Jeremy's post made me think a bit more about what it means to be able to archive such things as all of our correspondence (or at least an enormous amount of it) via the Internet and computer. For myself, I have (though not all in one place) all of my e-mail messages from about 1987 and on (and there are times I wish that I had had some means of easily saving materials from my PLATO days!). And while it would be interesting to throw them all on a giant hard drive and go to town with various analytic software packages to discern countless patterns, etc., it's not only e-mail that I have. I also have floppies with letters, memos, files, programs, images, sounds...you name it, and if it can be digital, it's there. Heck, some of it isn't even mine, but I have it. Some of it you sent me (you know who you are). I'm almost overwhelmed thinking about how historical work may change as a result, but also overwhelmed thinking about what we can and may need to do to make sense of what we have when so much is available. Let's go data-crazy and link my e-mails to yours, Jeremy, and on and on and on, and build a vaster and vaster archive. Not only are there various legal, ethical and methodological issues with which to grapple, there are some very practical ones as well. I was recently involved in discussions with a group of people in D.C. to help the Library of Congress figure out how to procure, archive, maintain, etc., materials that are, in their words, "born digital." Fascinating discussions, but again, overwhelming (funny how that word keeps popping up when I talk about this - perhaps it's me alone that's overwhelmed). Just ask Brewster Kahle, or any of the numerous folks involved with archive.org. Ask Steve and Kirsten about archiving 9/11 information (and to add my $.02, I hope they do get a chance to tell us about the process of putting that site together). How do we keep it secure (both in the sense of "private" and in the sense of "safe")? How do we think about it, if at all, right now? That is, I suspect we all have this sense of the "stuff" that we have on our disks and hard drives, but how does that intersect and interplay with how we feel about the box of letters we keep in the closet? Will we encrypt stuff, or keep it open? Will we erase some? Will others know that we've erased it and be able to track it down via another source (for our e-mails and such are typically not ours alone)? Among other questions, the ones I most often seem to come back to are: What will the work of history and historians be, how much effort will be involved in tracking down personal correspondence, will it be the same or different than tracking down the paper letters, the visual and audio outtakes, the drafts, notes, etc., offline? With what consequences? Sj (who's glad to have had another chance to add to your inbox) At 7:40 PM -0500 1/23/02, jeremy hunsinger wrote:
today i took the opportunity to burn some of the abundant processor power available these days and ran mhonarc on my old eudora outbox from one machine, my old nt server, 41000000+ bytes 18700+messages around 10 a day going out. so in all covers more or less my complete outgoing life from 1997 when i applied to ph.d. programs to oct. 2001 or so. has anyone else archived all their incoming and outgoing emails, and considered them? why or why not? Looking over these things, i cannot make it public really, but still it is there, it represents to some extent what i have done. opinions, ideas? I mean this archive comes to somewhere around 25000+ pages of writing, most of which I wrote, most of it innocuous and meaningless outside of its reparte, but it exists much of it in confidence. So I am sittiing here, the reason why i did it, of course, was to provide me with better access, I'll run my search engines over it a few times and be able to dig through it as i wish, but really, are these things the papers of our day? are email communications really, as they are figured frequently, ephemeral? jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu on the ibook www.cddc.vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy www.dromocracy.com
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