Paper explained
Memory Undone: Between Knowing and Not Knowing in Data Systems
What disappears when a data system “forgets”—and who decides?
The question
Why this work
This position paper treats forgetting as both a technical intervention and a social practice. Removing a file, changing a trained model, and never collecting a perspective can all make information unavailable, but through different mechanisms.
The approach
A visual guide
Four terms that should not be collapsed into one
Erasure
Remove or disable access to stored artifacts: files, rows, caches.
Unlearning
Intervene on learned parameters or outputs to remove or bound data influence.
Exclusion
Choose upstream what not to collect, label, or include.
Forgetting
The broader sociotechnical process through which something becomes unavailable.
What the work contributes
The paper offers a vocabulary for separating these mechanisms and argues for accountability around what is retained or excluded. Evaluating forgetting therefore involves rights, power, and representation alongside technical utility.
Original paper & resources
arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.21180 [cs.CY], submitted February 24, 2026. Presented at Undone Computer Science on 24 March 2026.
Citation
Makovska, V., Fletcher, G., Stoyanovich, J., & Zakharchenko, T. (2026). Memory Undone: Between Knowing and Not Knowing in Data Systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.21180. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21180
BibTeX
@misc{Makovska2026MemoryUndone,
title = {Memory Undone: Between Knowing and Not Knowing in Data Systems},
author = {Makovska, Viktoriia and Fletcher, George and Stoyanovich, Julia and Zakharchenko, Tetiana},
year = {2026},
eprint = {2602.21180},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
primaryClass = {cs.CY},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21180}
}