Session 3B | Quantifying and Qualifying the Loss of Web-Based Evidence in Graduate Performance Studies Theses

How is web-based evidence referenced and documented in Performance Studies masters theses? How can Performance Studies, with its framework for analyzing performances in context and its heightened awareness of ephemerality, inform our understanding of evidence lost to link rot? Relying on a corpus of born-digital Texas A&M University theses, we analyze documentation practices and discuss the implications of lost evidence for these graduate publications. We will ground our meditation on these questions with observations about citation practices and the potential for intervention, with an eye towards a generalizable and potentially automated approach to guarding against rot in electronic theses.