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> It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction
by tablespoon 4y ago
> It's not weird or a subculture unless you think those labels apply to researchers. And there are a lot of researchers out there, across academics, non-fiction authors, and journalists.
I do think the label applies to researchers. And except for the case of "tracking down citations to webpages that don't exist anymore," researchers can continue to do all those things using traditional methods (which may be a harder, but still easy enough, especially if it's your job).
- ghaff 4y agoIn fairness, a lot of content created over the past 25 years or so only exists in ephemeral digital form. Some is captured in sources that libraries subscribe to but a lot of it isn't. (Of course, libraries also subscribe to content that was never on the open web.) It's also the case that pre-web, a lot of that sort of content was pretty much lost to time. Per a discussion, a little while back, relatively little from the BBS era is preserved because it was mostly a distributed group of hobbyists.
- crazygringo 4y ago> researchers can continue to do all those things using traditional methods No they can't, as I stated. Citations that point to URL's that no longer exist require IA. There's no other tool currently.
- monknomo 4y agoWhat is the traditional method for finding a webpage that does not exist anymore?
- lolinder 4y agoThe Internet Archive.