Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era
From booktorrent
"Scarcity or Abundance?" is an article written by digital history guru Roy Rosenzweig, founder of the Center for History and New Media and historian at George Mason University. This article appeared in The Journal of American History in June of 2003.
Summary
Rosenzweig begins the article by discussing the fragility of information on the internet via a discussion centered around the short-lived internet sensation known as the Bert is Evil website, created by one Dino Ignacio, which featured pictures of Bert from Sesame Street in close proximity to some of history's most notorious villains. Rosenzweig offers a warning to historians working in a digital age, arguing that the ease with which information appears on the internet will create an "astonishingly rapid accumulation of digital data," through which historians will have to sift.
Selected Quotations
"Ignacio's sudden deletion of Bert should capture our interest as historians since it dramatically illustrates the fragility of evidence in the digital era. If Ignacio had published his satire in a book or magazine, it would sit on thousands of library shelves rather than having a more fugitive existence as magnetic impulses on a web server." (3)
"Historians need to be thinking simultaneously about how to research, write, and teach in a world of unheard-of historical abundance and how to avoid a future of record scarcity." (5)
Works Cited
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” The American Historical Review 108.3 (2003): 735-762. Print.
