When I began library school in 2009, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew I didn’t want to work in a school, but wasn’t sure if I wanted to be in a public library either. I started to focus on the “information science” part of my degree expanding on my love of unearthing knowledge, and over the next two years, transformed it into “internet science.” The internet has been a part of my daily life since my early teens and to get to examine it, digging my hands deep through its culture and history has been amazing.

Since graduating in 2011, I’ve been working at the website Know Your Meme, connecting the dots of internet culture and researching how trends grow and change over time. As internet culture melds and becomes one with popular culture, being at the forefront of this type of research is really exciting. Watching a piece of content go from a picture shared on Reddit to a international phenomenon with a movie deal (hello, Grumpy Cat!) is so wild, and I’m glad I can say that I was there, documenting it along the way.

(This is me and Grumpy Cat. She is not as grumpy as the internet makes her out to be).

However, my real passion has always been for thorough researching. My favorite days are the ones when I can seal myself off for a few hours in the ancient web, the archives of places like Usenet or Fark, long-forgotten Angelfire sites, and mirrored Geocities pages (shown below) that somehow escaped Yahoo!’s 2009 cull. This side of the internet feels like home to me, spaces on the web that used to be so loved and full of life, now full of ghosts and automated messages seeking buyers for miracle pills and mail-order brides. We think of the internet as such a vast place with just the websites we use every day: our social networking, news, personal email, etc. How much of the internet is virtual graveyards?

Days that I spend in these graveyards make me feel part detective and part archivist. I get to dig through tons of antiquated content searching for the building blocks that unintentionally changed history, saving them and drawing the lines between them. I love watching the way word and phrase use evolves over time, like how a missing word from a 4chan post claiming someone had “accidentally 93 MB” of files in May 2008 became prevalent as a way to express a mistake, changing the context but always forgetting the verb, even with people who’ve never used 4chan.

I bring this all up because recently, I got to work on the history of ASCII Art, and I ended up someplace I didn’t entirely expect to be: 1893, to be precise. In my line of work, it’s rare to end up before 1990, let alone 100 years earlier. I found a somehow-saved Geocities page pointing me to a typewritist named Flora F. Stacey, who was cited as making these works in 1895. The anonymous site was a great jumping off point and a reminder never to trust unattributed sources as definitive. I dug more, diving into Google Books (!) and finding a scan of a printed journal (!!) from 1894 that confirmed Stacey was in fact a typewriter artist. However, what the Geocities source had left out was she exhibited her work (shown below) at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.

These two years and important accolades made all the difference: for one, two years in Internet Time is an eternity (Remember Chuck Testa?) and going to the World’s Fair meant someone recognized this type of art and found it important enough to put on display 100 years before it became easily created with word processing programs and easily shared on places like Usenet and, well, free website hosts like Geocities. And now as our internet world becomes littered with image macros of cats with words on them and GIFs from every memorable moment from recent television shows, the history of this art form had the potential to be lost to time and abandoned internet space.

This is where I come in. And that is the best part of the job.