Politics and Archivists

[kniedzw]

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

Comments

[unforth]

Don't have time to respond in full, but thought I'd ask, are any of the old webpages in the Way Back Machine? That's the best way I know to find info on old webpages...Some of that stuff also makes it into electronic archives at various institutions...

[kniedzw]

I linked to archive.org (aka "The Way Back Machine") in my post.

I'm mostly concerned because, from a logistics perspective, the people who actually control the servers are best able to archive what's on them. Slurping the information like the Way Back folks do isn't a viable solution, in my view.

Mostly, it was something I was pondering in the midst of the election, and I thought I'd babble about it.

[mindstalk]

The people who control the servers are also able to mess with the archives, and lots of servers aren't permanent. Unless by 'archive' one meant shipping DVD-ROMs to the Library of Congress or something.

Another source of disappearing text: online news articles. I get a lot of my news from AP and Reuters feeds, filtered through Yahoo, not newspapers archived somewhere.

[kniedzw]

You've encapsulated my concerns.

I was merely noting that people in control of a server are in the best position to archive them in order to preserve data, presuming that they want to do so.

You're quite right, however. I was mainly frustrated by the ephemeral nature of the public presences of our elected officials. By all rights, I believe that data should be persistent.

[kniedzw]

Interesting. Wasn't aware that they technically fell within the purview of the FRA. Who's ostensibly in charge of that? The LoC?

[kniedzw]

Heh. I'm awake. Thanks. :)

[brisance]

There are private, public, and government orgs that do collect that kind of stuff. Interestingly to your point (never mind my phony word), however, they often only archive the text that's visible on the pages -- when they did studies and asked researchers, researchers only wanted the text, not the images.

I went to a conference about digital archiving efforts of all kinds of born-digital stuff. It's a damn tricky nut to crack, indeed.

[kniedzw]

Digital media sucks. That's my view. I think we should go back to paper.

*sigh*

Neo-luddite IT folks unite!

[brisance]

Well, at least you agree with MIT. They did a study in which they determined pound for pound, inch for inch, dollar for dollar, year for year, guarantee for guarantee, that acid-free paper kept in temperature-controlled environments was the cheapest, most secure way to preserve visual-based non-video material and was the best worse-case scenario method of ensuring future access.

Except for...what was it...papyrus? or maybe stone tablets. I think they said those were theoretically better. Although stone tablets did poorly in the pound for pound comparison. De-acidified rag-based paper did well, too, I think, but it wasn't as good cost-wise.

[susansugarspun]

Not papyrus, I'm sure, because that's prone to mold problems. (I taught a whole lecture on writing technologies, earlier this semester.) Paper's remarkable, when compared to everything else out there. I might be willing to believe that vellum or parchment has an edge over paper in terms of long-term preservation, but it's orders of magnitude more expensive to produce.

[d_c_m]

puts forward the George W. Bush's grandfather was none other than Aleister Crowley.)
Now that's an insult to Crowley. Come let us raise energy and cleanse his name!

oh for goodness sake....

[kniedzw]

Heh. I actually have some (relatively meager) respect for Barbara Bush. Far more than I have for her children, certainly. ...and say what you will about Crowley, but he wasn't a moral or laudable individual. Interesting, surely, but cleansing his name would take an act of God.

[d_c_m]

hee hee hee hee! I totally agree with you on both points. It just that a possible family connection strikes me as hysterically funny on so many levels.

[coyotewatches]

But... you know... it sure does make for a hell of a conspiracy story about why we invaded modern-day Bavylon, yo!

[squishymeister]

thanks for posting all of this. I was curious today as I was locked up pretending you be invisible, and then BOOM I looked here and you did all of my work for me!

I am thrilled about the turn out.
AND I am proud to be a native Californian today.

[kniedzw]

...and Hastert is stepping down from the Republican leadership. It's a changing of the guard all over.

My major problems have to do with the rash of anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage ballot measures that passed nationally. The Arizona measure that made English the official language of the state made me cringe, as well.

That said, apart from Lieberman (and, to a much lesser degree, Arnold) winning, I really don't have many complaints. :)

[mindstalk]

I've seen a claim that since Arnold is at the left end of Republicans, and his opponent was near the right end of Democrats, Arnold losing might have meant a shift to the left.

[kniedzw]

I don't buy it. Arnold losing would have just made sense, given the miserable approval ratings he had just six months ago. He was scraping the bottom of the barrel in approval, right above the Ohio governor who was implicated in investing state pension funds in coin collections that lost significant money. Then Arnie's spin machine went into full-press mode, his opponent disappeared from the airwaves for a month and a half, and the Austrian came roaring back.

He's somewhat leftist for a conservative, but I believe that to be more a function of the political climate of his state than an actual reflection of his beliefs. He's historically idolized fascists, after all, so I tend to think that the islands of oddly Rightist policy that occasionally flash through onto the public stage are probably more real than any conclusions that might be drawn about his marriage into the Kennedy clan, for instance.