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> I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. There are hundreds of email archivists working
by Alex3917 7y ago
> I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail.
There are hundreds of email archivists working at universities across the country. The reason you don't hear about them is that email didn't exist until ~1971, universities don't accession email collections until either after someone dies or at least until relatively late in their career, and once collections are accessioned they are usually embargoed for some amount of time -- e.g. IIRC 50 years in the case of Harvard.
Also, even though there are 15 or so different email archival software packages, none of them is really fully baked yet, so right now lots of universities are just putting email into longterm storage formats and then they're content to just wait another 10+ years until the email archival software is in a better state before processing them for publication.
If you have good email threads you want to publish on the Internet now though, you can use our tool https://www.fwdeveryone.com https://www.fwdeveryone.com.
- est31 7y agoE-Mails are fairly easy to archive. What about Whatsapp, Slack, etc? Shared Google documents? You need to create archivers for each of these apps, or at least the apps where the "important" communication is happening over.
- Alex3917 7y ago> E-Mails are fairly easy to archive. I mean unless you think the value of the knowledge contained within email is obviously less than the value that will be unlocked by self-driving cars, it stands to reason that solving the problem may not actually be any less complicated.
- ISL 7y agoThat is one of the key reasons not to use the chat-like apps. Hard to search, hard to back up, hard to thread...
- Alex3917 7y agoThis. Every time you send a message in one of those apps, it's like taking a $20 bill and lighting it on fire. I'll admit they have their uses, and hopefully they'll get better over time. But given their current state, if you don't place any value on what you're saying then why even say it in the first place?
- Ar-Curunir 7y agochat apps aren't a replacement for email, they're a replacement for in-person face-to-face talking. You can't search or even store voice conversations (unless you explicitly record them, so by your logic, why would you talk to people at all?
- tspike 7y agoI owe my current career to those apps. I’m mostly remote and I’ve been able to stay in tune with the pulse at the big offices via chat apps. Every time I send a message through one of those apps, it’s like putting a $20 bill in my pocket.
- throwaway8941 7y agoThat's only an illusion because the most popular ones are complete trash. Telegram has your whole chat history (or most of it) indexed and you can search it very quickly from the main window (just press Ctrl+F and type away). The history can also be exported, along with images and other files, to JSON, or to a bunch of HTML files.