9/20/2023 0 Comments The trove wayback machine![]() ![]() It took as many centuries for most of its collections to be destroyed. Thousands of years ago, the Library of Alexandria was, as the astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote, “the brain and heart of the ancient world.” For seven centuries, it housed hundreds of thousands of scrolls great works of philosophy, literature, technology, math, and medicine. It is not just access to knowledge, but the knowledge itself that’s at stake. Today’s web is more dynamic than ever and therefore more at-risk than it sometimes seems. The trove they’ve built is extraordinary, but it’s far from comprehensive. Scott and his colleagues are saving tens of petabytes of data, chasing an ideal that doubles as their motto: Universal Access to All Knowledge. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has a trove of cached web pages going back to 1996. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone, there is just zero recourse.” A piece of paper can burn and you can still kind of get something from it. “Except when it goes, it really goes,” said Jason Scott, an archivist and historian for the Internet Archive. It can be read by machines, sorted and analyzed in massive quantities, and disseminated instantaneously. You have to know this.ĭigital information itself has all kinds of advantages. You can't count on the web, okay? It’s unstable. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. ![]()
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