Treating the Web as an archive: Finding the financial crises ground zero online

eaves.ca

13 points·jokermatt999··3 comments

That title seems inaccurate for a posting that talks about a single article. Having a cogent argument for why exactly that specific event was "ground zero" would have been better.

The post was about the Internet granting people easy access to pieces of the past which are easy to forget or generalize or overlook when they're not readily right in front of your face.

"I sometimes wish that the New York Times had run this article again in the last few months, just so we could get reacquainted with the individuals - like Larry Summers - and political parties - both - that got Americans into this mess." While that is a good sentiment (and probably a good idea), the point I took away from the article is that if people really use the web to its full potential, the NY Times wouldn't have to reprint that story, since its existence could be linked to and summoned and quoted by anyone who wanted to look, since it's there. The web is so much about what's happening right now that people, I think, sometimes forget to look at it through the lens of an enormous reasonably-easily-accessible historical record.

And my point is that historical research generally involves picking through lots of bits of archival material, weighing each bit's validity, and constructing a balanced historical narrative. The title of the piece made me expect that, and when I found that it only looked at one specific article, I was somewhat disappointed.

Instead it ended up a breathless piece with an "the internet changes everything" when in fact, it doesn't. Before the internet, newspapers were available in libraries on microfilm. It took more effort, but the same information was available.

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