Comments on: Treating the web as an archive – or finding the financial crisis’ ground zero online

By: Twitted by Tom_Chippendale

Twitted by Tom_Chippendale — Tue, 05 May 2009 06:16:56 +0000

[...] This post was Twitted by Tom_Chippendale – Real-url.org [...]

By: signalfire

signalfire — Sun, 03 May 2009 09:10:15 +0000

Thank you for pointing out both the archival value of the web, but also the fact that all those who said, 'there was no way to see this coming' are in the same criminal league as, 'No one could have thought they'd use planes and run them into buildings…'

Can we please, finally, get rid of those who refuse to understand and act on complexities? Or at the very least, remove them from power? I make the connection to religious 'belief'. We tell lies, fantasies to children and then a few short years later, expect them to act rationally. It's a hopeless situation, really.

By: PrebleNY.com

PrebleNY.com — Sat, 02 May 2009 18:28:08 +0000

It essentially defines ground zero of the financial crisis…

Treating the web as an archive – or finding the financial crisis’ ground zero online | eaves.ca:
… It essentially defines ground zero of the financial crisis: …
A VERY interesting article with reference back to 1999 when this mess was sta…

By: Twitted by entwistletx

Twitted by entwistletx — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:32:39 +0000

[...] This post was Twitted by entwistletx – Real-url.org [...]

By: Jeremy Vernon

Jeremy Vernon — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:15:47 +0000

Another artifact of the web is the explicit semantic association of content that is possible only with rich meta-data that would be impossible in a newspaper. The web allows newspapers to take on the attributional rigor of academic papers without sacrificing readability – they can quote sources and link directly do them, cite articles etc. This web of content is quite valuable and is otherwise impossible with paper based articles (it also encourages a greater accountability amongst journalists).

Microfiche digitization is (relative to say books) a reasonably straightforward process. UofT houses the largest digitization facility in the country and can process thousands of fiches in a matter days. What becomes the issue is storing and distributing the content – one must avoid any single-points of failure. Another problem is future-proofing, data must be accessible and readable by future software, something that often breaks (anyone try opening up a RealMedia file from 1996 with a 2009 RealPlayer?) open source has a part to play here, as does opening up the specifications for deprecated file-formats.

By: Daily News About Mr Irrelevant : A few links about Mr Irrelevant - Thursday, 30 April 2009 12:06

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:28:04 +0000

[...] Treating the web as an archive – or finding the financial crises ground zero online [...]

By: kferaday

kferaday — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:00:25 +0000

Google News Timelines takes a first stab at showing the lineage of a topic across news, blogs video etc. I think tools that built on this so that you could create communities of interest around a topic or issue might help address some of the issues you're talking about.

By: Veronica

Veronica — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:51:02 +0000

Unfortunately, this gets significantly harder with gov docs once you want to go back beyond the current government and do any kind of systematic research. URLs are apt to change over time and when talks and speeches have pithy titles like "Remarks before dinner with the President of France" googling is not always straightforward. There is very little consistency between government departments or across time about where they archive things like old speeches and websites.

For instance, the US Dept of State points you quite easily to a "Former Secretaries of State" website where you can access archived websites and speeches, while White House practice seems to be to maintain a separate website for the previous President's tenure, before moving them over to the national archive. The military, by contrast, archives all of their speeches onsite; I don't know what happens to previous version of websites.

Former Canadian Prime Minister's Speeches used to be linked directly from the PCO website; now they are stored at the National Archives' Website. DFAIT has only very, very recently linked its archived speeches from the DFAIT website; previously you had go to the national archive website (though I think that's fairly new as well) or call the department historian. In Canada, the National Archive site is improving its web archiving, but the interface is still not straightforward.

The Germans and the French are better at this than we Canadian/Americans are (at least as it concerns foreign policy) but we can take heart that the Brits are much, much worse (except when it comes to Hansard, which is currently digitized back to 1803. Awesome.)

By: Harley Young

Harley Young — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:47:16 +0000

This is an interesting post, and it highlights the importance of archival in the digital age. Whereas you can go back and retrieve many articles from the NY Times online, and you can go to the library and look at the fiche of the Globe & Mail from 1982, we must consider what happens if those assets vanish.

You tweeted yesterday (http://twitter.com/david_a_eaves/status/1654845327) about the withering National Post. What if it does die, or what if the NY Times does? What happens to all that content, your potential archive? Of course, with properties like those, you can probably go to libraries to look at information because it was, at one point, printed on paper. And, you can try looking for some things in the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine (http://www.archive.org/); however, lots of stuff that might be useful (cf. recent news about trying to archive Geocities http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/042909_...) is ephemeral, and as more news shifts to an online-only format, content may become even more ephemeral.

You're right that analysis of data can expose risks, but one of the risks that we seem to being a fine job of ignoring is the preservation of data such that analysis is even possible. Probably not everything needs to be archived, but who decides what of today is important in 2050? Or even 2015?