The stack of huge boxes on my door containing this material heralded an important milestone in my life: my first assignment as a professional historian/archivist.

From the official announcement:

To celebrate ‘GDC 25’, the conference organizers have appointed an official historian for the show in the form of noted technology archivist Jason Scott, known for his Textfiles.com digital archive and his history of preserving important digital artifacts.

Scott, who has created the BBS Documentary and the just-debuted interactive fiction documentary Get Lamp, will be in charge of receiving and synthesizing historical accounts, anecdotes and other media from GDC attendees, and digitizing extensive printed, audio and video archives.

He will be posting a twice-weekly blog post on the official GDC website news page [RSS feed] and sister outlets starting in early November, revealing exclusive videos and audio lectures, stored on the UBM TechWeb Game Network’s GDC Vault website, alongside other images and analysis from the history of the event.

Alongside this announcement, GDC organizers – part of the Game Network, as is this website – and Scott are calling for submissions from people who’ve attended the show over the past 25 versions. They’ve set up an official email address, gdc25@gdconf.com, which CGDC and GDC attendees can email with anecdotes and reminiscences of attending previous GDC shows.

In addition, if previous attendees have content from classic shows they’d like to share, please tag photos as ‘gdc25’ on Flickr or upload videos to Vimeo or YouTube, and email the official ‘gdc25’ mail address.

As it says, I am going to be posting updates of the incoming pile on their official weblog for the GDC (Game Developers’ Conference, in case you’d not picked that up) and not here. However, I am allowed to keep copies of what I scan and digitize and even host stuff that I think is relevant.

It’s a paid position, but I’m not being feedy-hand-bitey when I say it’s not enough to live on – it’s a fee for a part-time contractor to do this work. I would like to get a couple assignments or jobs that could help me bring in income, because to be honest things are on a very slow downward spiral financially. I know that sounds surprising, but GET LAMP and BBS Documentary are high-quality projects – they cost money to print (and more have to be printed) and I do actually, you know, travel and buy technology to support my work. I just mention this in case anyone wanted to talk to me about possible employment, part-time or other… I’m around, people.  Let’s do lunch.

What’s important about this role is very obviously not the money. It’s that I am truly and honestly doing work in the field I wanted to switch to, computer history. I’m doing it for something very interesting, and I am being given an opportunity to prove myself in this task. It is challenging, it is fun, and it will be a great time telling the stories coming to me. Not to mention all the artifacts that people are getting inspired to tell me about. This is fantastic.

This very simply would not have happened without the Sabbatical. Absolutely not. I never get tired thanking the people who gave towards that funding, because I never stop benefiting from it. Thank you, people.

Now, let’s archive some GDC!

Categorised as: computer history | jason his own self

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