The effort to preserve a million letters written by U.S. soldiers during wartime
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. Dead people don't pay for advertising revenue, so that data's likely being deleted soon after they're gone, or when their phone dies.
Yes some of these services allow salvaging the data of relatives, but most people aren't going to be paying whatever's the future Google extra money monthly to preserve grandma's multi-gigabyte E-Mail account. What would previously be letters from the front stored in a box somewhere will be stored alongside swaths of commercial E-Mail and spam.
Honestly I view all of this (digging into someone's personal correspondence from the past) as extremely overly voyeuristic, rather than having actual value.
If it wasn't meant to be public originally, I don't want it to be public. It does not respect the original author's intention.
(Not trying to be hostile - but I just wanted to say this.)
Reading about what a meat grinder war is for the grunt on the ground helps future generations a lot more in not repeating those mistakes than so-and-so many millions died.
I think past a given point we shouldn't respect the author's privacy. Everybody's got records they'd like to keep private, and perhaps they'd even like to keep it private past their death to avoid some harm among their surviving immediate relatives.
But past a certain point everyone who could be harmed by such disclosures is long dead.
WWII letters were used as an example here. My grandfather was alive during WWII. I think it's reasonable to expect that there are people sending emails they'd much rather not have their grandchildren learn about after their death.
I'm willing to bet you agree with this notion in principle, and would just like to quibble about the time scale. Or do you think that if we unearthed something that's clearly private correspondence on a clay tablet from ancient Sumer that it should be kept private?
In this specific case, I'm willing to bet that if someone were to say "this secret should be kept from my grandchildren after I'm dead" it's exactly the sort of thing their living grandchildren would have an interest in knowing about, and that interest should outweigh a dead person's privacy.
If you're really not concerned about the privacy of the dead and think that time scale is just a quibble, would you be ok with a policy that nude photos and 3d models of all dead bodies, together with personal identifying information, be uploaded to a public searchable website as soon as possible after death? After all, some people might be interested in seeing that.
Not many people are upset about the privacy implications of reading an ancient clay tablet, so this is not as big a concern. The time scale thing isn't just a quibble, it's central to how living people are affected.
But, if one seeks a consensual compilation by one person, here is a superb one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17032891
I only bust it out on a super chill, lazy day off and read but a few letters at a time, and I'm still only a fraction of the way through it.
Voyeuristic? Probably. I find it a very rare, direct, and valuable transmission of an external being's perspective and senses, though. Candid but consensual.
People die. Humanity lives on. At some point, the author dies, then their relatives die, and when they're all dead twice over, this stuff becomes relevant as a way for the future generations to have a glimpse at the realities of life of their ancestors.
I.e. history. If we were to respect what you wrote, we wouldn't have history.
Historians' heroes will be those with publicly facing personas. No one will remember anyone except the guy with a public Twitter profile.
There are hundreds of email archivists working at universities across the country. The reason you don't hear about them is that email didn't exist until ~1971, universities don't accession email collections until either after someone dies or at least until relatively late in their career, and once collections are accessioned they are usually embargoed for some amount of time -- e.g. IIRC 50 years in the case of Harvard.
Also, even though there are 15 or so different email archival software packages, none of them is really fully baked yet, so right now lots of universities are just putting email into longterm storage formats and then they're content to just wait another 10+ years until the email archival software is in a better state before processing them for publication.
If you have good email threads you want to publish on the Internet now though, you can use our tool https://www.fwdeveryone.com.
I mean unless you think the value of the knowledge contained within email is obviously less than the value that will be unlocked by self-driving cars, it stands to reason that solving the problem may not actually be any less complicated.
I'll admit they have their uses, and hopefully they'll get better over time. But given their current state, if you don't place any value on what you're saying then why even say it in the first place?
You can't search or even store voice conversations (unless you explicitly record them, so by your logic, why would you talk to people at all?
Telegram has your whole chat history (or most of it) indexed and you can search it very quickly from the main window (just press Ctrl+F and type away).
The history can also be exported, along with images and other files, to JSON, or to a bunch of HTML files.
Most copies, like most old books and most letters, will be destroyed. But some copies of some peoples information will probably live on. Some hard drives and flash memory will be miraculously preserved or whatever for future generations automated electron scanning microscopes to decode.
http://www.walterbright.com/trip/chas.html
But the letters my grandmother wrote to him are totally lost.
With digital communications, this is generally not going to be the case. If someone unearths an Amazon datacenter and starts poring over the content stored in flash drives, they are going to just find volumes and volumes of raided/sharded/indexed/normalized/encrypted content that mixes presentation with prose and reads like someone quickly twisting the dial on an old analog radio.
Most of the content we see now is emergent from the system that stewards it and is only accessible when it's in operation.
+1 for the terrific analogy!
Fountain pen lets me write longer without pressuring my hand. Stamps for actually changing the world, as opposed to private writings. Matches and sealing wax for constructive pyromania.
I sent them all of my grandparents' correspondence from 1941 - 1945 which they meticulously organized into chronological order, and digitized. They're working on transcribing them now.
If you only have physical artifacts, I recommend scanning at 600 dpi for digital artifact creation prior to uploading to the Internet Archive.
We used to call poor handwriting 'chicken scratch' for fun all the time when I was a kid. I would know because my handwriting has always been horrible. I was always jealous of people who had pretty handwriting :)
I'm sure this is a term people in many other countries would recognize, I wonder what other coloquialisms have this sort of widespread recognition?
> crabbed handwritting, cacography, chicken scratch