• Context Preservation

    I’d like to poke some brains about context preservation.

    For the last couple of years or so, I’ve been intrigued by the concept of context preservation. It happens whenever I check our web log server and see a big spike on a certain page on our website, or when there are many page requests coming from a certain domain/area. What’s going on that day? What makes this particular page suddenly so popular on that day? Did one of the librarians post bibliographic instruction? Has somebody added a link to our web page and announced it somewhere?

    The news that the Library of Congress will archive public tweets is also intriguing, especially when researchers or anthropologists start poring over the content and trying to make any sense of the myriad things people shared on Twitter. How to make sense of a conversation when it’s done between somebody with public tweets and another who has his Twitter account protected (and thus his tweets are not archived by the Library of Congress)? Do any of the hashtags make any sense at all? When a hastag is trending, does it get captured and preserved, too?

    My questions about context preservation have more to do with how scholarly communication seems to change. In addition to the traditional methods (writing journal articles and presenting at conferences), the communication is also happening in multiple, simultaneous channels such as unconferences, blogs, social media, even THATCamp. There is a high volume of relatively unorganized information, due partly to the preference for spontaneity. There are users who want to make personal connections across broader and broader groups. Discourse will take in multi-directional conversations. Given that trend, how do we preserve the context of information or conversations?

    Terry Brock’s (@brockter) blog post, Remembering the People Behind the Things, nicely explains context preservation from an archaeological perspective.  Many of you probably already know about this YouTube video about the Beatles, 1000 years later.  This is a fake video, but it points out precisely the problem of interpreting what’s happening in the past.

    P.S. I can’t resist including this as well: Turtles have it figured out. http://xkcd.com/889/

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3 Comments


  1. LynneG says:

    This is a topic that I think is of critical importance. Count me in for this discussion, altho I have few ideas how to preserve the diversity of forms and ephemera.

  2. Rebecca says:

    TURTLES!–and the Power of the Principle of (Archival) Provenance: https://www.nescent.org/wg/dryad/images/c/cc/Provenance.pdf

    This sounds like a very interesting session. How can we extend the principle of provenance into an at-once more fragmented and networked environment? (And should we, at least should we only do this? Is it at least a useful thing to consider?)

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