Writing History in a Paperless World: Archives of the Future
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Writing History in a Paperless World : Archives of the Future. / Kaur, Ravinder.
In: History Workshop Journal, Vol. 79, No. 1, 2015, p. 243-253.Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Writing History in a Paperless World
T2 - Archives of the Future
AU - Kaur, Ravinder
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - The rapid expansion of the seemingly limitless digital universe invites us to rethink the question of archives. If information in the time of high-speed Internet connectivity is easily produced, searched, circulated and consumed, it is as easily deleted and effaced from the public domain too. The digital content (especially user-generated) on blogs, websites, and social media platforms is both plentiful – often expressed as ‘information overload’ – and fragile; it risks perishing almost as fast as it is produced. The historians of the future seeking to write the history of the early twenty-first century will be faced with this problematic. While one approach is to seek technological solutions toward storing the digital content, another is to reconsider what the very notion of past might mean in the age of acceleration. The past is produced rapidly as every passing moment is buried under fresh layers of information and news almost every second on multiple media. This article considers the challenges of writing the history of the vanishing present.
AB - The rapid expansion of the seemingly limitless digital universe invites us to rethink the question of archives. If information in the time of high-speed Internet connectivity is easily produced, searched, circulated and consumed, it is as easily deleted and effaced from the public domain too. The digital content (especially user-generated) on blogs, websites, and social media platforms is both plentiful – often expressed as ‘information overload’ – and fragile; it risks perishing almost as fast as it is produced. The historians of the future seeking to write the history of the early twenty-first century will be faced with this problematic. While one approach is to seek technological solutions toward storing the digital content, another is to reconsider what the very notion of past might mean in the age of acceleration. The past is produced rapidly as every passing moment is buried under fresh layers of information and news almost every second on multiple media. This article considers the challenges of writing the history of the vanishing present.
KW - Faculty of Humanities
KW - HISTORY
KW - Archives
KW - digital archives
KW - social media
KW - Faculty of Social Sciences
KW - digital archives
KW - history
KW - archives
KW - social media
KW - internet
U2 - 10.1093/hwj/dbv003
DO - 10.1093/hwj/dbv003
M3 - Journal article
VL - 79
SP - 243
EP - 253
JO - History Workshop Journal
JF - History Workshop Journal
SN - 1363-3554
IS - 1
ER -
ID: 132685404