02/1/11

The Future of Historians

I’m not a Twitter user, but from what i know about this  social network, i think it’s a great idea to digitally archive all public tweets because it can be quite useful for future historians. I agree with one of the comments on the blog post about Twitter and history http://cac.ophony.org/2010/04/16/archiving-tweets/ that there’s more useless information on Twitter than useful one. However, historians can filter information by, for example, searching by keywords. Having all public tweets archived will allow historians to collect a lot of historically important and interesting information, such as people’s reaction to important events or tweets of presidents and other political figures. In addition, Twitter will allow historians to use rel time every day information.

After reading the article about Wikileads http://hnn.us/articles/134077.html, i think that while the Wikileads documents dump will help historians in the short term, it will probably have a bad effect for the future historians.  Because if this leak, in the future all the information will be much more secured. It will be harder for historians to get access to the important information,  which will probably make them less relevant.