I can't seem to find it now, but there is a historian or an archivist whose specialty is studying this phenomena. I've read some journal articles and other pieces they've written about this. From what I remember, it was more about what *will* happen than what has already. For example, if twitter is used now to communicate, what will historians have in 300 years to study? Now, we have letters people would write to each other. The prediction was that the digital age would be a dark spot. We'd know that something happened then, and probably have a general idea (barring some sort of catastrophe), but we wouldn't have any specifics. The idea being, sure the archives of Twitter exist now, but who will pay to keep them running for 300 years (given physical media rot, etc)? I think the answer is "no one". I'll keep looking for the name or article I read. On Sat, Jul 20, 2019, at 05:44, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > good friend of mine is starting a research project, looking into > what i will call "digital transience" ... she is using a slightly > different term and would prefer i not use it for the time being. > > the idea is fairly obvious ... the danger of digital content > vanishing for any of a number of reasons: dropping support for > proprietary data formats, physical media (5 1/4" floppy drives, Zip > drives(?)) vanishing, link rot, entire site rot, and so on. so she's > interested in a couple things. > > first, just *general* contributors to the unexpected loss of what > might be important corporate digital data. but also, real-life > examples of things like this -- the one that leaps to mind is the > recent microsoft debacle involving ebooks protected by DRM: > > https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-ebook-apocalypse-drm/ > > i think that, of the two topics above, she's more interested in > actual examples of significant loss of digital data, not through any > sort of malice, but by accident or unforeseen developments in hardware > or data formats that suddenly cause a catastrophic loss of > information. > > i've already started a list, but i'm open to as many examples as i > can collect. thoughts? > > rday > > -- > > ======================================================================== > Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA > http://crashcourse.ca > > Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday > LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday > ======================================================================== > > To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org > To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org > To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org > > To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org