[Nettime-bold] was: [Nettime Bold] Very Funny I Think Not. is: Yo, HermeneuticInternet

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

>There was no nettime bold in May and June 1998. 


best

J


Josephine,

I submit to the observation. There was no Nettime Bold in 1998. However, I am 
NOT writing about 'nettime bold'.
I am writing about 'The Web Archive'. The
Web Archive contains copies of around 
1/4 (by my rough estimation) of all web 
sites and web files from mid 1996 to the present.

They were collected along with  
key strokes and all email communication 
of people using the net - though there is 
no public access to those, as yet...  

We can now hyperlink via 'The Web Archive'
to earlier architectures of the WWW by date, and surf familiar sites by period. I did so
and threw Bunting's, Vuk's, Micz's, early 
statements from a delightful return to 1996
following intact links through familiar 
sites.
How highly linked the WWW was then, more 
links than content, before the damage 
wrought by 
administrative rationalisation of web 
servers
by our public service insitutions and the
subsequent damage caused by 'dotcoms' for 
whom linkage ran contrary to the commercial agenda,
as well as career minded in both camps (I believe we covered this in our private email 
communication yesterday).

The WWW of 1996, if listed on search engines
of the period, is pretty much all there. 

I found my censored and erased 'Difference Engine' research site at Goldsmiths College's site which is archived in the Web Archive, wrote about it to Nettime, provided
the URL via the Web Archive. Yesterday I went
back to take a look at Difference Engine, 
that pre-Homeric wonder of ancient digital culture, to fire up some long unused neurons
and re-experience those heady Heroic days
of bold colours, yellow text on black, + wonderfully confusing email exchanges 
to find that it had gone. 

As I had written about it only to Nettime Bold, I assumed a 'Bolder' was responsible for
 this revision of the 'Web Archive'. If so, it
 is a highly signigficant skill, and I would 
like to know how it is done. A confession was
 sought. None has been forthcoming. I will not tell anyone, trust me I am a researcher in cultural studies "). I have the originals in several versions backed up in any case. 

If it is not a Bolder, then a number of 
alternatives present themselves concerning
the circualtion of email to Nettime Bold, 
as well as regulation and governance of Internet as highly intriguing lines of 
inquiry to be pursued with great 
thoroughness and urgency.

In any case, the Web Archive, and the ability 
it presents to hyperlink 'temporally' means that any reading of the WWW must be a hereneutic reading. This is good news for the 
historical materialists in Nettime, but bad
news because very warty male academics will 
now become interested in the field.

As long, that is, as the content of the 'Web 
Archive' is not open to revision. Whoever
did revise the Web Archive, can you get in 
touch? Tust me to be discreet. I am, after all, a researcher in cultural studies entering an eighth year exploring this remarkable technology in culture. 


Lachlan




*

Lachlan Brown wrote:
> 
> NOT funny.
> 
> Can the Nettimer-bolder who took the May and June 1998
> copies of Difference Engine from the 'Internet Archive'
> please put it back this instant!!!
> 
> http://web.archive.org/web/19980709120537/http://scorpio.gold.ac.uk/difference/engine.html
> 
> You know who you are...
> 
> Lachlan
> 
> >Few things surprise me anymore about Internet
> but 'The Internet Archive' is a bliss. Quite a good sample
> of the WWW from mid 1996...
> 
> I am amazed to see that my 'difference engine'
>  which was censored on 28 May 1998 by the
> closure of my staff and research
> log-in and erased simultaneously
> at York University in Toronto and at Goldsmiths College in
> September 1998 (http://www.gold.ac.uk/difference/engine.html)
> is here (or much of it anyway) at the Internet Archive:
> 
> http://web.archive.org/web/19980709120537/http://scorpio.gold.ac.uk/difference/engine.html
> 
> British Cultural Studies erased a folder named /difference/ in a frenzied witch-hunt
> and called it an administrative error.
> 
> Come and see what those utter bastards at
> Goldsmiths College destroyed. Barbarians.
> 
> Hmmm....
> 
> My God its like excavating through the
> ash of Pompeii to find some former civilisation. The 'digital age'.
> 
> Lachlan Brown
> http://third.net
> 
> Wayback Machine Overview
> 
> The Wayback Machine, a service from the
> Internet
> Archive and Alexa Internet, allows people to
>  access
> and use archived versions of stored websites.
>  Visitors
> to the Wayback Machine can type in an URL,
> select
> a date, and then begin surfing on an archived
>  version
> of the web. The Wayback Machine is built so
> 
> that it
> can be used and referenced by anybody and
> 
> everybody.
> The original idea for the Wayback Machine
> 
> began in
> 1996, when the Internet Archive first began
> archiving
> the web. Now, five years later, with over 100
> terabytes
> and a dozen web crawls completed, the Internet
>  Archive
> has made the Wayback Machine available to the
> public.
> The Wayback Machine, which currently contains
> over 100
> terabytes of data and is growing at a rate of
>  12 terabytes
> per month, is the largest known database in
> the world,
> containing multiple copies of the entire
> publicly available
> web. This eclipses the amount of data
> contained in the
> world's largest libraries, including the
> Library of Congress
> 
> [remember how meaningful the web was in 1997?  go have your hopes crushed
> again.  ~d]
> 
> THE WAYBACK MACHINE -- http://web.archive.org
> 
> <sj@c3.hu> wrote:
>  > INTERNET ARCHIVE WAYBACK MACHINE ENABLES
>  > USERS TO ACCESS ARCHIVED VERSIONS OF WEB SITES
>  > DATING FROM 1996
>  >
>  > SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The Internet Archive, a comprehensive
>  > library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form,
>  > has launched the WAYBACK MACHINE, a free service allowing
>  > people to access and use archived versions of past web pages.
>  > The site enables searching and viewing of an enormous
>  > collection of web sites, dating back to 1996 and comprising
>  > over 10 billion web pages.
>  > /.../
>  >
>  > For artists who have changed and expanded the information on
>  > their web sites over the years, the site allows an interesting look
>  > at a process which they themselves may not have documented.
>  >
> 

-- 

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