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There is a real danger that obituaries of people in the early 21st century will become inaccessible to future generations due to obituary rot: https://shaungal
by jawns 1y ago
There is a real danger that obituaries of people in the early 21st century will become inaccessible to future generations due to obituary rot:
https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/obituary-rot.html https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/obituary-rot.html
> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoObits should intentionally be committed to the Internet Archive for longevity and preservation, but I digress.
- DoingIsLearning 1y agoThe Internet Archive is massive force for good and a huge not-for profit effort. However in certain aspects of preservation of History (for example if deemed high value at a national level) we should also expect national archives to duplicate the effort to preserve this and other information with historic value.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- inglor_cz 1y agoI wonder how much would such national digital archives resist rewriting of history. It is much harder to doctor hard copies of newspapers or books. You can burn them, but altering them is a complicated challenge, and someone may own another copy of the originals. With digital records, the temptation is stronger because the editing is easier, and other "unofficial" copies that diverge from the officially archived version may be declared to be fake/misinformation etc.
- akoboldfrying 1y agoTimestamping services that use digital signatures solve this, basically.
- inglor_cz 1y agoArchives are meant to last for decades and centuries. I am not sure if any currently used timestamping algorithm remains unbroken in 2100 or so.
- bryanrasmussen 1y agoWell, I have some experience with the Danish National Archives, but may be out of date. First, the rule used to be that they could crawl all Danish sites or having interest to Danish government (so I guess also news reports of Denmark or discussion in other nations) ignoring robots.txt, which yes I found that to be a very wrong headed rule but that's what it was. So obviously they need to put in a good deal of effort to get content into the archives that would be getting blocked otherwise. At the same time governmental records, including the records and cases in communities around the country get added to archives (but of course are only available to scholars at some future date) So theoretically this is a lot of data. I suppose other national archives probably have similar rules and situations. It would seem unlikely that one could rewrite history easily with so much data, without alerting people to what you were doing. But I guess that is actually the lesson of Fascism, they don't care if you see what they're doing. They will do it and then hope you forget how it got to be like it is.
- immibis 1y agoThe Internet Archive is constantly under attack for daring to preserve pressure waves. One of these days the destruction will be successful. Probably right now, under a Republican landslide government.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- KerrAvon 1y agoIt wasn't a landslide by any definition except the Trump campaign's; Trump won by an extremely narrow margin. It's important to be accurate about this to try to preempt despair.
- inglor_cz 1y agoTrump won by an extremely narrow margin in the popular vote, but by a high margin in the electoral college, which was the real prize fought over by the two candidates. He took all seven swing states. IDK if this counts as landslide in the American sense. I mostly heard that expression used for results of European elections. Edit: instant downvote, didn't even take a minute from the original posting! Wow. Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics. The fact that Trump got 312 electoral votes to Harris' 226 is just that, a fact. It does not reflect any subjective attitudes or preferences of anyone taking part in this discussion, wisdom or idiocy of current White House policies etc.
- nothrabannosir 1y ago> Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics. However, I am sensitive about shoe-horning political talking points into a conversation.
- inglor_cz 1y agoDid I do that? Not knowingly; my main intent was to reflect on what "landslide" may mean in various perspectives. Personally, I am more to the right than to the left, but I don't enjoy the clusterfuck of the current administration at all, doubly so because our local security (a small NATO member which used to be subjugated to Moscow) has been thrown into total uncertainty.
- dleeftink 1y agoThere's a danger, but also a natural way of things. Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity? Mind I can get behind the genealogy argument, yet feel that our post-life records being accessible by default is not an assumption we can make unilaterally.
- globnomulous 1y ago> Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity? The historical record is important and we don't know what will be useful to future generations. Take Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms as an example. It briefly recounts the multiple legal proceedings that the Roman Catholic Church brought against a humble Italian Renaissance-era miller who spread strange, heretical ideas about the cosmos (involving the cheese that was apparently the moon's substance and the worms that ate it). Ginzburg draws on Church records, including the man's own written defense, and builds a fascinating picture of his mental world, intellect, and disposition. If I remember correctly, these small, cloudy windows into the Early Modern past even let Ginzburg identify likely traces of pre-Christian, or folk, traditions largely hidden from the written record. This is a funny example, I suppose, because in all likelihood the miller would have been tickled to know that his ideas survived and found an audience not just despite but because of Church persecution. Still, his case nicely illustrates the importance and unpredictable value of the historical record.
- 20after4 1y agoAn early example of the Streisand effect? Should it be more accurately named the Ginzburg effect? :D
- speckx 1y agoWhen my mother-in-law died, I immediately registered a domain for her name and created a website and added the obituary, eulogy, and a photo gallery and shared that with friends and family for exactly this reason.
- hdjrudni 1y agoThat's cool, but doesn't it have the same problem? When you die or decide to stop paying, the website dies too.
- nightfly 1y agoArchive.org
- bombcar 1y agoPeople are going to be surprised Pikachu when that goes down, either from poking the law bear or just because everything dies eventually.
- thesuitonym 1y agoIn 1000 years, you're unlikely to find any given book, hard drive, or newspaper that is still legible, but accessing any of those is far more likely than finding an Internet Archive datacenter, spinning it back up, and accessing the contents.
- pabs3 1y agoWhich domain? I'll send it to archive.org using ArchiveBot. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
- Jaygles 1y agoCompanies that aggregate and sell data suck up all of the obituaries as they are public record and unburdened by regulations on sharing and selling it. Although it may not be in its original form (as far as I know), info from obituaries may actually be positioned to survive a very long time.
- hackable_sand 1y agoThat is okay. People deserve the right to die.
- 6502nerdface 1y agoBut not the right to be forgotten.
- hackable_sand 1y ago[flagged]
- jhanschoo 1y ago"There are people who have done great evil, who perhaps want to be forgotten if they were dead. But it would not be morally right to forget their deeds and the lessons we can draw from them. Because of that, the right to be forgotten upon death is a conditional one." The above is the moral reasoning expressed in the comment you are responding to, and of course whether or not one agrees with this line of reasoning can vary from person to person and belief to belief.
- hackable_sand 1y agoFair enough
- magicmicah85 1y agoEU begs to differ, but the right to be forgotten certainly ends when you die.
- detourdog 1y agoWhat we have already lost is the process of reading the newspapers that birthed the obituary. Newspaper's used to have strong local coverage and a collection of vignettes into the outside world. The way the author uses the obituaries is the way I used to use the newspapers. Getting multiple newspapers (and magazines) from all over the world was a fixture for New York City creative offices pre-internet.
- titaphraz 1y agoIt's really hard to find stuff from the "old internet" on google. I know it's there. But instead it feeds me garbage marketing articles that just touch the surface and then try to sell me something.
- lubujackson 1y agoI suggest trying Yandex, no joke. It feels like 2005 Google - no industry forced filtering or rerouting, no BS recipe sites boosted by SEO and "time on page" manipulation...
- thesuitonym 1y agowiby.me, marginalia.nu, and kagi.com seem to do a better job at this. Wiby is specific to old web, and even has a delightful "Surprise me" button that can take you to some fun little websites that provide an insight into someone's life.
- smartmic 1y agoI think the idea from the original article is great! But although I'm a fan of printed newspapers and even subscribe to a renowned one, I unfortunately can't take part in it, simply because in my cultural circle (Germany) there are no detailed obituaries of ordinary people in the newspaper, only death notices. But that's always been the case here - at least that's how I know it.
- jayknight 1y agoWhen in doing genealogy, I tend to save obituaries in archive.org and archive.ph and sometimes paste the content into the wikitree profile. None of those are guaranteed to be around in 50 years, but hopefully it helps a little.
- nsenifty 1y agoThe bigger danger is that all obituaries will be written by an AI.
- AStonesThrow 1y agohttps://m.xkcd.com/1683/ https://m.xkcd.com/1683/ > inaccessible to future generations No, it's not going to go down this way. Here's what currently happens: obit links get passed around among friends, family, loved ones. Anyone who catches wind of a death and is remotely interested in family history/geneaology is going to archive it and plug it in somewhere. Such as Find-a-Grave, ancestry.com, etc. Ancestry themselves should be actively indexing all these obits and such. Digital obits will last so long that you will hate them forever, and curse the day they wrote yours. Because here's what's going to happen next: every "data point" in those obits will be plugged into databases. Family Trees, Find-a-Grave Memorials, personal ancestral files. Those will be indexed, searchable, and every single factoid will be repeated and reduplicated and copy-pasted in perpetuity. https://m.xkcd.com/2106/ https://m.xkcd.com/2106/ Unfortunately, anyone who reads obits and knows some family history also knows that obits are riddled with errors. Sometimes they're deliberate! Sometimes they misdirect or protect the innocent, minors, whatever. Sometimes they're spiteful and sometimes they're simply papering over scandal with something anodyne. So you've got a 95% true obituary that's being traded and scraped and plugged into databases, and those 5% falsehoods are going to multiply like a pernicious cancer. Once I delved into my family tree, I found that most of my effort and resources were in disproving connections, removing sources, and reconciling conflicts due to inept researchers who didn't check anything. I hacked off entire "trunks" due to false bloodlines (usually to Revolutionary heroes, nobility, notables, etc.) Let's get real here: obituaries were published in newspapers! Newspapers are periodicals designed to last only as long as you read them, and then you wrap fish in them and toss them on the fireplace! Don't get so precious about these fleeting words. Because many people will care far too much, preserve them with undue care, and we'll be worse off than before.
- magicmicah85 1y agoYou only live as long as the last person to remember you. Now the internet is going to make us all immortal as our descendants research the family tree.
- dogman1050 1y agoNeither of my parents obits are available online. They passed in 1998 and 2002. My wife's mother's obit is still out there from 2012.
- throw0101a 1y ago> There is a real danger that obituaries of people in the early 21st century will become inaccessible to future generations due to obituary rot: When my father died we got a 'complementary' online posting from the funeral home for ~1 year (for funeral/service details), but I also made the effort to pay to put one in the newspaper for posterity.