Archiving the “Fabric of Digital Life”

This paper describes the process for establishing the “Fabric of Digital Life” archive, which is dedicated to the study of wearable media and augmented reality inventions. Fabric of Digital Life features the development of an open repository online research archive using CollectiveAccess software that tracks, catalogues, and in some cases, stores artifacts that imply future invention. The collection of this corpus will enable the analysis of inventors´ writings and discourses, news articles, images, videos, documents, commercial ventures, artifacts, and events that instantiate the discourse of emerging inventions relating to reality-shifting, digital life, and digital culture. Inventions do not emerge from the hands of solo inventors, they emerge within a vast context of overlapping texts that communicate the motives of everyday people as much as they do the motives of inventors.