My name is Ethan Gates, and I currently live (and work from home) in Central Massachusetts.
Broadly speaking, I am passionate about professional and community education around audiovisual and digital technology. I like to learn how stuff works - whether that means taking apart a Betacam deck or tinkering in a computer’s command line interface - and share what I’ve found out with others. That’s come to mean leading workshops, writing blog posts, volunteering with community archiving efforts like XFR Collective, and connecting with many other amazing and thoughtful archivists, information professionals, maintainers and technologists.
I currently work in the Software Preservation and Emulation unit at Yale University Library. My primary focus is on user documentation, training, testing, and developing requirements for the EaaSI (Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure) remote emulation platform, building off about six years of effort during EaaSI’s grant-funded seed period. But in general as a “technologist” I do what I can to make emulation and software preservation more accessible practices for heritage organizations.
Before my time at Yale I worked as the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Technician for the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. I was responsible for maintenance and use of the lab spaces and equipment employed by the department’s two-year Master’s degree program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (of which I am also a graduate, class of 2015).
My undergraduate background at Amherst College (‘12) was in film studies and Russian language/literature, which will hopefully explain the errant Soviet cinema references you may encounter. I’ve occasionally published film reviews and still like to indulge my scholarly bent - apologies in advance if I ever over-enthusiastically yell at you about Boris Shumyatsky and/or the history of film preservation in the Soviet Union.
Please feel free to peruse my full CV, look over some of my workshop materials, talks, and published articles, or check out my professional blog, The Patch Bay. Thanks for visiting, and get in touch any time!