The Internet Is Rotting - The Atlantic
A terrific piece by Jonathan Zittrain on bitrot and online digital preservation:
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
Keepers of the Secrets | The Village Voice
A deeply fascinating look into the world of archives and archivists:
The reason an archivist should know something, Lannon said, is to help others to know it. But it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his knowledge on anyone else. Indeed, if the field could be said to have a creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important. Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane or not?
Related links
Times Higher Education - Memory failure detected
A worrying report on the state of digital preservation and the web, specifically in the UK. Welcome to the memory hole.
Sandra Rendgen
A blog dedicated to data visualisation, all part of ongoing research for a book on Charles-Joseph Minard.
Data visualisation, interactive media and computational design are one focus of my work, but I also do research in the history of maps and diagrams.