A baby bite, a looping badger song and a Scottish tongue-twister are now part of Britain’s film history.
The British Film Institute has added more than 400 online videos spanning 30 years of internet memedom and virality to a new archival collection, preserving them as culturally significant records of digital life. The collection expands an archive otherwise geared largely toward films and documentaries.
The chosen videos were all made by British creators, and many reached global audiences. The archive includes early clips that spread through forums and chatrooms, along with TikToks and Twitch streams.
“The videos have this almost scary ability to document so much of modern life,” Will Swinburne, a curator at the British Film Institute, told the New York Times. “If you imagine losing that, you would lose access to what life was like at this time and how people were expressing themselves.”
Among the best-known entries is “Charlie Bit My Finger,” the 55-second YouTube video uploaded in 2007. It has been viewed 888 million times and shows a toddler putting his finger in his younger brother’s mouth.
The video sold in 2021 as a non-fungible token for $761,000, prompting concern that it would be removed from YouTube.
“After the auction we connected with the buyer who ended up deciding to keep the video on YouTube,” Howard Davies-Carr, the father of the two boys in the video, told NPR in 2021. “The buyer felt that the video is an important part of popular culture and shouldn’t be taken down. It will now live on YouTube for the masses to continue enjoying as well as memorialized as an NFT on the blockchain.”
The collection also includes “Badgers,” a 2003 animation built around the repeated words “badger,” “mushroom” and “snake.” It was created before YouTube and spread through email chains and online forums.
Another addition is a 17-second snippet from a 2021 Twitch stream in which a Scotsman realizes that saying “purple burglar alarm” in a Scottish accent is nearly impossible.
The institute also selected videos for their role in shaping formats now common online, including early vlogs, video essays, tutorials and marketing campaigns.
Preserving the material took time. British Film Institute researchers first identified videos for the archive, then contacted creators to ask for original footage. Some clips no longer existed online and had to be recovered from old hard drives, laptops or memory cards.
After acquiring files, researchers indexed each one by genre, description and quality. Two copies of every video were stored on tapes in robot-operated libraries, and a third copy was placed in a separate archive about 80 kilometres away to protect records from disasters.
“A lot of people think that just because a meme is shared online, that it’s going to be saved. But that’s not the case,” Arran Rees, a museum data manager with the Collections Trust, said in a 2020 BBC News explainer video. “We know from past experience that our digital culture heritage is not safe just because it’s online.”
The source material points to earlier losses. Myspace lost all of its data and millions of songs uploaded before 2016 during a botched server migration. When Vine shut down in 2017, much of its content disappeared with it.
“The goals of this project were very ambitious. We wanted to significantly grow the collection of online moving image while also diversifying the voices of the creators in it, and also building the infrastructure for us to do that in,” Kristina Tarasova, an assistant curator at the British Film Institute National Archive, says in a video about the collection. “It’s also about transforming the way we look at copyright and rights, building toward the archive of the future.”
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