my e-mail archives
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
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "archiving." I've saved virtually almost my incoming and outgoing email messages since 1995 when I first started downloading mail into Eudora until today, but I haven't compiled or processed them in any way--they are just in a bunch of Eudora folders (organized by year). I guess I've got about 70,000 incoming email messages on my hard drive, and a smaller number of outgoing messages. Don't know quite what to do with them, but they're useful when I want to check back on my previous communication with someone, even dating back several years. Mark Warschauer http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw 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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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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The doyen of film archivists, Paolo Cherchi Usai, pointed out a conference laste last year in Wellington that of approximately 47 minutes of film exposed in 1896 we have about 42. Of about 9 billion hours of film and television released in 1999, the world's archives hold less than 0.1 per cent. Archiving, canon formation, biography as well as history become tied to arts of forgetting and erasure. Amnemotechnics replace mnemotechnics.That said I have a 4Gb drive full of mail, a collection of floppies, zips and CDs not to mention a variety of online stashes with heinous quantities of archived images, animations, , PhDs, book and journal manuscripts. The difficult thing is that you never know when you will *absolutely* need the reference from the file you just erased, but erase we must, and trust the wisdom of sysops to maintain what is public in the public domain of listserve archives, while what is intimate belongs to the lovers and enemies to whom the intimacies were addressed. One day no doubt the world will mourn the loss of my juvenilia. The mourning will be a better experience than reading them. s Sean Cubitt Screen and Media Studies Akoranga Whakaata Pürongo The University of Waikato Private Bag 3105 Hamilton New Zealand T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604 T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543 seanc@waikato.ac.nz http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/ Digital Aesthetics http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita The Dundee Seminars http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html
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.
I could see something like this happening, not necessarily in academia, but certainly in upper management of companies. Building an archive of e-mail actions via the internet, having to sort out any personal materials, etc. We have already seen this set of problems in the Clinton white house archives.
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."
one of my problems also as i also have around well nearly 21 gb of material that i've produced at VT in one year or another, and material that I've nabbed from the net. This is also a problem of nearly every university in the world. I have had to deal with several instances where someone has put material online that they had rights to one year, but found out that it was derivative in some manner and had to be removed, sometimes this was even after the faculty had left the university.
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?
you see, i don't have a box of letters in my closet. I have my e-mail and very few letters that would mean anything to anyone. Most of my acceptances to grad school and rejections first came via e-mail then they came in post. most of my work is e-mail or digital, i hardly ever print something if i can stand it, moreso now that i broke my local printer and have to print down to the workroom, though I'll fix that soon enough. But yes, I think these are my letters. as to the archive nature of them, most of my materials that i've worked on are archived on a server. I do not keep most of them local on my computer. however, they are not marked up or anything, which is somewhat what i was doing in a defacto sense by webifying them yesterday so that i could run a search engine over them to get better management capabilities.
-- jeremy hunsinger http://www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy cddc/political science http://www.cddc.vt.edu 526 major williams hall 0130 http://www.dromocracy.com virginia tech -under construction blacksburg, va 24061 540-231-7614
participants (4)
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jeremy hunsinger -
Mark Warschauer -
Sean Cubitt -
Steve Jones