Dr. Tyler Musgrave, Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at Wayne State, will lead a discussion on "Screenshots of a City: Detroit's Digital Aesthetic and What Platforms Forget" will be hosted on September 29, 2026 at 12:00 p.m. Light refreshments will be served prior to the event. 

Parking will be provided for guests who RSVP.

About this lecture: Detroit's cultural life increasingly lives online — in the content creators, photography, memes, music, and vernacular expression that circulate across Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and X. But this born-digital culture sits on infrastructure the community doesn't control, where content vanishes when platforms die, links rot, and algorithms bury what they don't reward. This talk uses the "Information City" framework to ask how a majority-Black city preserves an aesthetic and a memory that were never physical to begin with. If institutions have models for this — the Internet Archive's web crawls, Flickr Commons' copyright-cleared collections — Detroit's digital culture lives somewhere messier: in the vernacular photo-pools, comment threads, and everyday posts that no institution was built to hold. Dr. Musgrave situates the emerging Digital 313 Archive in that gap, as one attempt to preserve a city's digital culture against the ephemerality and extraction built into the platforms where that culture is made. The talk offers less a solution than a provocation: what does it mean to archive a city that increasingly exists as data?

The Detroit Center for Black Studies at Wayne State University is a hub for dialogue, learning, and public engagement focused on Black life, history, culture, and thought in Detroit and beyond. Under the leadership of inaugural director Dr. Richard D. Benson II, the Center supports interdisciplinary learning and community connection while creating opportunities for students, faculty, and the public to engage with the rich traditions and contemporary significance of Black Studies.