

Treating the Web as an archive: Finding the financial crises ground zero online - jokermatt999
http://eaves.ca/2009/04/30/treating-the-web-as-an-archive-or-finding-the-financial-crises-ground-zero-online/

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ojbyrne
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.

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ja2ke
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.

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ojbyrne
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.

