Digital Diva • Digital Age Presents New Problems for Historians

Digital Age Presents New Problems for Historians

Some of today’s children will grow up to be Presidents, artistic luminaries and notorious criminals. A century from now, long after they have completed their noteworthy deeds, historians and biographers will attempt to document their lives and times. And thanks to the shift from written to digital records, those scholars of a future past will face a challenge very different from the job of contemporary academics.

Through Twitter, Facebook and email, a child in 2010 will, over their life, produce a body of writing that dwarfs the collected output of even the most prolific Founding Fathers such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. This volume will shift the problems of historical research from the archeological recovery of rare texts and letters to the process of sifting through vast fields of digital information that weave through legal gray areas of corporate and private ownership.

“The problem we are going to face isn’t the loss of literacy, or the end of electricity, but having too much information,” said John Unsworth, dean of the University of Illinois’ Library School. “It’s the abundance problem, not the scarcity problem, that we should be focused on. There’s very little that isn’t recorded [these days]. The big problem we’re going to have is ‘I know it’s in there somewhere, but where is it?’”

» via [Live Science](http://www.livescience.com/)

(via infoneer-pulse)

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