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Friday, November 19, 2010

We Can Store it, but can we Effectively Think about it?

Cheap storage now allows us to store all that occurs in the Web.  I have worked on projects that include using things like the Internet Archive to understand the evolution of specific changes online for decades. 

ReadWriteWeb poses the question:
" ...  In a remarkable series of articles on the World Policy Institute's blog, Anais Borja introduces this distressing thought.  "With easy storage made even easier by cheap disk space, our ability to create and save information has outpaced our ability to think critically about the theory and practice of archiving it."Will this increase in materials force a democratizing of information and impress that on future historians or will it create an epochal informational garbage dump where real understanding will defy human and machine thought? ... "

We ran into similar roadblocks.  We could find the screen shots of the web pages we needed.  Yet these were raw data, and it was much more difficult to understand their context at the time.  But is archiving of all this data possible?

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