Denise de Vries is an adjunct researcher in the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University. Her research focuses on developing methods for recovering digital objects from obsolete media (cassette tapes, digital tapes, cartridges, 8 inch disks, 5 ¼ inch disks, 3 ½ inch disks, CDs), as well as developing digital forensic methods to better capture the requirements for executing obsolete software in emulated environments.
She established the Computer Archaeology Laboratory, a collection of working legacy hardware and software from the 1980s to the early 2000s, to carry out this research. This is now the Digital Heritage Laboratory at Swinburne University.
Based on her research, she was invited to join UNESCO PERSIST (Platform to Enhance the Sustainability of the Information Society Transglobally). She is on the technology taskforce of PERSIST whose mission is to keep the world’s digital heritage safe and accessible.
She was a CI on the Play It Again Creating a Playable History of Australasian Digital Games, for Industry, Community and Research Purposes”, ARC Linkage, 2012-14 and is currently a CI on Play It Again: Preserving Australian videogame history of the 1990s, ARC Linkage, 2019 – 2021 and Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a method and national collection, ARC Linkage, 2019 – 2021.
Denise has collaborated on a wide variety of research projects, both in Australia and internationally. She has been a keynote speaker at several conferences and advised numerous institutions on technical issues that can be encountered during the process of disk imaging obsolete media. Her contributions to digital preservation were recognised in 2022 with the award of a DPC Fellowship.