Tuesday, January 27, 2015

The Interweb: Remembered forever or forgotten in seconds?

This very interesting and thorough article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker (Annals of Technology) is mainly about the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine.
It describes the importance of being about to retrieve data from the internet, and gives some worrying examples of people trying to retract important information.
It's also about link rot, reference rot, and how these problems plague the world of legal research. There are a couple of enterprises under-way ( e.g. Perma.cc) to make link rot a thing of the past, which you might want to investigate before you cite webpages in your assignments.
I recommend you give it a read.
That reference?
Jill Lepore "The Cobweb: Can the internet be archived?" (27 January 2014) The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb;