[Air-l] my e-mail archives

[Steve Jones]

Jeremy's post made me think a bit more about what it means to be able 
to archive such things as all of our correspondence (or at least an 
enormous amount of it) via the Internet and computer. For myself, I 
have (though not all in one place) all of my e-mail messages from 
about 1987 and on (and there are times I wish that I had had some 
means of easily saving materials from my PLATO days!). And while it 
would be interesting to throw them all on a giant hard drive and go 
to town with various analytic software packages to discern countless 
patterns, etc., it's not only e-mail that I have. I also have 
floppies with letters, memos, files, programs, images, sounds...you 
name it, and if it can be digital, it's there. Heck, some of it isn't 
even mine, but I have it. Some of it you sent me (you know who you 
are).

I'm almost overwhelmed thinking about how historical work may change 
as a result, but also overwhelmed thinking about what we can and may 
need to do to make sense of what we have when so much is available. 
Let's go data-crazy and link my e-mails to yours, Jeremy, and on and 
on and on, and build a vaster and vaster archive.

Not only are there various legal, ethical and methodological issues 
with which to grapple, there are some very practical ones as well. I 
was recently involved in discussions with a group of people in D.C. 
to help the Library of Congress figure out how to procure, archive, 
maintain, etc., materials that are, in their words, "born digital." 
Fascinating discussions, but again, overwhelming (funny how that word 
keeps popping up when I talk about this - perhaps it's me alone 
that's overwhelmed). Just ask Brewster Kahle, or any of the numerous 
folks involved with archive.org. Ask Steve and Kirsten about 
archiving 9/11 information (and to add my $.02, I hope they do get a 
chance to tell us about the process of putting that site together). 
How do we keep it secure (both in the sense of "private" and in the 
sense of "safe")? How do we think about it, if at all, right now? 
That is, I suspect we all have this sense of the "stuff" that we have 
on our disks and hard drives, but how does that intersect and 
interplay with how we feel about the box of letters we keep in the 
closet? Will we encrypt stuff, or keep it open? Will we erase some? 
Will others know that we've erased it and be able to track it down 
via another source (for our e-mails and such are typically not ours 
alone)?

Among other questions, the ones I most often seem to come back to 
are: What will the work of history and historians be, how much effort 
will be involved in tracking down personal correspondence, will it be 
the same or different than tracking down the paper letters, the 
visual and audio outtakes, the drafts, notes, etc., offline? With 
what consequences?

Sj (who's glad to have had another chance to add to your inbox)

At 7:40 PM -0500 1/23/02, jeremy hunsinger wrote:
>today i took the opportunity to burn some of the abundant processor 
>power available these days and ran mhonarc on my old eudora outbox 
>from one machine, my old nt server, 41000000+ bytes 18700+messages 
>around 10 a day going out.  so in all covers more or less my 
>complete outgoing life from 1997 when i applied to ph.d. programs to 
>oct. 2001 or so.  has anyone else archived all their incoming and 
>outgoing emails, and considered them?  why or why not?  Looking over 
>these things, i cannot make it public really, but still it is there, 
>it represents to some extent what i have done.  opinions, ideas? I 
>mean this archive comes to somewhere around 25000+ pages of writing, 
>most of which I wrote, most of it innocuous and meaningless outside 
>of its reparte, but it exists much of it in confidence. So I am 
>sittiing here, the reason why i did it, of course, was to provide me 
>with better access, I'll run my search engines over it a few times 
>and be able to dig through it as i wish, but really, are these 
>things the papers of our day?  are email communications really, as 
>they are figured frequently, ephemeral?
>jeremy hunsinger
>jhuns at vt.edu
>on the ibook
>www.cddc.vt.edu
>www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy
>www.dromocracy.com
>
>
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