I can't seem to find it now, but there is a historian or an archivist whose specialty is studying this phenomena. I've read some journal articles and other pieces they've written about this.
>From what I remember, it was more about what *will* happen than what has >already. For example, if twitter is used now to communicate, what will >historians have in 300 years to study? Now, we have letters people would write >to each other. The prediction was that the digital age would be a dark spot. >We'd know that something happened then, and probably have a general idea >(barring some sort of catastrophe), but we wouldn't have any specifics. The >idea being, sure the archives of Twitter exist now, but who will pay to keep >them running for 300 years (given physical media rot, etc)? I think the answer >is "no one". I'll keep looking for the name or article I read. On Sat, Jul 20, 2019, at 05:44, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > good friend of mine is starting a research project, looking into > what i will call "digital transience" ... she is using a slightly > different term and would prefer i not use it for the time being. > > the idea is fairly obvious ... the danger of digital content > vanishing for any of a number of reasons: dropping support for > proprietary data formats, physical media (5 1/4" floppy drives, Zip > drives(?)) vanishing, link rot, entire site rot, and so on. so she's > interested in a couple things. > > first, just *general* contributors to the unexpected loss of what > might be important corporate digital data. but also, real-life > examples of things like this -- the one that leaps to mind is the > recent microsoft debacle involving ebooks protected by DRM: > > https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-ebook-apocalypse-drm/ > > i think that, of the two topics above, she's more interested in > actual examples of significant loss of digital data, not through any > sort of malice, but by accident or unforeseen developments in hardware > or data formats that suddenly cause a catastrophic loss of > information. > > i've already started a list, but i'm open to as many examples as i > can collect. thoughts? > > rday > > -- > > ======================================================================== > Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA > http://crashcourse.ca > > Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday > LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday > ======================================================================== > > To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscr...@linux-ottawa.org > To get help send a blank message to linux+h...@linux-ottawa.org > To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org > > To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscr...@linux-ottawa.org To get help send a blank message to linux+h...@linux-ottawa.org To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org
