How Do I Reference An Instagram Post?

*taps mic* is there an "internet history" yet?

from y2k pilipinas

riding the wave of my digital gardens post, i find myself sinking to the bottom of the internet and drowning in questions.

i mentioned a long time ago about how a team of scholars are “repatriating” and creating a digital archive of the san pablo convent of manila. with rare manuscripts burned and some brought to scotland by the white people(british) who tried to occupy a country already occupied by other white people(spanish), these documents have scattered around the globe auctioned off to libraries in the U.S. and the U.K. all this mess because the dude that greedily took all of these didn't have an heir.

at first i found this weird. why not just repatriate the archival material that had been yeeted (read: looted) out of the philippines?

it's great that such institutions are digitizing everything like there's no tomorrow, that means people will have more access to text that are normally kept in acclimatized rooms wherein the need for an appointment isn't necessary.

however this will now take away the cool, dark academia aesthetic.

however this form of research, of flipping literal pages of a book on my computer, not only blinds me, but also disconnects me from the source material.

the feeling i get when browsing the filipinas heritage website and the image bank of the ortigas is awful. it's exhausting to look at descriptions of books and images, trying to imagine how the size is, what it might look like in my hands, and then going back to a wall of information and research some more.

i did this for my thesis and didn't enjoy it. my thesis is not the best because i stayed safe in the collection of my resources.

i thought it was convenient, and it is. you can find any paper-trail online.

but i also think that archives just have more personality. you can talk to the archivist, the librarian, consult related texts, and dig yourself a deeper rabbit-hole without needing to open five tabs per second, and also possibly missing documents that would help you but haven't been scanned.

[contrary to these sites, the martial law library is not an eye-sore but.. an ambitious project]

and that doesn't mean i hate digital archives or that everyone should stop working on this digitization effort. the fact of the matter is cloud storage is not gonna be a thing in probably a decade. librarians and archivists, already archiving physical books, are not held at gun point to scan, itemize, pay for cloud storage, pay for high-resolution image scanners, and host it all on a website. it's simply not possible to have a digital library of old stuff.

i personally think it's easier to keep a book from being eaten by worms than jumping through these hoops.

Vocabulario de la lengua tagala : primera, y segunda parte : en la primera se pone primero el Castellano, y despues el Tagalo, y la segunda al contrario que sonlas raices simples con sus acentos.

so i ask, what is so special about these things anyway?

i didn't need to know that lambanog is honda in spanish, and i certainly didn't need to know that they spelled IKUHA as YCOHA. but obviously, it's important to show that there exists a tagalog vocabulary: first and second part: in the first part is spanish and later tagalog, the second is contrary to their roots and accents.

archives are carefully collected and preserved for a reason. they don't want to archive jose rizal's grocery lists (but based on how we treat him maybe we do) but thats beside's the point.

cultural institutions like these want to preserve and archive stuff that they think is of importance. which doesn't really interest me. in spirit of exploring the "history from below” and in spirit of making the internet cool again i now redirect you to something that is interesting: community driven archives.

patrick kasingsing is the moderator behind Brutalist Pilipinas, where he posts about brutalist architecture he finds while on his hot-girl photowalks. this interview with him is interesting because 1. he is clearly passionate about this and 2. he is learning about brutalism (a lil bit more i guess).

But half the battle is excavating information to verify three things: The name of the building, the year it was erected, and the principal architects. Patrick’s sources include an extensive network of academics and architects, but he tells me that there is one method more reliable when it comes to information on buildings: To pretend like you’re buying it. “Mas marami akong nakukuhang [I get more] information from real estate websites,” he says.

y2kpilipinas is an “archive” of late 90s to 00s philippine media. it gives me cringey flashbacks of my childhood but i love it.

the philippine cassette archive is also an interesting blast from the past.

while all of these are aesthetically pleasing, i wonder how do we reference them? when in reality these community driven “archives” are not.

patrick of brutalist pilipinas cites how he finds the need to convert his hobby into a study¹:

“Dati, gusto ko lang magkaroon ng ambag [Before, I just wanted to contribute] for an architectural movement that I think is suffering by trying to address its most basic problem: Documentation. But I can’t be doing just that,” he says. “I’m not doing brutalist buildings or heritage architecture for that matter any service with just this.”

Patrick is unsettled. He needs to change things up soon, he has to. “Something with more bite,” he says. “More permanence.” For someone who loves old buildings in a country that doesn’t, he’s startlingly optimistic. He imagines a future where students of history and architecture study brutalism, our brutalism. “No one is going to cite sources from a social media account,” he says. “I want to transition brutalism documentation from hobby to a study.”

but i think there hasn't simply been a conversation on the philippine internet. more so it's history. thankfully there is a talented group of people led by chia amisola who are creating the philippine internet archive, and they are looking for leads on… the philippine internet.²

so what is the consolation of this very negative post? you may ask.

firstly. i can't control ugly websites that are useful, especially when they actually follow archival standards. i think it's humanizing, personal, and offers more of a connection when they talk about the digitizing process. i like that they share updates on the digital repatriation, and that it is still a project subject to transcription and translation. you can feel involved at least. and you can do so here.

second(ly). i have no resolution for why and how we can reference an instagram post. since these “community archives” are either their own personal archive or a photoset curation of stuff taken from the web… it's hard to track them down. anyway nice to look at i suppose. (does someone have a better answer than me?)

thirdly. why isn't this talked about. is my algorithm not algorithiming. history nerds need technology tools also. is there room for that in our brains? while the history of the internet is YOUNG, the time that passes is incredibly fast.

how do we relay the now to future generations, where every human thought is virtual?

please interact with me by leaving a comment or replying to this email

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more links:

• On Are.na, Archival Websites.

• Making Spaces in Online Archives, a transcription.

• A blog post about Filipino Zines. I find it fascinating that they cited La Solidaridad as a Zine… I am reminded again how we simply cannot view history through present times lens.

• Write HTML with a group of other people who wanna hang out (and help) you on Sunday Sites.

• Maybe you missed it, but the internet died five years ago.

1. he has gone the capitalist route, selling city guides and merch

2. chia is also the head of developh, a group who organizes workshops and talks about internet art, internet preservation and tech labor. developh is best viewed through a political lens (aka we need to recclaim our spaces of “truth”, this makes my brain hurt so i have yet to think about this).