Politics and Archivists
There are the obligatory things to mention. Friends of mine are justly happy about the next Speaker of the House. Similarly, Massachusetts gets its first African-American governor, who just happens to be a Harvard man. (Any of you folks happen to know which House? swan_tower and I are curious.) The key Indiana races went Democratic (including District 9, which is mine; go, Baron Hill!), Tester appears to have won Montana, and Rumsfeld is stepping down, to be replaced, apparently, by former CIA chief Robert Gates. Generally speaking, this appears to be a political shift and an interesting one, at that. Some of the concession speeches are worth watching.
I mean, this news is better than having found out that Britney Spears was divorcing Kevin Federline.
(Only tangentially related: If any of you are, like me, fond of loopy conspiracy theories, take a look at this one, which puts forward the idea that George W. Bush's grandfather was none other than Aleister Crowley.)
In any case, no. My current thoughts are on the various websites that will be going down between now and mid-January. This concern actually came to me when I saw this video yesterday. Apparently, the White House had been cropping "Mission Accomplished" from the video of the infamous speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May of 2003. ...at least the version of the video which is on the White House web site. This got me to thinking about the impermanence of items on such sites and the ways in which that is ... well ... wrong.
For instance, what if one wanted to see the White House site for, say, the very end of Clinton's term? It's not as if Bush's cronies have been keeping that site up, and while the internet archive sometimes has such things, it's not as if all of the lame-duck legislator sites will be kept for posterity. What about Senator Santorum's site? Senator Talent's? Defeated Indiana Representative Mike Sodrel's site? I don't think so.
I know too many anthropologists, librarians, political wonks, and historians to say that this information isn't important enough to save. Granted, individual candidate websites might not be the most important thing in the world, but certainly something like press releases should be archived, shouldn't they?
Of course, then we run into revision issues, as with the White House's editing of the video above. Most sites don't have the revision controls for their pages that, say, Wikipedia has (using as an example, in this case, the page for Mike Sodrel, my lame-duck Congressman). Software developers are very familiar with revision control packages, but not many other folks are. ...and I'll wager that most Webmasters are just as happy to be able to expunge old documents from their servers, particularly when it doesn't fit the image their employers want to project.
I've heard many times that the span of time we're in currently will be a black hole in history, as much of its literary and intellectual output is going to fall prey to data rot. I've mentioned this concern before, I'm sure. ...but the fact that there appears to be no good centralized archivist for this data makes me sad somehow, even as the Right stumbles and the Left cheers.
I mean, this news is better than having found out that Britney Spears was divorcing Kevin Federline.
(Only tangentially related: If any of you are, like me, fond of loopy conspiracy theories, take a look at this one, which puts forward the idea that George W. Bush's grandfather was none other than Aleister Crowley.)
In any case, no. My current thoughts are on the various websites that will be going down between now and mid-January. This concern actually came to me when I saw this video yesterday. Apparently, the White House had been cropping "Mission Accomplished" from the video of the infamous speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May of 2003. ...at least the version of the video which is on the White House web site. This got me to thinking about the impermanence of items on such sites and the ways in which that is ... well ... wrong.
For instance, what if one wanted to see the White House site for, say, the very end of Clinton's term? It's not as if Bush's cronies have been keeping that site up, and while the internet archive sometimes has such things, it's not as if all of the lame-duck legislator sites will be kept for posterity. What about Senator Santorum's site? Senator Talent's? Defeated Indiana Representative Mike Sodrel's site? I don't think so.
I know too many anthropologists, librarians, political wonks, and historians to say that this information isn't important enough to save. Granted, individual candidate websites might not be the most important thing in the world, but certainly something like press releases should be archived, shouldn't they?
Of course, then we run into revision issues, as with the White House's editing of the video above. Most sites don't have the revision controls for their pages that, say, Wikipedia has (using as an example, in this case, the page for Mike Sodrel, my lame-duck Congressman). Software developers are very familiar with revision control packages, but not many other folks are. ...and I'll wager that most Webmasters are just as happy to be able to expunge old documents from their servers, particularly when it doesn't fit the image their employers want to project.
I've heard many times that the span of time we're in currently will be a black hole in history, as much of its literary and intellectual output is going to fall prey to data rot. I've mentioned this concern before, I'm sure. ...but the fact that there appears to be no good centralized archivist for this data makes me sad somehow, even as the Right stumbles and the Left cheers.