Digital Archaeology

Definition

History is the leaving behind of a story. On the web, you're inventing a story in the ambient surroundings so onecan pick it up where toy are. You put something in front of a person to make them stop, and before they know it, they've had an experience. Leaving behind history is easier when it's written in stone. When it's written on old VHS or cassette tape, stuck on the hard drive of an Amiga or stored in an old database, it's not as simple to extract. Of lot of our history stands to be lost if we do not save it. Digital Archaeology is the act of gathering, classifying, extracting and archiving various forms of files into accessible formats capable of being accessed by future people.

Importance

"Digital archaeology is a discipline that doesn't quite exist yet, but may develop to deal with this problem, which is pervasive in the world of data.

"NASA, for example, has huge quantities of information sent back from space missions in the 1960s stored on deteriorating magnetic tape, in formats designed for computers that were obsolete twenty years ago. NASA didn't have the funds to transfer the data before the machines became junk. The National Center for Atmospheric research has "thousands of terabits" of data on aging media that will probably never be updated because it would take a century to do it. The archival tapes of Doug Engelbart's Augment project - an important part of the history of computing - are decaying in a St. Louis warehouse.

"The 'aging of the archives' issue isn't trivial," says desktop publisher Ari Davidow. "We're thinking of CD-ROM as a semi-permanent medium, but it isn't. We already have PageMaker files that are useless" [1].