| The Internet as an archaeological resource | 2001-11-17 17:57 6 comments |
 by Flemming FunchSince I'm going back home to Denmark for christmas with my family, after not having been there for many years, I got the idea of looking on the Internet for people I used to know in Denmark, just to see what came up and what has become of people. Like, my childhood friends, people I went to school with, etc. And it is sort of a weird experience. Some people are easily found and turn out to be doctors or engineers or business consultants or musicians. Some of them I can find, but only in a more obscure context. Like, one was looking for parts for restoring an antique car at some point, another posted a comment about a movie, and another posted a recipe for sausage stew. First of all, I can only find people with unusual names. Anybody with a common name will just disappear in the volume of matches. And Igot to think of how the Internet kind of is a legacy of what one leaves behind. In that it is the most easily accessible resource, it seems like it is of some importance. Of course that is not where we live our lives, but what if it were the main resource for somebody researching the past? What if I lived my whole life, and the only thing left behind was my recipe for sausage stew? That might not be all that different from how the past otherwise is reconstructed from archaeological finds and scattered written records. It doesn't really tell us all that much about what really happened, but we construct our picture based on what is available. And maybe I'm just an Internet freak who expect to find everything in a search engine, but I noticed that I felt a sense of loss about not finding a lot of things. I looked up the schools I want to, the places I used to live, etc. And I did learn some new things about their history, which I didn't know before, but a lot of history is not to be found. I think that, in principle, all non-fiction books ever written should be electronically available and searchable. In part because they're a record of what we know and what we experience and what we've done. Books have indeed been written about the places I grew up, the schools I went to, the experiences of members of my family, etc. But unless I put a considerable amount of energy into rounding them up, they'll be scattered around in attics and eventually forgotten. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic. But I think the Internet could and should have a role in helping preserve our history better. |