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Treating the Web As an Archive

Posted by Soulskill on from the don't-forget-to-backup-your-data dept.

An anonymous reader sends a link to a blog post by David Eaves discussing how the ease of finding information on the web affects how we analyze history. "... nothing is different per se — the same old research methods will be used — but what if it is 10 times easier to do, 100 times faster and contains a million times the quantity of information? With the archives of newspapers, blogs and other websites readily available to be searched, the types of research once reserved for only the most diligent and patient might be more broadly accessible." As an example, he points to an almost 10-year-old article detailing the events surrounding the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which some believe was a significant contributing factor to the current financial crisis.

18 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. This History... It's Iffy by mistashizzle · · Score: 2

    You can't believe everything you read on the internet.

    1. Re:This History... It's Iffy by Coopjust · · Score: 3, Interesting

      True, but looking back at verifiable events can give us some real insight.

      Try looking at the Slashdot archives on September 11th, 2001. I was in middle school when the attacks happened, and I wasn't a Slashdot reader. Even more than the articles, the comments are very interesting. Panic. First hand accounts. Anger (We're going to bomb them into oblivion, we'll have Osama in a week, etc.)

      While you can't trust old information on the internet, it does have a wide variety of verifiable information that is more accessible digitally than it ever has been before.

    2. Re:This History... It's Iffy by Z00L00K · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No, you can't believe everything, but if you check the sources you can classify it as being acceptably reliable or not.

      The web contains a great deal of information but you still need a search engine to deal with it - like Google. Unfortunately - or luckily - Google does filter out some pages with insecure and/or inappropriate content. This is of course negative for some researchers but positive for most people on the net.

      And it's never wrong to double-check the information provided. It may be correct, but there may be opposite views too.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    3. Re:This History... It's Iffy by houstonbofh · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Too bad it takes so long to read the article... (Not that long, just a few minutes of shock afterwards) Then your would see his premise. The web as an archive is only a small part. A bigger part is how journalism is changing to quick payoff, not truly investigative. (Verifiably true) And that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it (also true) and we did. And that this is not the machinations of one party but both. (Also provable)

      Perhaps you should change that to "Don't believe something just because it was on the internet."

  2. Huh by paazin · · Score: 5, Informative
    From the article (Nov 1999):

    The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system.

    Yep and no one forsaw this financial crisis, indeed.

    1. Re:Huh by Knave75 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Also from the article

      I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota.

      That is almost spooky. We need this guy to be running the country.

    2. Re:Huh by houstonbofh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      From the article (Nov 1999): said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. ''There are many reasons for this bill, but first and foremost is to ensure that U.S. financial firms remain competitive.''

      But I thought the Republicans were to blame for this economy... That is what the media said. You mean we can't trust our politicians and the media?

    3. Re:Huh by nine-times · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Who held the majority in Congress in 1999?

      There's plenty of blame to go around.

    4. Re:Huh by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Informative

      There's bipartisan blame for that bill, but it was primarily pushed by Republicans.

      The act itself was named Gramm-Leach-Bliley after its three Republican drafters and promoters. The first version of the act passed both Houses with mainly Republican support, especially in the Senate. In the House, it passed 343-86, with a 205-16 tally for the Republicans, and 138-70 for the Democrats (counting Sanders as a D for the moment). In the Senate, it passed 54-44, with a 53-0 tally for the Republicans, and a 1-44 tally for the Democrats. Schumer actually voted against that version of the bill (Fritz Hollings was the lone Democrat in favor).

      After reconciliation between the House and Senate versions failed, a new version was drafted that gave some concessions to Democrats, mainly in the form of strengthened anti-redlining provisions and strengthened medical and financial privacy regulations. The sweetened bill passed by large margins, though still with the Democrats (now reduced to only a smaller core) being the primary opposition. In the House, 57 still voted no, including 52 Democrats and only 5 Republicans. In the Senate, there were 8 nays, comprised of 7 Democrats and 1 Republican. Clinton (a Democrat) signed the bill.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    5. Re:Huh by Vellmont · · Score: 4, Insightful


      But I thought the Republicans were to blame for this economy

      The repeal of Glass-Steagall was one of many pieces of de-regulation that lead to this mess. The loudest voices I hear championing the call for less regulation, smaller government, etc is the republican party. If you read the article the vast majority of the opposition came from the Democrats (with only 1 Republican Senator voting no). It was pretty weak opposition to be sure.

      So sure, Democrats can share a lot of the blame here. But don't ignore the fact that Republicans are largely the ones pushing for de-regulation (many still want even MORE).

      Anyway, I think the thing to take home from all this is not one party over another, but rather one set of ideas as being wrong. I always hear the main argument against regulation being "unintended consequences", like it's some kind of magical argument to wave over everything. What people seem to forget is that ANYTHING can have "unintended consequences", including doing nothing.

      --
      AccountKiller
    6. Re:Huh by jmorris42 · · Score: 2, Funny

      > It makes it trivial to find someone whose opinion supports your position...

      Exactly. Anybody with a functioning brain could figure this one out but like so many myths of the left it goes unchallenged. And when challenged the challenger is either thrown down the memory hole (if small, as in watch this post go -1) or shouted down violently in the hope they learn to never question authority[1] again. Or just shouted down to drown them out. And even if the rebuttal is total and absolute the politically correct version of history simply continues.

      Glass Steagall was intended to prevent the sort of diversified banking, brokerage and insurance financial monsters that proved best able to survive this fiasco. Lehman Brothers, the pure brokerage play, is dead. Bear Sterns and Merril Lynch, again pure brokerages, are absorbed and gone. AIG, a pure play insurance outfit is now a zombie government semi-entity.

      But we must blame someone, anyone, other than the real villians of this story. Freddie, Fanny, Congress (mostly Democrats but also fair share of Republicans who were more than willing to go along including at one notable point Pres. Bush himself) and to a small but notable extent Obama's legal work for ACORN. By 'encouraging' (quotas) lenders to make loans they KNEW would almost certainly go bad forced[2] them to do yet more terrible things to try to paper over the problem and spread the losses out, only delaying the diaster, making it bigger and infecting so much more of the economy of the entire world.

      All we hear is how this was 'a failure of regulation' and thus the solution is yet more regulation. Nope. It was a failure of policy. The regulators had more than enough authority and did nothing because the banks were doing exactly what the government wanted them to be doing. A failure caused by government being too involved in 'private' finance. I put private in scare quotes because for the most part it already didn't exist and won't at all once Obama gets done. Almost no home mortagage has really been private in decades, almost all either actually go through Freddie/Fannie or at least are 'conforming' paper, meaning they meet the requirements set by Freddie/Fannie. Only the very rich got to use the actual private sector banking system to buy a home. Almost every home built in the last few decades has been built to FHA specs and recomendations, if by nothing else but osmossis. Congress set actual percentage quotas on how many loans would go to which politically preferred groups, including (in dense weasel words of course) how many had to be loans almost certain to go bad.

      [1] Remember Citizen, "Dissent is the highest form of Patriotism." But only when attacking a Republican administration. Attacking the Most Holy One is treason at best and probably even worse: Racism. Racism, the crime with no defense, no firm guideline to know when one has committed it and the only punishment is banishment from all polite society.

      [2] Not forced much. After all most of the people making the decisons were quite happy to squander the shareholder funds in theor trust to be seen as 'enlightened' by primitive socialist savages. Savages in the sense that they can see all the wonders of civilization, envy, and fear it, but couldn't create much of anything if their lives depended on it. After all, far too many banking/fund managers/etc executives are young college educated socialists themselves.

      --
      Democrat delenda est
  3. 10, 100, 1M times more crap by wjh31 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes theres alot of information on the internet, its easy and fast to find it. But its also easy and fast to find a great deal of crap on the internet that isnt actually of any use to you. Filtering the wheat from the chaff can often take as much or more effort as finding the information in the first place. How many times have you had to re-word your search phrase, try several search results, and use ctrl-f to actually select the usefull information from all the extra crap.

    1. Re:10, 100, 1M times more crap by argent · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How many times have you had to re-word your search phrase, try several search results, and use ctrl-f to actually select the usefull information from all the extra crap.

      Yes, that's way more trouble than driving down to a university library and spending the afternoon grovelling through microfiche to get a comparable amount of information.

    2. Re:10, 100, 1M times more crap by ResidntGeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Man, have you ever _been_ to a university library? The sheer amount of information available in those places can have a comparable effect to the Total Perspective Vortex, if you stop and think about it too much. It's also the most beautiful thing on earth.

      So, you should go sometime. Wander around a good university library (I recommend Perkins Library at Duke, if you're anywhere near there) sometime, just marveling at the sheer amount of information available - open a few books and skin them, go to the official documents section and look at random UN subcommittee reports from 1978, check out the journal archives and read organic chemistry papers from 1932... then go home and try to still feel powerful and informed while you wrestle with Google and the Wayback Machine trying to get a newspaper article from 2007 that isn't on the website anymore.

      --
      ResidntGeek
  4. The web is NOT an archive by line-bundle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The web fails in so many ways.

    1. It's to easy to rewrite history. Because articles are (generally) on one website they can be changed. This is unlike a newspaper archive where it would be costly to destroy all copies of the paper.

    2. The web is biased. If aliens connect to the internet they would think all the human race ever does is porn and bashing MS (maybe not exactly that, but you get the idea)

    3. The web becomes unreadable faster than paper archives. Protocol changes and what-not.

    4. The web is too easy to control. A private company can censor the web via lawsuits.
    .
    .
    .
    I'm tired

    1. Re:The web is NOT an archive by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I would double your point #3 as very important. Look what happened to tables in HTML. Once they were central to web design, now they are gradually being deprecated. As despicable as the BLINK tag is/was, it's a classic example. In the future,BLINK won't even work, and then a website won't be understood in all of its "glory". Now BLINK is ugly and stupid, but TABLES are not. When will CSS be deprecated, then what?

      Your point #3 is endemic to all digital data, and it is why I think our culture, unlike many before, will simply disappear from history completely.

      RS

      --
      Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
    2. Re:The web is NOT an archive by grumbel · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The problem is that this only works if the information is valuable enough for people to actually copy it. With by far the most information on the net, that just never happens. And even if you copied it, you don't have any way to check that its authentic and not a manipulated copy and neither do you have a way to keep your copy online for the general public, as DMCA takedown notices will make sure that the information can only be found in obscure places.

      I think the biggest problem with the Internet is the lack of unalterable static publications. You don't publish a thing on the Internet and then move on. You publish it, apply some bug fixes later, alter this and that, move it over to a new framework years later and so on. Things on the Internet just aren't static enough for proper archival, webpages evolve over time and even if you would do daily backups of webpages, you would miss plenty things. Things might look different when there would be a way to directly access the databases driving the webpages, but most of the time thats not the case. Even popular "open" projects fail at this, Wikipedia for example has all the history of edits stored and viewable, but they don't have that for deleted articles, those are purged and unviewable by the general public.

  5. There is also the Memory Hole Problem by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Back when the Bush Junta decided to invade Iraq, the article on Time MAgazine's website by George HW Bush as to why deposing Saddam would be a Really Bad Idea disappeared. As far as I know it still isn't there.

    I think Archive.org is a good online archive, but its actual mission is impossible: it would automatically require a doubling of the size of the interweb thingie.

    So, combine that with the Memory Hole problem, and you have a precarious situation: not a good formula for notions of an archive, where consistency, completeneess, and reliability are paramount.

    RS

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.