Historians and archivists have expressed concerns about the Digital Dark Age for decades. The short life span of storage hardware (about 7 years for SSDs under stress, 30 years for HDDs, and 100/200 years for optical discs under climate-controlled conditionsly) inverts our relationship with primary sources. Advanced encryption methods employed in data centers for privacy and security reasons further complicate the challenges of creating digital archives. We are forced to think about long-term preservation today and be prepared to lose access to the original medium.

Please join us in the February roundtable of our Big Data and the Historian's Craft series, featuring Yennie Jun, Ian Milligan, and Jerry Wang.

Yennie Jun has researched the challenges of archiving big data at the SNU Big Data Studies Lab and is currently finishing her MSc in Social Data Science at Oxford.

Ian Milligan, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo, is a well-known expert of web archives and the author of History in the Age of Abundance (2019).

Jerry Wang is a senior systems developer at a major tech company with 16 years of experience in the cloud computing industry.

 

In March and April, we will continue our discussion of big data archives with data scientist Shannon Stewart, environmental historian Ian M. Miller, and anthropologists A. R. E. Taylor and Julia Velkova.

March 18: Securing Big Data Artifacts

April 15: Energetics of Big Data

 

Moderated and sponsored by:

Javier Cha, Big Data Studies Lab, College of Liberal Studies, Seoul National University

Matthew Connelly, History Lab, Columbia University

Vincent Leung, Department of History, Lingnan University