Comment by nomadtwin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nomadtwin | Hacker News Reader

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Can someone help me understand the greater vision of this project?

I do like the idea and efforts from a technical point of view. Tinkering with OCR on unusual (or old) languages. But that's not the goal of this project as far as I'm concerned (it's a byproduct?) Archiving every single news entry for the sake of completion sounds more like obsession than purpose. We're creating so much information that it will be even harder to separate garbage from valuable information (you have to spend time reading the useless stuff before you can justify whether or not it's valuable to you).

Information overload IS a problem and by adding more information to an already saturated ecosystem I don't see the vision here but would like to understand :)

It almost seems like a hording problem but for the digital natives. People accumulate a lot of stuff but rarely can they actually appreciate what they possess as time & perception is a very limiting factor.

An article that would shed some light would be highly appreciated.

They're not generating new information though, they're aiming to make old information available. I'm sure that it's quite helpful for historians to be able to search & read old newspapers, it gives more details about what people read about and often establishes a more specific time line.

We're probably not that good at recognizing which bits will be of interest to future generations, so archiving everything (to a point ... but I believe that newspapers are well within reasonable) sounds like a good idea. Plus you never know what you discover when you make things available.

Not to mention that from 1800 to 1930 the world population doubled (1 billion to 2 billion, passing the 1.5 mark just around 1900).

While this pales in comparison with the 6 billion humans added since, that's a significant change - particularly for most likely available recorded sources - at a time of monstrous evolutions to major world powers/empires, expansion into vast new areas of the world (namely North America) of essentially the British empire (while at the same time the East India Company ceased to exist by the end of the century for contrast), some abolition of slavery becoming a reality in places (1833 for the British), and what arguably kickstarted much of the mental frameworks for our entire lives: the first two industrial revolutions (for example: democratization of once-monastic school system while adopting the year-of-production type of mental model for its promotions).

1804 is the first locomotive. 1859 is The Origin of Species by Darwin. 1861 is Maxwell equations. 1869 is Mendeleev's period table. And so on and so forth[0]. Measurement devices also improve in reliability and efficiency, leading to many of the early recordings we can now look back at when it comes to the consequences of the explosion of human activity with regards to the environment.

It's quite a fantastic century to keep a trace of, frankly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_century#Science_and_techn...

Think about it this way - to view the particular page, article etc you would have to be able to travel to the library in person to view it. If digitized multiple people across the entire globe can access the content. Furthermore printed material degrades over time and at some point becomes unreadable. By digitizing it it remains accessible to future generations. Who knows what may or may not be of interest to future generations. Storage is cheap - historic information is priceless.

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