Just think: When we all die, some historian is going to get his/her/its hands/pseudopods/etc... on one of the most important historical documents of our era, the Livejournal database!
Seriously one of the more amazing digital library projects I saw was something called The Making of America. The project's genesis was the question of what to do with the thousands of 19th century books mouldering in university library storage facilities. U of Michigan and some other Us decided to digitally scan them in and put them all online. The end result(as of year one) was something like 20% of everything published in the 19th century. Everything: books, catalogs, periodicals, correspondance. It's really an unbelievable archive. So the problem for future historians is going to be finding the signal through the unbelievable volume of noise.
I hope that, when Livejournal fades into the mists of time, I'll have enough warning to print out my entire journal on acid-free paper and lock it in the type of document box used for storing property deeds and other important papers from fire/water damage. I think it would be really cool to have a copy of this journal, because it does an excellent job of chronicling my life for the last three years.
The LJ database could be interesting, though. I don't know how - I'm not a social scientist, and I have no idea what strange and arcane things might hide on LJ - but it could be.
I think the Making of America archive might be more valuable when there's more noise. One of the things I thought about is the idea that what appears to be noise may actually be a signal that I don't know how to understand.
What Making of America is awesome for is providing slice of life details for anyone writing fiction. You can search by year and find what people were writing about day to day in all its banal glory. Here's an example courtesy of the guys doing QC in the cube next to me at the time. It's from a 3rd grade reader in the 1870s IIRC:
Mike and Rob are killing birds. Mike has killed three birds. Rob has killed two birds. How many birds have Mike and Rob killed?
So it's a word problem from the arithmetic section with what would be a psychotic bent by our lights. It's proof that people in the 19th century really did have a different mindset than our own. We have to remember that our food system wasn't industrialized back then like it was now and lots of people lived with their food. Gives your pause to think your great to the Nth parents might have named their sunday dinner.
As for LJ, I know that some people are doing research on social networking via things like LJ even as we blog today.
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Date: 2006-12-04 08:15 pm (UTC)Seriously one of the more amazing digital library projects I saw was something called The Making of America. The project's genesis was the question of what to do with the thousands of 19th century books mouldering in university library storage facilities. U of Michigan and some other Us decided to digitally scan them in and put them all online. The end result(as of year one) was something like 20% of everything published in the 19th century. Everything: books, catalogs, periodicals, correspondance. It's really an unbelievable archive. So the problem for future historians is going to be finding the signal through the unbelievable volume of noise.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-04 08:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-04 08:34 pm (UTC)I think the Making of America archive might be more valuable when there's more noise. One of the things I thought about is the idea that what appears to be noise may actually be a signal that I don't know how to understand.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-04 09:32 pm (UTC)So it's a word problem from the arithmetic section with what would be a psychotic bent by our lights. It's proof that people in the 19th century really did have a different mindset than our own. We have to remember that our food system wasn't industrialized back then like it was now and lots of people lived with their food. Gives your pause to think your great to the Nth parents might have named their sunday dinner.
As for LJ, I know that some people are doing research on social networking via things like LJ even as we blog today.