JSTOR Daily: How can contemporary biographers contend with the explosion of materials at their disposal? “It may be that the digital revolution has had a more profound effect on biography and life writing than on any other branch of literature, perhaps any branch of the arts,” writes the scholar Paul Longley Arthur. The developments of Web 2.0—think the internet of things (or IoT), user-generated content, social media, and time-stamped everything—were “extraordinarily liberating” for the discipline of life writing, the category that encompasses biography, autobiography, memoir, journals, and diaries, and draws on myriad source materials and ways of interpretation. He writes that “born out of mistrust in the capacity of ‘literature’—in its crafted completeness—to represent lives, and growing up in the shadow of the respected and well-established literary genres of biography/autobiography, life writing found a natural affinity with the freer, more spontaneous modes of expression and communication that digital technologies made possible.” The internet, Arthur argues, gives us comprehensive and franker information about a subject, and enables the biographer to render the subject in a more comprehensive and frank way. It may be that digital technologies free subjects to express themselves, and thus generate more source materials, but to scholars, Web 2.0 has also vastly complicated the production of biography and life writing…

Obsolescence, says Craig Howes, the director of the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, is one of the most problematic barriers to access. Tech required to read old formats, like floppy disks, for example, isn’t readily available, and even if you can get your hands on it, that film may have deteriorated beyond the point of readability. “It’s still working out that the single best medium for retaining information is paper because it’s worked for 3,000 years,” Howes tells JSTOR Daily…”