[Air-L] archiving virtual worlds for social science research

[Scott MacLeod]

Thanks.

The value of archiving this development of 'real' virtuality and
virtual worlds is very high, I think. I compare this time in the
information technology revolution, of which virtual worlds are a very
fascinating aspect, to the cultural, artistic, and intellectual
flourishings that occurred in ancient Greece, where now only about 3%
of texts, etc. remain from that time. Many people in the future may
well try to reconstruct any elisions in data from the early
development of virtual worlds to understand this amazing developments.
So the more successful we are at preserving the beginnings of
information technology (thank you, Brewster Kahle -
http://www.c-span.org/congress/digitalfuture.asp - see Monday,
December 13, 2004, for example), the more we will be able to learn
about how cultural innovation and change work. How to virtualize the
idea of the library? Does anyone know how the internet archive -
http://www.archive.org/index.php - is approaching these questions?

Scott



On 8/29/07, Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu> wrote:
>
> On Aug 29, 2007, at 9:44 AM, Scott MacLeod wrote:
>
> > How would an organization like webarchive.org or someone
> > archive all of Second Life, in the aggregate in real time, as well as
> > the rest of the virtual worlds.
>
> well in sl... you would have to just have the complete object
> database with all object properties, the scripts, etc.   the movement
> database and the conversation/avatar dbs.   from there you could
> likely recreate a live archive...
>
> but really, do you really want to do that?  and what makes you think
> it should be done?
>
> > Might one be able to create a record
> > of all emerging virtual worlds from day 1?
>
> nope, much is lost.
>
> > Is there a way to retrieve
> > an online SL conversation with actions from years ago?
>
> no, not unless someone saved it in logs
> > Some virtual
> > world web-page centric archives exist, but do other kinds of archives
> > exist?
>
> i am unaware of them.  there are a few projects to preserve some
> thing... however.. i do not know of any large project.
>
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