In a Huffington Post opinion piece, Dartmouth’s Daniel Rockmore talks about the difficulty of finding certain archived information as a great deal of what is known has moved or is moving online. The digital realm “may prove to be the Achilles heel of a new age of cultural preservation,” he writes.
“Early digital materials pose a new set of problems for the modern historian: It is not uncommon that we no longer possess or have easy access to the technologies able to read the media on which the artist’s or writer’s work resides,” writes Rockmore, the William H. Neukom 1964 Distinguished Professor of Computational Science.
There is much to be said for the direction information archiving is taking, he says, “as it brings a wealth of information to many who previously had little or no access.”
However, he writes, “even though information now spills effortlessly onto the screens in front of many of us—but still only for those on the green side of the digital divide—the data deluge can give the illusion that everything we find immediately is all there is to find and that it must also be correct.”
Read the full opinion piece, published 11/17/15 by The Huffington Post.