Once More Into the Breach…

In the article Promises and Perils of Digital History, Cohen and Rosenzweig examine our digital presence, focusing on how we “preserve” history on the web. I found this topic to be incredibly interesting, and a little unsettling. It is something that I have pondered myself for a long time now. I believe the most poignant example of the flaws in “preserving” digital history is something we all either love or hate: wikipedia. I know I’m not the first person to point out the massive problem that arises when we allow anybody to re-write history however they may choose, but what gets me is that when I look at my peers, and even myself, we STILL continue to use wikipedia for scholarly papers, even though we know of times when the information was blatantly wrong. (The 2008 election is a good example – all the ridiculous things that were written on some candidate’s wiki pages). The thing is, it’s easier, quicker, and less costly to just search something on wikipedia than it is to do extensive research at the library, or to pay for a database like JSTOR. And as a nation we are big fans of convenience.

The good news is, the authors of this article offer a solution, a call to arms for all historians to take the act of digital preservation into their own hands. We can only wait and see how successful this endeavor turns out to be. I hope that people take this request seriously, for as we saw in the news just today, when a group of Mali rebels fleeing Timbuktu torched a library full of ancient manuscripts, we may not always have the physical, tangible remains of historical artifacts, so we must preserve our knowledge in a permanent way.

Three things I would like to learn about this semester are:

1) About some of the Anti-Piracy laws in the United States and other countries

2) About Internet Privacy Laws (especially as they pertain to user information stored by Google, Facebook and other important players)

3) And about some of the big people in the creation of the internet as we know it today.

~ by chriscaps on January 28, 2013 .