Personal Digital Archiving and the Digital Dark Age
Personal digital archiving focuses on preserving an individual’s online history and legacy. In a world where social media platforms act as personal diaries, life histories, and tools for self-expression, archiving ensures that these digital artifacts are retained for future reflection, accountability, and historical research. Social media platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms are central to how we communicate, interact, and live as a society.
The digital threads they hold tell a story of our life events, reflections, and relationships.
However, users lack reliable ways to safeguard their digital identities and narratives in the face of platform obsolescence, privacy risks, and shifting technological landscapes.
Preservr’s Promise
Preservr began as a Bachelor of Information capstone project at the University of Toronto, proposed by Dr. Seamus Ross and brought to life by Sehar Bajwa, Luca Carnegie, Shirley Chen, and Francesca Ye. Preservr explores how an integrated tool suite can empower individuals to preserve their digital footprints while addressing challenges of organization, accessibility, sustainability, and personal meaning. Currently, Preservr supports the archiving and analysis of Instagram data packages in the local environment of users. In the future, Preservr aims to expand their offerings to other social media platforms, cloud storage archiving, and web-hosted data visualization tools through a phased approach. Preservr hopes to revolutionize the way social media users curate their digital footprints by bridging the personal, cultural, and technical to secure access to meaningful content for years to come.
The Preservr Team
Get to know the Preservr team — a group of creative, curious, and driven individuals with diverse passions, skillsets, and a shared commitment to designing meaningful digital experiences.
Sehar Bajwa
Sehar is a creative strategist and consultant passionate about joyful, intuitive interface design and impactful digital storytelling. As President of the Bachelor of Information Student Association, she represents her cohort across the University of Toronto and serves on high-level governance committees at the Faculty of Information. Her work blends design thinking, advocacy, and strategic leadership — all rooted in a deep commitment to people-first innovation. Looking ahead, Sehar plans to pursue law school, building on her academic focus in law and policy and her extensive experience in university affairs. In her spare time, she writes poetry, freelances design, and unwinds at Pilates classes around the city.
Luca Carnegie
Luca is a human who likes blending design thinking with data, especially when it solves fun and interesting problems. From researching AI-powered tools for the University of Toronto or delivering high-fidelity prototypes at Deloitte, he’s created (and wants to continue making) beautiful, impactful, and people-centered solutions! In his free time you can find him playing trombone and singing jazz, trying the next great coffee shop and napping outside on warm days.
Shirley Chen
Driven by a passion for innovation and design, Shirley is a curious and strategic thinker with experience in marketing, business consulting, and client engagement. She hopes to use her skills in both UX design and data science to create solutions and bridge gaps between human behavior and emerging technologies. In her free time, you can find Shirley staying active through various activities (weightlifting, dance, and dragon boat to name a few), exploring music of all genres, or travelling around the world.
Francesca Ye
Often crossing over between corporate and cultural archives, Francesca is an emerging digital archivist focused on organizational transitions to dynamic, user experience-driven archival policies. Detail-oriented and imaginative, Francesca hopes to continue developing her skills in delivering comprehensive archival systems with influence from her interdisciplinary experiences across different organizations and collections. Francesca’s work is largely concerned with digitization, knowledge equity, ephemeral archiving, and records policy. In her free time, Francesca enjoys sewing, afternoon tea, and exploring new neighbourhoods.
Professor Seamus Ross
A long-time champion of digital preservation and cultural heritage, Seamus is a Professor at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, where he served as Dean from 2009 to 2015. Before that, he was Founding Director of HATII at the University of Glasgow and has held leadership roles across institutions supporting digital curation and humanities computing. His research explores everything from emulation and digital archaeology to genre classification and semantic extraction — all while advocating for broader access to scholarship. In his spare time, he supports innovative preservation projects (like the Digiman animation series) and continues to mentor the next generation of digital stewards.
Download Preservr today.
- Visualize your Instagram data
- Analyze your engagement demographic
- Regularly archive your social media information.
- Download Preservr scripts today.
Preservr 2025