The r/DataHoarder subreddit is an online community focused on social, legal, and technical practices related to digital curation. Created in May 2013 and with a current membership of over 700,000 users, it is neither representative of any institution nor defined by a shared digital curation credo. Yet, r/DataHoarder nonetheless defines itself as a community of ‘digital librarians’ who have varied ‘reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time^tm)’ (r/DataHoarder, 2017). Regardless of type of data or reasons for hoarding, r/DataHoarder members share best practices, technical guidance, and, on occasion, ethical stances towards the increasingly complex sociotechnical landscape of a digital-first world. As such, r/DataHoarder acts as a distributed community of practice, enacting digital curation through deinstitutionalized and extralegal means.

A recent example of r/DataHoarder’s collective efforts is seen in their archiving work in the wake of the January 6th United States Capitol attack. The subreddit’s users collaborated to document and preserve footage from the attack as well as communications between those involved, which received both scholarly and journalistic attention (Basu, 2021; Chapman, 2022). This example demonstrates how, despite a distributed community structure, r/DataHoarder’s members also coalesce around shared ethics and practices. We take an interest in exploring these motivations, where they both align with professional guidelines, or alternately exhibit distrust for traditional collecting institutions (i.e., government agencies), and how they work intentionally outside these institutional boundaries.

This study therefore examines how r/DataHoarder imagines and actualizes digital curation practice. We consider how such framings align with and depart from standards and practices of digital curation within traditional memory institutions. We present a preliminary thematic analysis of the top posts which have a vote count of 2,000 or more (Panek, 2021). We present this exploratory study to address the following research questions:

What is the practice of ‘data hoarding’ and what activities and capabilities does it entail?

Over the past three decades, scholarship in digital preservation and curation has produced a knowledge base of best practices, primarily focused on conducting this work within organizational settings. This includes the standardization of preservation systems and functions through the open archival information system reference model, as well as common practices and activities as referenced in the digital preservation coalition (DPC) handbook and outlined in the digital curation centre (DCC) lifecycle. The specific needs for organizational and individual skillsets in conducting preservation and curation have also been studied, prescribed, and measured through capability models and tools like the NDSA levels of preservation, DPC competency audit tool, and DLF’s levels of born-digital access (NDSA, 2019; McMeekin & Currie, 2022; Peltzman et al., 2022).

Largely separate from these organizational approaches, we see increased public awareness of digital content at risk of loss. Recent grassroots collecting of digital materials include: work by the environmental data governance initiative to collect EPA data prior to the beginning of President Trump’s term in office in 2017 (Walker et al., 2018); work by archive team to collect NSFW materials following Tumblr’s policy change and removals in 2018 (Ogden, 2022); efforts of Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) to preserve digital materials from Ukraine following the Russian invasion in February 2022 (LeBlanc et al., 2022). We observe that these forms of collecting, and preservation differ significantly from the work by practitioners within traditional memory institutions. We take inspiration from Dallas (2016) who advises digital curation research should,

focus on the study of actual practices of curation in a diversity of contexts … and should prioritize such intellectual inquiry over the imposition of models developed within the custodial fold (p. 440).

We therefore take up a concern with understanding collecting and curation outside of memory institutions.

For this initial, exploratory study, we frame this work as a ‘community of practice’ to understand how groups of diverse and distributed individuals engage in digital curation. Coined by Lave and Wenger (1991), the concept of ‘communities of practice’ (CoPs) originates in organizational studies. Cox (2005) addresses the concept’s varied usage and distinctions between the early applications of CoPs, and later take-up by Brown and Duguid (1991, 2001), as well as Wenger’s (1998, 2000) subsequent publications. In information studies, the concept is often deployed to describe or facilitate efforts in community building around shared practices, both within and across organizations. For digital curation in particular, CoPs have been the guiding framework for developing capacity-building workshops at the local and national level (Moran et al., 2019, Rios et al. 2020).

We adopt a broader view of CoPs, as advocated by Bowker and Star (2000) who place less emphasis on the organizational setting. This understanding of CoPs has been previously applied to study the knowledge practices of amateur and hobby communities, and particularly their distributed formation in virtual space (Hills, 2015). Several precedents also explore this type of community formation for learning and sharing practices specifically through reddit and its structure of subreddits (Britt et al., 2022; Haythornthwaite et al., 2018; Hudgins et al., 2020; Kwon et al. 2020). Proferes et al. (2021) provide a systematic overview of past research with reddit, which we also use to inform our choice in data collection, scale and methods of analysis, and ethical decisions for working with public but potentially sensitive and personal posts and comments.

This preliminary study deploys thematic analysis to examine how members of the r/DataHoarder subreddit conceptualize, describe, and enact their data hoarding practices. Thematic analysis allows researchers to qualitatively surface ideas generated by individuals, communities, or institutions. As noted in Braun and Clarke (2006), theme identification does not necessarily correlate with a quantitative measure such as prevalence in the dataset. We follow Braun and Clark’s six phases of thematic analysis: familiarization with data; generating initial codes; searching for themes; reviewing themes; defining themes; and reporting findings (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 87-93). We employ thematic analysis alongside theoretical commitments from CoPs research, whose concepts serve as guide points for framing themes deductively, while still offering space for inductive themes to emerge.

Reddit has been studied using thematic analysis within scholarly fields ranging from gender and sexuality studies to addiction medicine (Proferes et al., 2021; Graves et al., 2022; Graham & Rodriguez, 2021). When applying thematic analysis towards Reddit as a site with multiple CoPs, we note past work that addresses the complex, often socially contentious practices this platform affords users, especially as a means to examine topics which they might face criticism or institutionalized intervention (Lundeen et al., 2024; Maxwell et al., 2020).

Based on this initial analysis, we identify a set of key themes that define the r/DataHoarder vision of digital curation as a practice.

The analysis of these themes reveals where the activities and capabilities of data hoarding converge with, or diverge from, digital curation within memory institutions. Compared to the DCC lifecycle, the practice of data hoarding begins with a focus on storage, rather than pre-ingest activities of appraisal and selection. Data-hoarders believe everything that you can get your hands on can and should be hoarded, and the only limit is how many TB hard drives you can buy. An interesting point of comparison is also seen in how hoarding addresses the DCC lifecycle’s activities of ‘create or receive’; for data hoarding practice, these activities are much more active than passive, requiring considerable workarounds as data-hoarders seek out and capture materials through illicit means. Data-hoarders take a unique perspective on ‘preservation actions’ compared to institutional practices concerned with migration, emulation, and fixity checks. Instead, data-hoarders preserve through torrents, seeding, and re-seeding, embracing the idea of, ‘lots of copies keep stuff safe’. From this perspective, access and preservation are much more closely aligned, or even seen as the same activity, enabled by their work outside of organizational policies and concerns with copyright.

We also observe that data hoarding practices are often explicitly driven by personal motivations of nostalgia and political stances. This presents an interesting contrast to curation practice in organizational settings, which can also, equally be influenced by personal interests of curators, though this may not be openly acknowledged due to a perceived need for institutional neutrality. The way data hoarding outwardly accepts the personal nature of memory work and collecting is a welcome change.

The key themes described above represent an initial analysis of how the r/DataHoarder community defines and constructs practices of data hoarding. We note that this preliminary work has several limitations, particularly in the selection of a dataset based on top posts. Many of the more everyday routines, as well as processes of enrollment and enculturation may not be present in our selected dataset. In future work we aim to study the ‘long tail’ dataset of posts with significantly less engagement and employ ethnographic methods to generate rich descriptive observations to understand the values and ethics driving this practice. Additional posts studied being to reveal processes of identity formation through r/data-hoarder, seen in posts with sentiments such as ‘this is why I hoard.’ This identity can also become all-consuming and challenging for posters who subsequently describe a need to stop hoarding or describe how hoarding affects the relationship with their significant other. The role of gender within this community, and the prevalence of pornography as a prevalent object of hoarding is another topic, we have not been able to analyze in detail in this preliminary work. Through subsequent phases of this study, we also hope to address if or how data hoarding distinguishes between data and other digital objects (like the articles, books, media, and games that are often the subject of hoarding). Ultimately, by comparing the work of data-hoarders with the work of curation in memory institutions, and what each is able to target in their collections, we aim to understand what gaps and absences remain.

This work-in-progress highlights how r/DataHoarder offers a view of digital curation practice focused on the materiality of digital storage, and calls-to-action that raise public awareness of the potentially irrevocable loss of digital information. This presents useful counterpoints to commonly referenced and standardized practices of memory institutions by focusing on how communities conceptualize, practice, and develop their own ethical framework toward sustained access of digital materials. In future work we hope to address many questions and topics out-of-scope for this paper, such as expanding to other communities, comparing across communities, and applying both etic and emic coding to community posts.