Published: August 20, 2025 by Dr. James A. Hodges

The lines between truth, fiction, hoax, and conspiracy have grown quite blurry in recent years, as digital forgeries and coordinated inauthentic behavior become a fact of online life. As a scholar working in the field of digital archives, I specialize in evaluating the history and significance of digital objects so that we can know what is true and what is not. Although we often associate these skills with the analysis of historical records from many decades ago, they can also be used to address contemporary problems like disinformation.

In 2023, I published an article examining the QAnon conspiracy movement, highlighting the ways that it often reframed authentic sources using idiosyncratic interpretive practices, rather than fabricating fictional narratives wholesale. This research affirmed my frustration with public discussions of mis- and dis-information over recent years: most journalistic reporting, and even some scholarly research, fixates on the conspiracy narratives’ falsehoods, without ever acknowledging the kernels of truth that help draw users in.

Earlier this year, I published a follow-up article, focusing on an influential early online hoax called “Ong’s Hat.” Ong’s Hat suggested that a group of rogue Princeton University physicists had secretly developed interdimensional travel technologies at a commune in rural New Jersey during the 1980s and 1990s. It’s clearly outlandish, but since it emerged online in the internet’s early days, its clever blend of real and fabricated sources has proven compelling enough to inspire countless online discussions, along with an academic monograph and a BBC documentary series.

To understand the relationship between fact and fiction in Ong’s Hat, I used a methodology called bibliographic archaeology, which was originally created to classify and quantify the formal characteristics of rare books. By looking carefully at the formal construction of a media object, we can learn a lot about how it was produced and circulated, as well as how it relates to other texts. What I found led me to reconsider online conspiracy cultures through frameworks drawn from studies of print modernity, oral culture, and live-action role-play (LARP) communities. If we want to understand online conspiracies, I argue, we need to understand 1) their grounding in print culture’s intertextuality, 2) the way they are embedded within game-like cultures that “play” with fiction and reality, and 3) the iterative interpretation and distribution practices through which they spread, which mirror so-called “oral cultures.”

My hope is that by demonstrating the value of an archival skillset in understanding mis- and dis-information, I can help others in the media and information professions to respond to emergent problems created by our breakdown in consensus reality. I believe that our professional community’s dual expertise with information technologies and user communities makes us uniquely positioned to perform this work. If you want to know more, please have a look at the full text, available now in Journal of Documentation.