Lori Emerson

Career Emerson's areas of study include poetics and aesthetics, media archaeology, computer history, telecommunications networks, digital humanities and textuality, digital preservation, and digital archives. Katherine Hayles explains that Emerson theorizes on the combinations of machine and human perspectives.

A component of Emerson's work centers on media archaeology or how to preserve digital memories. The Media Archaeology Lab she founded at the University of Colorado Boulder campus collects obsolete technologies in order to foster study and understanding of them. Carrying the motto "The past must be lived so that the present can be seen," the lab maintains all of these items in working order and allows them to be used at any time. It houses the world's first portable computer, the Osborne 1, as well as video game consoles, typewriters, audiovisual materials, and audio equipment. This form of digital archaeology is a term used by Emerson to describe how people have interacted with computers over time. Her work establishing a media lab has been mentioned by other researchers in the field.

Selected publications

Reviewed by the Emily Dickinson Journal, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Huffington Post, and others

Reviewed by the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association in 2014

Emerson, Lori (2025). Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook. New York: Anthology Editions. .

Awards and honors In 2015, Emerson received an honorable mention from the Electronic Literature Organization for the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature for her work Reading Writing Interfaces. In 2015, she received the ASSETT Teaching With Technology Award from the University of Colorado at Boulder for her work in the Media Archaeology Lab.