A Question for Academics

[nancylebov]

I've heard laments that the rise of the telephone meant that there weren't letters to study.

Now that the net has taken hold, is there getting to be unmanagably much writing from people who you want to study?

Comments

More fragile all right!

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

This is why I keep personal archives of my LJ entries (using the built in tool; I haven't gotten around to writing a tool that'll suck down all the comments as well), and have always tried to keep an archive of all my Usenet posts and the followups they've generated.

It's all still fragile, especially considering that for all my "just in case I want it later" and "just in case a hundred years from now I wind up being interesting to a historian" thinking, I'm still archiving casually, not really as an archivist would. And some things have slipped through the cracks -- drafts of web pages that may not have gotten archived, Usenet posts that I forgot to log, and three different periods from which I have mail or other writing archived in formats I can't currently read. (Two different cartridge tape formats and a spool of 9-track ... but the data are all in plain ASCII, IIRC.) Eventually, when I obtain the elusive round tuit, I do want to get all the old stuff read, all the "current" (early 1990s to present) material sorted, and burn CDs in a couple of different formats and maybe even put a copy on a spare IDE drive I can then unplug and leave at my mother's house or something. But that's still not proper archiving and I'm perfectly aware of that.

So yes, it's fragile.

Personally, I feel nothing quite beats carving in stone for single copy durability, but nothing is really safe until it's been published ... and a hundred thousand or so copies sold, on multiple media, and deemed important enough by enough other people that a) several sites will take care to archive it carefully, and b) successive generations will read it often enough to make sure they remember how and/or copy it to forms they can still read.

Dante was considered important enough to translate. Homer was considered important enough to translate and to have his language taught in high schools in countries that don't even speak the modern version of it. ("Format incompatibility" is a much bigger problem in the digital age but isn't completely new.) It'd be hubris for me to take much more serious measures than what I've got planned without first achieving that kind of cultural importance (not that I'm immune to hubris, of course), but just making sure that it's all in a form that can be conveniently read by most people at the time of my death ought to do for someone like me.

This is something folks on photography mailing lists and newsgroups worry about too. For all the advantages of digital (especially in terms of "workflow" and meeting deadlines in high-turnaround businesses), there's still the fact that we can still make prints from glass plates exposed more than a hundred years ago, while it's difficult to find anyone who can read the 5.25" TRSDOS and CP/M diskettes I was using less than twenty years ago.

Re: More fragile all right!

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought about Homer as the most superb example of memetic persistance. That's very satisfying.

What's proper archiving?

Even if you get your personal archive organized, what would you do to improve the odds of an interested scholar finding it?

I keep waiting for digital jukeboxes which are designed to read a significant number of hardware/software formats. I think there'd be a market, and I don't think it would be technically extremely difficult to do a pretty adequate job. (Technically finicky, yes--but I don't think it would take wildly new invention.)

When I say adequate, I mean that it could cover a lot of the more common formats--I'm not expecting it to cover everything--there are a lot of obscure languages.

Re: More fragile all right!

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Proper archiving in this case would be printout on acid-free paper with copies stored in multiple locations (far enough apart that the same flood or earthquake won't take out all copies simultaneously), plus copies on microfilm/microfiche; the electronic copies stored in multiple current formats (the most generically/easily readable of current formats -- right now that would be parallel plaintext and XML versions), again in multiple locations in different geographic regions, web-accessible and vault-stored offline, with the offline copies on media formatted for each of the current major operating systems ...

... and a set of scripts set up to manage migrating the archive to the next new storage medium, OS, or file format so that today's solution doesn't become the five-decades-hence "well it was thorough at the time but now it's obsolete" stash. (Obviously the migration tools themselves would have to migrate.) And because I'm paranoid, whenever an operating system or storage medium became obsolete, functioning computers supporting that OS/medium, plus a supply of spare parts, would be added to equipment collections (geographically distant, yadda yadda yadda).

Clearly my own personal writing just doesn't warrant that kind of effort and expense. But if I were storing something of vital cultural, scientific, or commercial importance, that I couldn't count on simple proliferation of published copies to make safe for me, that's how I'd go about it. I'm not sure what would be that important but also not published, but various subsets of that protocol are used for certain real-world applications.

"Even if you get your personal archive organized, what would you do to improve the odds of an interested scholar finding it?"

Become famous. Madonna/Mick Jagger/Beethoven famous. :-) They'll find it.

Failing that -- assuming the scholar is looking for "slice of life" writings or "how did people think then" material rather than "famous life under a microscope" -- I'd try to be entertaining enough to be theferrett-level or Samuel Pepys-level famous and try to make sure that pointers (or clues, when the pointers become stale) to copies of the archive are attached to some non-trivial number of the things that get quoted or archived by other means.

But really, barring fame, that's a whole 'nuther question. There are organizations dedicated to preserving snapshots of the web, including personal web sites of people who have died, to make such material available and findable, but that puts it back into the relying-on-survival-of-an-organization category.

Re: More fragile all right!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I don't back up my LJ and I don't save my usenet posts, and I don't even save my own email, because it all seems to me to be ephemeral conversation and I can't imagine it being of interest in the long term -- or if I do it's in the sense of "I suppose I ought to delete this".

This is the opposite attitude, I suppose.

Re: More fragile all right!

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

I've got an additional reason for backing up my Usenet posts and email -- since copies I can't delete are going to be floating around indefinitely, I should have my own local copy so I can check for what I've forgotten that might surface in a job interview or whatnot, and also so that I have a record of what I actually said in case someone tries to twist my words against me in the future. Paranoid, I know. I got into a few flamewars back before the Great Renaming, and the habits stuck. But that's a reason for a personal archive, not a preservational one...

As for imagining it to be interesting in the long term, I don't really expect it to be. It's just that nagging voice that keeps saying, "Isn't it a shame I can't read the diary of a 13th Century farmer to get a clearer picture of how the commoners lived and thought, rather than having to rely on paintings and what the educated classes wrote about the farmers?"

Then again, although I put a certain amount of care and craft into much of what I write, I'm not in the business of producing "'real' writing meant to be preserved" (by which, this context, I mean literature, intended for publication and meant to still be read more than a few years from now), so to me, my writing doesn't have a division between "this is a 'keeper' and that is just conversation", and that may also affect my inclination to toss it all in the archive pile. (Okay, there is some division -- there's what I post on my web site vs. everything else -- but the division isn't so sharp.)