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Historians would love to preserve spoken communication and there are many projects recording everyday conversations. There are even projects of recording the ty
by jonathanstrange 7y ago
Historians would love to preserve spoken communication and there are many projects recording everyday conversations. There are even projects of recording the typical sounds of the environment in certain areas at a certain time. However, many forms of spoken everyday conversation fall under restrictive privacy laws, which poses strict limits to such preservation efforts.
The texts on the internet at a given time, on the other hand, are public and reflect the opinions and ways of living of a large number of people at that time. There is no doubt that these could be analysed in the future to give us historical insights in ways we cannot even conceive yet. (Think e.g. about getting them data mined and analysed by advanced A.I. to give new insights into the time period.)
The worth of the data is so obvious that it's really hard for me to understand why you and some other people don't think these are interesting data points for research on how we lived in, say, 200, 500, or even 10000 years from now. The data is not only interesting to historians, but also to economists, political scientists, and linguistics, btw.