#digital-preservation

#digital-preservation

"Link rot" is the unfortunate phenomenon whereby online articles become populated by broken links - URLs that once led to active pages but now result in error messages or dead ends. A Pew Research study from 2024 showed that nearly 40% of links that existed in 2013 were no longer active. Such "digital decay" occurs across a broad diversity of webpages, from news and government sites to Wikipedia pages to tweets.

The traditional museum experience, pausing in front of an object, and absorbing its history visually or by reading its description, has long shaped how collectors and others relate to cultural treasures. Yet, over the last few decades, digital technology has quietly rewritten many of those rules, changing not only how collections are exhibited but also how they are documented, preserved, and even inherited.

I use software as a creative instrument: in workflows, publications, client systems, and in all the quiet machinery that keeps institutions pulsing through connected ideas. I've now lived through two platform shifts up-close: the dawn of the consumer internet and the explosion of Web 2.0's networked creativity. The lesson that stuck is simple: the most exciting tools are rarely the safest place to store your work.

All that work was published online, too. But with several changes in the content management system in the 26 years since I started at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, only four of those stories still live on that newsroom's site. I've reported on journalists have to do to save their own digital archives for years. And I've always thought of it more as an individual issue.

The Atlantic launched its website in November 1995, 138 years after it first went into print. The magazine began in response to one information revolution; the website appeared at the dawn of another. Now, 30 years on from the launch, you can buy a copy of the first printed edition of the magazine on eBay, but you can't find much of the original website. The internet, notable for remembering just about everything, seems to have forgotten that particular piece of its own history.

Padimai Art & Tech Studio will launch with Your view matter (2022/25), a VR work by artist Olafur Eliasson that was commissioned by the studio's founder, technologist and collector Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as Metakovan. The initiative comes four years after Sundaresan's record-breaking $69.3 million purchase of Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a sale that thrust blockchain-based art into the global spotlight. Padimai, an independent entity, aims to move the conversation beyond speculation, toward long-term questions of technological infrastructure, digital sovereignty, and collective memory.

It's a question David Ewalt, Scientific American's editor in chief, was tasked with tackling long ago, where he was forced to look at memory, human connection and technology in a way that asked deeper questions about how we preserve information in the digital age and what it means to come into contact with our past selves. Hi, David. David Ewalt: Hi, it's nice to join you.

As TechCrunch reports, the rebooted platform, dubbed diVine, will include over 100,000 archived videos from the platform, likely only a small fraction of the platform's original database. Vine had over 200 million active monthly users in its heyday ten years ago, but was shut down in 2016. But the reboot has a hidden ace up its sleeve: AI-generated content is banned outright, and any suspected use of AI will be flagged and prevented from being posted - a panacea for an internet that's been overrun with lazy AI slop.

"Obviously, Suzanne was greatly loved, not only by her family, but by millions of people," he said. "One of the projects that we have coming up is a really interesting project, the Suzanne AI Twin."

"We need a Heklina Criterion 4K Blu-Ray edition," my friend quipped.