History 513 2007-08 02. The Infinite Archive

19 Sep 2007

The web is unimaginably large and growing rapidly, yet the individual pieces that make it up are ephemeral, loosely connected and of low average quality. This week we focus on the nature of the web, on the tools we use to measure and navigate it and on its utility for historical practice.

Battelle, John. “The Database of Intentions,” John Battelle’s Searchblog (13 Nov 2003). A revised and expanded version appears as chapter 1 of The Search.

Cohen, Daniel J. “Raw Archives and Hurricane Katrina,” dancohen.org (28 Aug 2006).

Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig. “Exploring the History Web,” Digital History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

Kelly, Kevin. “Scan This Book,” New York Times Magazine (14 May 2006).

Lyman, Peter and Hal R. Varian. “How Much Information? Executive Summary.” School of Information Management and Systems, University of California, Berkeley, 2003.

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (Jun 2003): 735-762.

Talbot, David. “The Fading Memory of the State: The National Archives Struggle to Save Endangered Electronic Records,” Technology Review (July 2005).

Wilkinson, Alec. “Remember This? A Project to Record Everything We Do in Life,” The New Yorker (28 May 2007).

“The Internet and WWW: Basic Concepts and Terms” and “How to Find Things (and People) Online,” Fundamentals of the Digital Humanities, King’s College London (2006).

Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. Portfolio, 2005.

Brown, John Seely and Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information. Boston: Harvard Business School, 2002.

Weinberger, David. Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Perseus, 2003.

Easy. Sign up for an account at Statcounter and use it to monitor the traffic to your blog. There is an overview of the required steps here.

Easy. Web history scavenger hunt. Try this assignment that Roy Rosenzweig gave students in his grad course in digital history. Could you find all of the sources in 30 minutes? Which ones were difficult to find, and why?