radical humanism that aimed to reject the idea of blackness as non-white, qua non-human as classified by the Apartheid regime. …

The Internet’s Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril

The Internet’s Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril

Published by skeptic

This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.” USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as Gannet that runs both its namesake paper and over 200 additional media outlets, bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. “They’re able to pull together their story research because the Wayback Machine exists. At the same time, they’re blocking access,” Graham says. A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection …