Beyond Tellerrand has a new website and it’s beautiful!
And look! Past speakers like me get our own page.
In fact there’s a great big archive of all the past talks—that very much deserves your support as a friend of Beyond Tellerrand.
A curated selection of visually interesting datasets collected by local, state and federal government agencies.
This site must’ve started as a way of showcasing really interesting collections, but now it’s turning into an archive of what’s being systematically destroyed by the current US regime.
Signed!
We, the undersigned, call on the record labels and members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)—including UMG, Capitol Records, Concord Bicycle Assets, CMGI Recorded Music Assets, Sony Music Entertainment, and Arista Music—to drop your lawsuit against the Internet Archive.
Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.
This magnificent piece by Maxwell Neely-Cohen—with some tasteful art-direction—is right up my alley!
This piece looks at a single question. If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century? There are plenty of worthy related subjects and discourses that this piece does not touch at all. This is not a piece about the sheer volume of data we are creating each day, and how we might store all of it. Nor is it a piece about the extremely tough curatorial process of deciding what is and isn’t worth preserving and storing. It is about longevity, about the potential methods of preserving what we make for future generations, about how we make bits endure. If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it? That’s it.
A complete digital archive of the famous typography from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
The lettering really is lovely!
Speaking of serendipity, not long after I wrote about making a static archive of The Session for people to download and share, I came across a piece by Alex Chan about using static websites for tiny archives.
The use-case is slightly different—this is about personal archives, like paperwork, screenshots, and bookmarks. But we both came up with the same process:
I’m deliberately going low-scale, low-tech. There’s no web server, no build system, no dependencies, and no JavaScript frameworks.
And we share the same hope:
Because this system has no moving parts, and it’s just files on a disk, I hope it will last a long time.
You should read the whole thing, where Alex describes all the other approaches they took before settling on plain ol’ HTML files in a folder:
HTML is low maintenance, it’s flexible, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s the foundation of the entire web, and pretty much every modern computer has a web browser that can render HTML pages. These files will be usable for a very long time – probably decades, if not more.
I’m enjoying this approach, so I’m going to keep using it. What I particularly like is that the maintenance burden has been essentially zero – once I set up the initial site structure, I haven’t had to do anything to keep it working.
They also talk about digital preservation:
I’d love to see static websites get more use as a preservation tool.
I concur! And it’s particularly interesting for Alex to be making this observation in the context of working with the Flickr foundation. That’s where they’re experimenting with the concept of a data lifeboat
What should we do when a digital service sinks?
This is something that George spoke about at the final dConstruct in 2022. You can listen to the talk on the dConstruct archive.
When I went up to London for the State of the Browser conference last month, I shared the train journey with Remy.
I always like getting together with Remy. We usually end up discussing sci-fi books we’re reading, commiserating with one another about conference-organising, discussing the minutiae of browser APIs, or talking about the big-picture vision of the World Wide Web.
On this train ride we ended up talking about the march of time and how death comes for us all …and our websites.
Take The Session, for example. It’s been running for two and a half decades in one form or another. I plan to keep it running for many more decades to come. But I’m the weak link in that plan.
If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, The Session will keep running. The hosting is paid up for a while. The domain name is registered for as long as possible. But inevitably things will need to be updated. Even if no new features get added to the site, someone’s got to install updates to keep the underlying software safe and secure.
Remy and I discussed the long-term prospects for widening out the admin work to more people. But we also discussed smaller steps I could take in the meantime.
Like, there’s the actual content of the website. Now, I currently share exports from the database every week in JSON, CSV, and SQLite. That’s good. But you need to be tech nerd to do anything useful with that data.
The more I talked about it with Remy, the more I realised that HTML would be the most useful format for the most people.
There’s a cute acronym in the world of digital preservation: LOCKSS. Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. If there were multiple copies of The Session’s content out there in the world, then I’d have a nice little insurance policy against some future catastrophe befalling the live site.
With the seed of the idea planted in my head, I waited until I had some time to dive in and see if this was doable.
Fortunately I had plenty of opportunity to do just that on some other train rides. When I was in Spain and France recently, I spent hours and hours on trains. For some reason, I find train journeys very conducive to coding, especially if you don’t need an internet connection.
By the time I was back home, the code was done. Here’s the result:
The Session archive: a static copy of the content on thesession.org.
If you want to grab a copy for yourself, go ahead and download this .zip file. Be warned that it’s quite large! The .zip file is over two gigabytes in size and the unzipped collection of web pages is almost ten gigabytes. I plan to update the content every week or so.
I’ve put a copy up on Netlify and I’m serving it from the subdomain archive.thesession.org if you want to check out the results without downloading the whole thing.
Because this is a collection of static files, there’s no search. But you can use your browser’s “Find in Page” feature to search within the (very long) index pages of each section of the site.
You don’t need to a web server to click around between the pages: they should all work straight from your file system. Double-clicking any HTML file should give a starting point.
I wanted to reduce the dependencies on each page to as close to zero as I could. All the CSS is embedded in the the page. Likewise with most of the JavaScript (you’ll still need an internet connection to get audio playback and dynamic maps). This keeps the individual pages nice and self-contained. That means they can be shared around (as an email attachment, for example).
I’ve shared this project with the community on The Session and people are into it. If nothing else, it could be handy to have an offline copy of the site’s content on your hard drive for those situations when you can’t access the site itself.
What are your own scribbles, your own ordinary plenty, not worth much to you now but that someone in the future may treasure?
For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.
A library of CC-licensed photos.
Next time you’re tempted to use a generative “AI” tool to make an image for a slide deck, use this instead.
An interesting idea from Tantek for an offline page that links off to an archived copy of the URL you’re trying to reach—useful for when you’re site goes down (though not for when the user’s internet connection is down).
Remy has turned his linkrot-battling technique into a service that you can use. He has more details on his blog.
Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.
I really, really like the progressive enhancement approach that Remy is taking here with outbound links:
When a real user clicks on a link, it’s swapped out to be redirected through my own endpoint that checks if the URL is still OK, and if so permanently redirects the visitor, otherwise my endpoint checks the Web Archive for the URL and permanently redirects to that instead.
I think I’m going to do the same! I’d have to rewrite the server-side code in PHP, but that shouldn’t be too tricky.
This could a project for the next Indie Web Camp I attend.
Go spelunking down the archives to find some lovely graphic design artefacts.
A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.
Time capsules on the moon, using NanoFiche as the storage medium.
Clicking through these cold war slides gives an uncomfortable mixture of nostalgic appreciation for the retro aesthetic combined with serious heebie-jeebies for the content.
The slides appear to be 1970s/1980s informational or training images from the United States Air Force, NORAD, Navy, and beyond.
A short documentary that you can dowload or watch online:
The film explores how image banks including Getty gain control over, and then restrict access to, archive images – even when these images are legally in the public domain. It also forms a small act of resistance against this practice: the film includes six legally licensed clips, and is downloadable as an HD ProRes file. In this way, it aims to liberate these few short clips from corporate control, and make them freely available for viewing and artistic use.
Licensed under aCreative Commons 0: “No rights reserved” license.