New Confluence Streams in 2025

Confluence of Ohio and Mississippi Rivers at Cairo, IL [source]

When two rivers or streams combine to form a new one, it’s called a confluence. In everyday academic work, we often talk about “streams” of research. I spent fall 2024 building a new confluence research stream.

When a single river splits in two, the process is called bifurcation, and the resulting streams are called distributaries. After finishing my dissertation in 2020, I was on the hunt for new projects. I tried different things to see what would stick. From one relatively unified stream of research, I created a handful of overlapping distributaries.

My dissertation represented the original stream of research-- a forensic archaeology of psychedelic culture’s relationship to computing (or a technical history of trippy software, to put it more simply). The main distributaries included alternate reality gaming, algorithm preservation, and new applications for digital forensics of PDF and JPG files. There was another stream that branched off as well, concerning natural science data curation.

From 2020 to 2022, a portion of my time was earmarked for research in the archives of a prominent petroleum geologist. It was written into my postdoc. That’s what set me up for my next set of projects.

Passau Confluence of the Ilz, Danube, and Inn Rivers [source]

In 2023, I examined New York’s coastal water quality data. In 2024, I looked at Los Angeles. In summer 2025, I’ll be switching back into a historical mode of analysis with a paper examining coastal water quality data as it was presented on surfrider.org between 1997 and today. How have changes in web design practices mapped on to changes in data curation practices? I’ll be presenting this talk at the biennial RESAW conference (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials) in Siegen, Germany.

This paper will mark a new confluence between my earlier historical research and my more recent data curation work. I still have some other streams running around in my thoughts, of course, but they’ll soon create new confluences too. All of this research can all be traced back to the shared headwater of digital preservation, but its destination in the ocean of human knowledge remains full of uncharted space.