I apologize in advance for all the terminology in this post!
When talking about the climate crisis, people tend to think of big issues like recycling and “going green.” Going digital and paperless seems like the obvious answer, or it did to me for a while. But this past week I learned a lot about how these digital spaces do take up physical space in places called Data Farms. These farms are warehouses full of servers and hard drives with this data. Have you ever wondered how Google can keep an email account with 3,000 unread emails accessible? It is all stored in these farms taking space until they are deleted. (Yes this is my way of calling out my boyfriend who has an account with 5,000 unread emails just ignored haha) This theme applies to webpages too. Links that no longer work are called Link Rot.
“…I was able to analyze approximately 2 million externally facing links found in articles at nytimes.com since its inception in 1996. We found that 25 percent of deep links have rotted. (Deep links are links to specific content—think theatlantic.com/article, as opposed to just theatlantic.com.) The older the article, the less likely it is that the links work. If you go back to 1998, 72 percent of the links are dead.” From The Internet Is Rotting by Jonathan Zittrain
As researchers find out of date links or pages not touched since the early 2000s or earlier, it seems best to do a removal or “flattening” of these pages. Ok so Flattening is a term that mean condensing a webpage down to its own HTML file to no longer take up internet space. There are programs like Wget where one can store all these files. This then calls into question what should be saved and archived, just like with physical sources. There are more than enough times that a scanned document is not great or does not last when a jpeg is no longer a good enough quality. This is the part the traditional historians and DH meet and understand the struggle of preservation with technology continuing to progress.
At the time of writing this I, unfortunately, do not have a great answer to this problem. Preservation has its own issues with bias already, and now the technology is just another straw on the pile. I think what I have learned is, for now, we need to keep the physical item if there is one and make a digital copy. If the item is digital born (ie links to articles), we need to keep up with updating links or flatten the page to guarantee its survival without being resource intensive. As we learn more about the environment we occupy, we can hopefully make more adjustments to be ethical and sustainable.
Hi Emily,
I love how you related going digital and paperless to this module because it makes sense! This past semester I have learned how harmful Data Farms are. It kind of invalidates the whole concept of “going green.”
Hey Emily! You make some really great suggestions about what to do with preservation. like Roser commented, it is ironic that we consider going digital to be more eco-friendly but in someways it is worse for the environment.
Hi Emily! There was a lot of good content in this week’s module. It was eye-opening to think about how harmful to the environment it can be to retain unread e-mails(and other unnecessary content). I have a spam e-mail address that I’m guilty of not deleting things and that should change. Thinking about data farms and the Yahoo article brings up the balance of what should be retained and let go, especially when there are environmental implications. I don’t have an answer for that either, but I think the first step is being mindful of how our digital footprint impacts the environment.
I totally felt the same way as you regarding the environmental impact of digital preservation. To me, it logically seemed as though it would be much more environmentally friendly when compared to physical preservation. Learning about how digital preservation effects the climate was certainly revelatory. Also, as you mention, the issue of deciding what to preserve seems to be one of the greatest challenges facing digital historians. I don’t think anyone has a great answer to that question at this point.
I also agree that physical items take priority while also keeping the digital-born items flattened until better solution of preservation come up. With the further decrease in physical size of flash-drives and other digital storage devices along with the increase of their storage capacity, the temporary solution comes to compressing these files if downloadable and storing them on these drive. While this does not solve the problem, the ability to store massive amounts of data on device such as this could prove worthwhile in the meantime.
It feels almost counterintuitive to think of digital items as taking up physical space, but as you pointed out, that’s exactly what they do. I think data farms are one of the best kept secrets of the modern world. Or, well, maybe not a secret, but at least a downplayed piece of information.