History 9808 2008-09 02. The Infinite Archive

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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.

Grafton, Anthony. “Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents,” The New Yorker (5 Nov 2007).

Internet Archive. “About the Internet Archive,” (n.d.)

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.

Roush, Wade. “The Infinite Library: Does Google's Plan to Digitize Millions of Print Books Spell the Death of Libraries; or Their Rebirth?,” Technology Review (May 2005).

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).

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