When I first started to consider the implications of digital preservation I thought back to the news headlines of a few months ago when Bitcoin was jumping in value. Someone had thrown away their hard drive when the price per bitcoin was only around 6 cents. However, in the last six months the price has been as high as $1500/bitcoin. The news inspired others to dig through the landfill hoping to locate the lost hard drive. This is interesting because we still have the technology to read the data on the hard drive, and bitcoins continue to be worth a shocking amount of money. However, what if the bitcoins were stored on a floppy disk, an old tape drive, or a real old floppy disk? There is a good chance they would not have survived the landfill. Even if they did, who has a computer that can read those formats?
The place where I see the power of digital preservation is in the concept that was mentioned in the first lecture of this class. The idea of doing history from the ground up. People's History. I am going to bring up the podcaster Dan Carlin again because he makes the case for the abundance of material that will be available for history in the next three or four hundred years.
However, how available will it be? If we have trouble with formats that are only ten years old, who will have the technology to read data from old hard drives in three hundred years? And even if we can read the data, will it make sense outside the cultural, geographic, and temporal attributes of its origin?
I would argue that there is always some sense that can be made of a text, or a book. Even if we perhaps critically misunderstand the initial meaning the author intended, the discourse, or social meaning derived from attempting to understand it is just as important, if not more so.
The mind experiment of a future civilization attempting to decipher our modern writings in blogs, tweets, status updates, and instagrams is a fascinating and hilarious exercise. We always assume that progress, especially with technology, is on the upward climb. However, it is also possible that the future will regress technologically, and that people will simply attempt to continue to preserve our current data in A Canticle for Leibowitz type fashion. You can just imagine monks huddled over desks scratching away at parchment illuminating Bieber's tweets.
Note: The whole Bitcoin thing still not making sense? Check out the video below, it is one of those ones that makes you feel as if you understand, when in reality, I still can't tell you what a bitcoin is.
The place where I see the power of digital preservation is in the concept that was mentioned in the first lecture of this class. The idea of doing history from the ground up. People's History. I am going to bring up the podcaster Dan Carlin again because he makes the case for the abundance of material that will be available for history in the next three or four hundred years.
However, how available will it be? If we have trouble with formats that are only ten years old, who will have the technology to read data from old hard drives in three hundred years? And even if we can read the data, will it make sense outside the cultural, geographic, and temporal attributes of its origin?
I would argue that there is always some sense that can be made of a text, or a book. Even if we perhaps critically misunderstand the initial meaning the author intended, the discourse, or social meaning derived from attempting to understand it is just as important, if not more so.
The mind experiment of a future civilization attempting to decipher our modern writings in blogs, tweets, status updates, and instagrams is a fascinating and hilarious exercise. We always assume that progress, especially with technology, is on the upward climb. However, it is also possible that the future will regress technologically, and that people will simply attempt to continue to preserve our current data in A Canticle for Leibowitz type fashion. You can just imagine monks huddled over desks scratching away at parchment illuminating Bieber's tweets.
Note: The whole Bitcoin thing still not making sense? Check out the video below, it is one of those ones that makes you feel as if you understand, when in reality, I still can't tell you what a bitcoin is.
I think another major issue for historians of the future is the sheer scale involved. We have a hard enough time tracking the impact of a certain event on social media with in a narrow time frame. Say for example tracking the Oscars across the major social media sights for 24 hours. You'd get a huge flood of results. No imagine you are historian of the year 2342 looking to understand what life was like in the 2010's. Assuming that you can still view and interact with all the data, where do you start? If anything, we've jumped straight from barely any evidence to far, far too much data.
ReplyDeleteYes, the scale of twitter archiving is massive. I can only imagine the storage space that the Library of Congress is using to archive tweets. With so much data we will need to make use of the newly synthesized toolkit of the Data Scientist. Already some of these large scale data tools are being used in the digital humanities to do large scale word analysis of entire bodies of encoded works.
ReplyDeleteIn fact using twitter has become a popular means for making predictions, particularly when it comes to elections.
I find it really interesting to think of the data as sound. When you have only one voice or instrument to listen to, there is so much you can learn and decipher. When you must listen to a whole concert of voices, all shouting out at the same time, making sense requires different tools, but the same careful attention.
I think you raised a really good point there. The problem isn't just about keeping the technology current or even the volume of information available, it's storing all that data. Can we even store all this information? If not, how do we decide what to preserve? This can of course lead right back to the problem that Carlin thought was solved. We could wind up storing only the "important" data and lose that valuable insight into less well represented aspects of our society.
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