Filipp Lepalaan
Title: Sustainable Digital Preservation: A Decentralized Approach
Supervisor: Dr. Alexandros Pazaitis
Opponent: Dr. Christos Giotitsas
Defense: 8 June 2026
Abstract: This thesis explores the issues of long-term cultural heritage preservation in "digital native" societies. It begins with the premise that while digital technology has been an unprecedented catalyst in advancing human communication, knowledge, and culture, it also carries with it equally unprecedented risks due to its transient nature and the fact that as the amount of information generated and density stored increases, so does our dependency on increasingly complex machinery to access it possibly leading us towards an unsustainable future. The specific artefacts of the study are several multimedia artworks from around the turn of the millennium that we have lost access to due to a host of technical reasons. We examine those reasons and analyse the socio-economic factors that lead to them. The late nineties represent a pivotal moment in techno-cultural development, and we can see important precursors in the technological environment we find ourselves today in the changes and outcomes of that era. By taking a closer look at that historical period we identify both positive and negative trends – positive outcomes we could repeat and mistakes we should avoid going forward. We validate the application of emulation for digital heritage preservation and highlight the indispensable role of the open-source community in the critical task of preserving legacy technology. We also present some insightful literature for solving the inherent conflicts between preservation and copyright. The thesis suggests that our current concept of an archive as a central repository of cultural heritage is itself somewhat outdated in the digital age. We therefore propose a decentralized approach in which data creators - namely us - with the help of proper tools, can take custody of our own data. We show how this solves the most difficult questions in archival science - namely that of curation - deciding what should be archived. We propose using participatory design as a powerful tool for technology governance and end with a suggested design for a sustainable digital preservation system.
Keywords: cultural sustainability, emulation, participatory design.
