Media archaeologist
Lori Emerson is an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and founder of the Media Archaeology Lab, a museum dedicated to obsolete technologies spanning from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. She is known for her work in media archaeology, digital preservation, and digital archives.
Education.
Emerson has a B.A. from the University of Alberta (1998), and M.A. from the University of Victoria (2001) and an M.A. from the University of Buffalo (2004). In 2008 she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Buffalo. She joined the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2008. As of 2022, she is an associate professor in the English department. She is also the founder of University of Colorado's Boulder's Media Archaeology Lab.
Career.
Emerson's areas of study include cultural studies, poetics and aesthetics, media archaeology, computer history, telecommunications networks, digital humanities and textuality, digital preservation, and digital archives. Emerson writes on and teaches experimental American and Canadian writing from the 20th and 21st centuries, the history of computing, and media theory. Her interest in the predecessors to ASCII art was part of a 2014 story in "The Atlantic." Katherine Hayles explains that Emerson theorizes on the combinations of machine and human perspectives. 
A component of Emerson's work centers on media archaeology or how to preserve digital memories. The Media Archaeology Lab she founded at the University of Colorado Boulder campus collects obsolete technologies in order to foster study and understanding of them. Carrying the motto "The past must be lived so that the present can be seen," the lab maintains all of these items in working order and allows them to be used at any time. It houses the world's first portable computer, the Osborne 1, as well as video game consoles, typewriters, audiovisual materials, and audio equipment. In exploring the ways in which the Media Archaeology Lab both differs from and adheres to the expectations of a traditional archive, Emerson and coauthor Libi Striegl describe that the Media Archaeology Lab "changes from year to year, depending on who is in the lab and what donations have arrived at our doorstep, and thus it undoes many assumptions about what archives as well as labs should be or do". This form of digital archaeology is a term used by Emerson to describe how people have interacted with computers over time. Her work establishing a media lab has been mentioned by other researchers in the field.
Awards and honors.
In 2015, Emerson received an honorable mention from the Electronic Literature Organization for the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature for her work "Reading Writing Interfaces". In 2015, she received the ASSETT Teaching With Technology Award from the University of Colorado at Boulder for her work in the Media Archaeology Lab.
References.
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