Quinn Labs · Research Project
LEGACY
Not social media. The things that actually mattered.
Will people 300 years from now know who we really were?
Exploring how today's digital lives can remain meaningful and accessible for future generations.
The premise
We know a great deal about the past because ordinary people wrote things down and someone else kept the paper dry. The modern problem is not a shortage of information. It is deciding what should survive, and making sure it can still be opened in a hundred years.
Paper vs digital, honestly
Paper is not automatically better. Digital is not automatically worse.
Why paper often survives
- Stored well, it lasts centuries without any intervention.
- Letters, parish registers, ship logs and postal records from the 1700s are still readable.
- No format, password or company sits between the reader and the page.
- It fails slowly and visibly, so people notice in time to act.
Why digital records disappear
- Obsolete file formats no software will open.
- Failing hard drives and unreadable media.
- Lost passwords and encryption keys with no recovery path.
- Deleted or dormant cloud accounts.
- Companies shutting down and taking the archive with them.
- Files that were simply never backed up anywhere.
Well-managed digital archives can also last a very long time, because copies do not degrade. The difference is not the material. It is whether anyone planned for the next hundred years.
Imagine · 2326
Someone opens your archive. Not your Instagram. Your real life.
Quinn Labs
Research questions, prototypes, and everything that failed.
Matthew Quinn Transport
A working business: routes, decisions, accounts, people.
RHS studies
Coursework, plant records, what grew and what did not.
Museum ideas
Concepts written down long before anyone could build them.
Garden experiments
Seasons of notes, photographs and small measured trials.
Research notes
The reasoning, not just the conclusion.
Family history
Names, places, dates and the stories attached to them.
Audio recordings
Voices, which almost nothing from before 1900 preserves.
Like reading Darwin's notebooks or a Victorian gardener's journal — but in a digital form designed to endure.
Research areas
Digital preservation
Formats, migration, checksums, and what to do when software dies.
Personal archives
How an individual can curate a life without a full-time archivist.
Family history
Passing an archive down without it becoming a burden.
Knowledge preservation
Keeping the reasoning behind a decision, not only the outcome.
Museums
How institutions decide what enters the record.
Libraries
Deposit, cataloguing and public access over centuries.
Open formats
Plain text, TIFF, PDF/A, FLAC — things no company owns.
Long-term storage
Multiple copies, multiple places, checked on a schedule.
Preservation rules we keep returning to
- Anything that needs one specific company to stay alive is not preserved.
- Three copies, two kinds of media, one somewhere else. It is old advice because it works.
- Open formats first. Proprietary ones only when there is no alternative.
- Context is part of the artefact. A photograph without a date, place and name is decoration.
- Preservation is a routine, not a purchase. Something must check the copies are still readable.
- Curation matters more than capacity. Keeping everything is the same as keeping nothing.
- Plan the handover. An archive nobody inherits ends at one funeral.
Related research
Two halves of the same record
Your professional life
Project Chronicle
Work, evidence, achievements, a career that remembers itself.
Your human life
Project Legacy
Everything else that made the professional life possible.
One asks what you did for a living. The other asks who you were.
Project Chronicle →The philosophy
The old instruction was: save your CV.
The better instruction is: preserve what matters.
A life is not a feed. It is letters, notes, photographs, recipes, maps and recordings.
Quinn Labs question
What should survive us, and who is keeping it readable?