{"id":252,"date":"2008-08-18T03:03:55","date_gmt":"2008-08-18T08:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=252"},"modified":"2008-08-18T03:03:55","modified_gmt":"2008-08-18T08:03:55","slug":"doing-my-small-part-to-preserve-digital-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2008\/doing-my-small-part-to-preserve-digital-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Doing my small part to preserve digital history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"tt-flickr tt-flickr-Small\" href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/photos\/photo\/2769982112\/High-cirrus-clouds-and-low-fog-over-the-Pacific-Ocean.html\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"border: 0pt none;\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3051\/2769982112_2be3ebd7d5_m.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"High cirrus clouds and low fog over the Pacific Ocean\" width=\"180\" height=\"240\" \/><\/a> Years ago, in an undergrad course, one the of the school&#8217;s librarians gave a talk about the big risk of the move to digital publishing &#8211; historical preservation.\u00a0 We know what the ancient Greeks thought in part because their words were carved into stone &#8211; would we be so lucky if they had used floppy disks?<\/p>\n<p>I wasn&#8217;t completely convinced that the situation was so dire then, and I&#8217;m still not really worried.\u00a0 The production and storage of information continues to grow exponentially, and I think the real problem for future archeologists will be dealing with information overload rather than some hypothetical gap in the written record.\u00a0 But <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2008\/obsolescence-and-obscurity-in-digital-cameras\/\">I have been thinking a lot about my own digital history lately<\/a> so I spent part of this weekend looking at old papers from college and publishing them on my site.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think my meager efforts will be much help to <a href=\"http:\/\/chnm.gmu.edu\/digitalhistory\/\">future historians<\/a> (much less reverse the entropy of the universe), but I did find some interesting stuff that I probably should have posted for the world to see a long time ago.<\/p>\n<p>For example:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Seven years ago I wrote a pretty decent paper about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2001\/the-internet-the-marketplace-of-ideas-and-the-public-sphere\/\">The Internet, the Marketplace of Ideas, and the Public Sphere<\/a>.\u00a0 Some of the issues discussed look a little different today, with so many easy options for blogging and other user-created content, but I think the overall point is still valid.<\/li>\n<li>Five years ago I encountered a Dialog, a library search system, which some of my professors from the library science field thought was the pinnacle of information retrieval.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2003\/the-pain-of-dialog-flat-file-vs-relational-databases\/\">I thought Dialog was a huge pain and that relational databases were much more powerful than flat-files<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Ten years ago I did <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/1998\/the-effect-of-knowledge-on-accuracy-and-partisanship-on-distortion-of-memory-of-baseball-statistics\/\">an experiment in a cognitive psychology class on memory and bias<\/a>.\u00a0 The paper is a bit thin (hey, I was a freshman) but the experience of researching and running a study made me consider switching my major for a little while.\u00a0 I still love doing research and hope to start working on a Phd in the next few years.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The more I dig up and paste into my WordPress archives the more I realize a few things.\u00a0 First, a distinct lack of content between undergrad and grad school &#8211; I&#8217;m doing a much better job of writing without assignments now than I did then.\u00a0 Second, a hard drive crash in 2003 resulted in a gap in my saved emails &#8211; this hurts more now that I&#8217;m looking back through things.\u00a0 Finally, I need to make a point, for the rest of my life, to just put things out there. It seems like such a shame that I put work into these docs just to have them rot on my hard drive.<\/p>\n<p>I know some of my co-workers, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reidyokoyama.com\/\">Reid<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewysz.com\/wyszdom\">Wysz<\/a>, have gone through the process of resurrecting old content to their current website.\u00a0 Anyone else thinking about doing something similar?\u00a0 What prompted you to do so?\u00a0 Or, what prevented you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Years ago, in an undergrad course, one the of the school&#8217;s librarians gave a talk about the big risk of the move to digital publishing &#8211; historical preservation.\u00a0 We know what the ancient Greeks thought in part because their words were carved into stone &#8211; would we be so lucky if they had used floppy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[268,419,420,341,104,415,353,354,167],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-blogging","tag-digital-history","tag-digital-preservation","tag-entropy","tag-information-retrieval","tag-library-science","tag-marketplace-of-ideas","tag-public-sphere","tag-research"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":253,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions\/253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}