I assembled an archive of the great #nytmuseums tweet chat held last week; it’s a 49 page PDF document (over 1400 tweets), 522kb. I can’t guarantee that I got everything, but it looks reasonably complete. The chat covered all kinds of things, but focused largely on how cultural institutions can use social media to meet [...]
Yesterday’s New York Times had an Op-Ed article about a problem I’ll bet you never thought of: The Digital Pileup. The essence of the article, with apologies to Jimmy McMillan, is that the amount of digital information is too damn high. Too much energy to run all those server farms. Too much human cost “wading [...]
I attended the Personal Digital Archiving conference in San Francisco last week. Some of the usual suspects in the world of digital preservation where there, most of whom are affiliated with institutions (including myself). But there were also a few rugged individuals who, out of passion or some other impulse, are working alone to collect [...]
Personal digital archiving–actions that individuals undertake to enhance the persistence and accessibility of their own digital photographs, videos and other content that documents their lives–is something of a hot topic. The Internet Archive is hosting its second Personal Archiving conference today and tomorrow with an impressive lineup of speakers. The Library of Congress held its [...]
Evan Carroll, over on The Digital Beyond, asks in a recent post about how personal digital archives might serve the same emotional identidy function as traditional tangible objects. He notes that a grandmother might pass on grandfather’s watch with some context about how he constantly checked it during the recipient’s birth. “Now this is more [...]
A meeting I recently attended, Here Be Dragons: Governing a Technologically Uncertain Future, featured three leading science fiction authors whose task was to help policy wonks image the impact of technology on society. As I noted earlier, one of those authors, Bruce Sterling. went on record as warning that rogue “cocaine submarines” pose a threat [...]
What should we call our future with regard to saving and using digital information? I think one common term misses the mark in conveying the true threat to data and in expressing the basic imperative for keeping it. “Digital dark ages” is a popular term that plays on fear, and by the way, suggests that [...]
The time had finally arrived: I had to bring some order to my large and disorderly collection of digital photographs. I had been putting the task off for a long time in spite of the fact that I knew I was taking a risk in losing some to various digital calamities. Now, after having done [...]
I attended Here Be Dragons: Governing a Technologically Uncertain Future at Google DC today and yesterday. It was deeply informative in an especially compelling way. Maybe it was the topic: governance of two disruptive technologies, the internet and synthetic biology. Maybe it was the policy experts who articulated very complex issues, or maybe it was [...]
I am looking forward to a conference here at Google DC over the next two days, Here Be Dragons: Governing a Technologically Uncertain Future. The dragon business is perhaps a little far-fetched. It refers to “maps in the old days often included depictions of sea dragons or lions to connote unknown or dangerous terrain,” and [...]