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  • How to disappear completely – The Verge

    The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia.

    This is a particularly complex problem for digital storage. For every painstakingly archived digital item, there are also hard drives corrupted, content wiped, media formats that are effectively unreadable and unusable, as I discovered recently when I went on a hunt for a reel-to-reel machine to recover some audio from the 1960s. Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with even the Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives.

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  • The best way to get past an article’s paywall – Lifehacker

    Archive.today is the fastest, most reliable way to quickly bypass a paywall that I’ve found, and I’ve been using it successfully for the past year across a wide range of sites. It’s a site that will create an archived version of any website you paste into the search bar. … you can often use this functionality to bypass a paywall and read an entire paywalled article without issue.

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  • Archivists work to identify and save the thousands of datasets disappearing from Data.gov – 404 Media

    Disproportionately, the datasets that are no longer accessible through the portal come from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But determining what is actually gone and what has simply moved or is backed up elsewhere by the government is a manual task, and it’s too early to say for sure what is gone and what may have been renamed or updated with a newer version.

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  • Video Game History Foundation Library

    The VGHF Library is operated by the Video Game History Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to the history of video games. This is the home for our collections of video game development materials, magazines, artwork, ephemera, and more.

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  • In search of logged time – Public Books

    Now, the carefully curated caches of our digital histories—and, therefore, almost all of our histories—face an existential threat. The creators of internet content—that is, us—believe they own their digital material, whether it’s a blog started at age 15 or a carefully backed-up Google Drive. This notion is proving to be a lie. The “digital dark age” is a term that was popularized in 2013 among archivists, who noticed that much of Web 2.0—the space that characterized the internet from the 2000s to now—faces complete obsolescence. Link-rot (dead URLs) and bit-rot (corrupted data) metastasized blog servers, video players, and chat forums. In 2019, 50 million tracks from 12 million artists on MySpace disappeared. This year, Christopher Nolan and Guillermo Del Toro warned film buffs to own DVDs as an archive source in a world where you don’t own many physical things, let alone the films you watch on streamers.

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  • Century-scale storage – Harvard Law School Innovation Library Hub

    We are on the brink of a dark age, or have already entered one. The scale of art, music, and literature being lost each day as the World Wide Web shifts and degenerates represents the biggest loss of human cultural production since World War II. My generation was continuously warned by teachers, parents, and authority figures that we should be careful online because the internet is written in ink, and yet it turned out to be the exact opposite. As writer and researcher Kevin T. Baker remarked, “On the internet, Alexandria burns daily.”

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  • Download 200+ free modern art books from the Guggenheim Museum – Open Culture

    Among the more than 200 Guggenheim art books available on the Internet Archive, you’ll find one on a 1977 retrospective of Color Field painter Kenneth Noland, one on the ever-vivid icon-making pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and one on the existential slogans — “MONEY CREATES TASTE,” “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT,” “LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL” — slyly, digitally inserted into the lives of thousands by Jenny Holzer. Other titles, like Expressionism, a German Intuition 1905–1920, From van Gogh to Picasso, from Kandinsky to Pollock, and painter Wassily Kandinsky’s own Point and Line to Plane, go deeper into art history.

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  • Linkfest #28: Neolithic octopuses, weeping trees, and a forty-year-old snowman – Clive Thompson

    For years now (I think it started around 2001) there’s been a web site that offers an exhaustive — and quite hilarious — faux-scientific taxonomy of the different types of bread clips. Apparently there are many varieties around the globe? So they’ve got pix of each major shape and its minor variations.
    humour internet

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  • Revisit episodes of Liquid Television, MTV’s 90s showcase of funny, irreverent & bizarre animation – Open Culture

    Liquid Television’s original three-season run began in the summer of 1991 and ended in early 1995. All throughout, its format remained consistent, rounding up ten or so shorts, each created by different artists. Their themes could vary wildly, and so could their aesthetics: any given broadcast might contain more or less conventional-looking cartoons, but also stickmen, puppets, early computer graphics, subverted nineteen-fifties imagery (that mainstay of the Gen‑X sensibility), Japanese anime, and even live action, as in the recurring drag-show sitcom “Art School Girls of Doom” or the multi-part adaptation of Charles Burns’ Dogboy.

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  • A treasure trove of tech history goes online with the unveiling of the Nokia Design Archive – Wallpaper

    Now the Aalto University in Helsinki has launched the Nokia Design Archive, an online portal that lays bare two decades of the company’s history, including hitherto unseen sketches, concepts and marketing material alongside some of the most legendary, long-lasting and fondly remembered handsets of all time (depending on your age). […] ‘In Finland we have a tradition for being open with big data sets,’ says Anna Valtonen, lead researcher on the Nokia Design Archive. ‘The focus is often on numerical, empirical stuff, but what about people? What about how humans perceive things? How are ideas adopted into society? From a scientific perspective, this is the kind of qualitative empirical material we need more of.’

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  • Manual library online – Manualmachine.com

    As a comprehensive repository for manuals, Manualmachine provides access to an extensive range of user guides and schematic diagrams.

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