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Digitizing archives is an interesting topic. It does bring up some serious questions of cost, maintenance, durability and who should pay for all of it. This pro
by blululu 5y ago
Digitizing archives is an interesting topic. It does bring up some serious questions of cost, maintenance, durability and who should pay for all of it. This proposal overlooks the basic questions of implementation and instead focuses on making an argument that cheap and universal access to Charlotte Brönte’s diaries should be something like a universal human right. At a certain level of notoriety or cultural significance I think that the case can be made for cheap general access, however somewhere between William Shakespeare and a small town journalist lies a cutoff point where the cost does not justify such an action.
I’d be curious to know what that cutoff is and why it can’t be lower.
Personally, I imagine that this cutoff is actually rather high. Digitizing a text is not cheap or easy, and hosting it is a long term challenge. Physical books are often more stable than digital copies so the durability is a serious issue.
Most physical archives have pretty low interest (there are only so many graduate students specializing in that specific figure). In this regime the bulk of the costs are related to storage.
Of course if someone like the author wants to shoulder the burden of making such an archive by themself, by all means go for it. In general I think that this proposal needs to be more honest in its appraisal of the costs and benefits involves. That said it is also written in the context of privatizing a publicly owned collection, and I rather like the idea that any such transaction would require the buyer to pay for the cost of digitizing and distributing the archive in perpetuity.
- samatman 5y ago> cost crowdfund > maintenance torrent > durability torrent > who should pay for all of it crowdfund. Not even being flippant, any objections? Strikes me as perfectly straightforward.
- tablespoon 5y ago> Not even being flippant, any objections? Strikes me as perfectly straightforward. If you can come up with a "solution" in a drive-by comment after a minute's thought, your "solution" probably isn't as good as you think it is. It was probably already thought up and rejected by someone who spent much more than a minute thinking about the problem. I'll close with a question: have you ever actually tried download old torrents of stuff that doesn't have mainstream popularity?
- samatman 5y agoWhy would that happen to a legal torrent of interest to a scholarly community? Are we going to run out of Bronte scholars? Will they not have computers and an Internet connection?
- tablespoon 5y agoIt might be helpful for you to try to think of reasons why your idea is wrong, rather than reasons why it is right. How many crowdfunding projects have failed to deliver? Do people who actually do archiving consider torrents to be a durable storage medium, like you seem to think? Who's responsibility would it be to keep a (perhaps) 100GB+ torrent seeded? Are you just assuming "someone else"? What do you think the longevity of the BitTorrent protocol will be? What's the chance it will be progressively harder to use over time (e.g. https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6246151319715840 https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6246151319715840, https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/04/15/built-in-ftp-implementation-to-be-removed-in-firefox-90/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/04/15/built-in-ftp-impl...)? How tech savvy to do think Bronte scholars are? How many Bronte do you think there are? Do you think they're just doing Bronte scholarship all the time?
- BizarroLand 5y agoOnce again, appeals to ignorance, hasty generalizations, false dichotomies and slippery slopes. All logical fallacies. Convincing yourself that the task is impossible and doomed to fail does not make it impossible and doomed to fail.
- aaron695 5y agoWhat legal torrents have disappeared? I'm not sure this is true. I'll give you a possible answer, ISIS footage perhaps. University's won't support those archives. But I'd have to check. Hosting a Bronte archive is trivial in general. Not sure why literature people think it's a good idea though. They can't do articles like this then, they become redundant when anyone can google it. Also pretty boring killing off reading rooms. But I'd be interested in what legal torrents you've seen disappear?
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoTorrents need seeds; it fixes distribution, not durability.