Learning from YouTube, the first born-digital, online publication released by MIT Press, began as a college course taught by Alexandra Juhasz both on and about YouTube between 2007-2021. In the first few iterations, classes and student work were recorded and shared on YouTube, and this new pedagogical modality garnered a flurry of media attention.
The 'publication,' an interactive, scholarly, and continually updated digital entity, is richly hypertextual. Made up of hundreds of multimodal units of linked text and video ('texteos' in the project's vernacular), which are interconnected, composed into sequences ('tours') and grouped thematically ('tags'), tracing broader themes and arguments in the work.
In 2025, artist-technologist Chaski began a digital conservation project to extend and make accessible its archival footprint. Entrusted by Juhasz with a hard drive of scraped early YouTube videos referenced throughout the work, they undertook the reconstruction and reintegration of the project's hyperlinked text and media content with the preserved video corpus. Many of these videos have since been taken down or are no longer available on YouTube, and while the preserved files on the hard drive fill significant gaps in the record, resolving this incompleteness was never a motivating aim of either the original project or Chaski's recent one.
This new work (Database: Learning from Youtube) makes visible the interconnected web of video and textual content that underlie this important media studies and pedagogical experiment. Rendering the project's underlying database in a different spatial form, the interface reorganizes how materials are encountered, allowing multiple vectors of relation to be seen at once. Working from and through the database, Chaski restages the project in a self-reflexive mode that extends some of its original commitments, treating the database not simply as a container but as an active structure, one that carries traces of its authorship, and affirms both the existing and absent fragments alike.