Digital Archiving Of Street Dance Culture

Why is archiving history so important? When we preserve the past, we have a context to measure our present and to envision our future. We can learn from our mistakes and build upon our successes. An organized effort to archive street dance culture has not been achieved on a widespread, international level. There are individual pockets of archivists preserving photos, transcripts, and film clips but there is no central organizing body. We need it.

Street dance has moved online. Our culture has been digitized and uploaded in frequent video clips, photo streams, and status updates. We're more aware of each other's activities. There's a greater general knowledge that is being shared in digital form. But where do we look online for a one-stop site that has it all archived and contained?

This is a crucial time for archivists in street dance culture. If we don't take action to preserve our culture, we could potentially lose knowledge of who we were. Much of our shared information are on venues that are created by corporate entities: Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Picasa, and Google. What if one of these companies goes under? Look at what happened to Geocities in late 2009. This online community of user-generated webpages was created in 1994. Through the mid to late 1990s, Geocities was the place to be to create your own website, collecting an array of sites capturing user's hobbies, activities, and personal profiles. Yahoo! bought Geocities in the late '90s. In the 2000s, we moved on to other sites as the social networking revolution took off. Then, Yahoo! closed Geocities in late 2009. Now, all that personal and cultural data are gone.

The solution? Fortunately, an online organization called the Archive Team has crusaded to archive as much of Geocities as possible in large torrent file now available to the public. Their work will be a historical record of a time when the mainstream public first interacted with the World Wide Web. That kind of information isn't stored in any film, book, or photo album. Those websites are cultural documents that will gain value over time.

What if we lost all of our Youtube videos and our Facebook pictures? Today's generation of street dancers will lose their personal histories online if they haven't archived their data. Social networks come and go, but if we store our cultural history, we can upload and distribute it in other venues for posterity. We need to start a movement to archive our street dance culture because it won't last in these current online sites forever. As dancers, we live in the moment and favor spontaneity. But to further the culture, we need to start thinking long-term. Otherwise, we'll wake up one day and discover that the past fifty years of our lives as dancers have disappeared as quickly as one can push the delete key on a keyboard.