Tag: historical evidence

02/1/11

One day you may not have privacy

Since the internet technology was improving, most of the people shared their thought or information on xanga, blog, twitter such kind of network service. However, before you wrote something, had you ever imagined that everyone could see what you posted on your space? From March, 2006, all the tweets were stored at the Library of Congress, which means all the twitter users’ information was stored too. Wikileaks document dump does the same thing, but more than that. It exposed variety of unknown of different countries. For sure the governments don’t want Wikileaks keeps running, and the owner had a lot of troubles from them, but it provides historian some secret information and help them to analyze different events. Therefore, not only for now but future also, historian could easily find information by sitting in front of the computer instead of reading a whole bunch of books.

Undoubtedly archiving tweets and Wikileaks document dump help so much by gathering the information; nevertheless, some may ask what about their privacy? This is a serious issue because some don’t want everyone knows about them. Also is it necessary to archive all the tweets? I doubt because most of the thing people posted on twitter were just meaningless, such as “My cat just scratches me!!” Therefore, this issue should be concerned earnestly.

02/1/11

“History” wishes historians good luck

To say historical evidence is changing, in my view, would be misleading. Historical evidence will always remain to be the same however the popular view of it will change as will aspects of it, such as accessibility, quantity, and quality.

As time goes on, binary code will become the language of historians, and as it does, historians will have more data to filter until they can reach objective evidence. With the coming of computers, social networks, cameras, or technological developments in general, history and the jobs of historians are changing. Many opinions, accounts, events, etc, have come to light that may otherwise have lain dormant never to be explored. That is not to say that these opinions are inherently worth hearing.

Historical evidence will become more comprehensive, nevertheless that does not change what historical evidence is, but rather addresses the faults of historical, historical evidence. As tweets are logged, search histories tracked, cables uncovered, we gather data. This data mustn’t be limited to textual data, for videos, photographs, and audio files are just as easily captured and stored. Data, although not always to the same extent or detail, has always been collected throughout the ages. It will be up to historians to continuously analyze this new data and ensure that we use the right information to build our knowledge.