posted on Tuesday, November 15, 2005 3:13 PM by Endie

The Electronic Palimpsest

Finding five-year-old writings on the internet is more like 5th century historical research than you would think.

Actually, I'm really rather serious there.  I'll be quick with this one, so bear with me.

The last couple of posts I've made have seen me going back to old message-board postings, tracking down dead blog entries and the like.  Now, when it comes to google, I have m4d l33t skillz like you wouldn't believe.  As Rutger Hauer says in possibly his finest work (the video to Kylie Minogue's On a Night Like This), "That which you find impossible, I find easy."  I can get old cached stuff, and I know about the Wayback engine and similar projects.  But there is a wealth of real, valuable information that is gone forever.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading Peter Heather's Fall of the Roman Empire,and the similarities between the problems of sources for historians of the late Roman Empire and somebody looking for stuff only two or three years old is surprising.  The originals are gone, but digests exist, as well as commentaries which quote more or less directly from the original.  Where you find apparently unrelated sites giving near identical quotes, your confidence that you are looking at the original rises.

Re-quoting can occasionally be traced, especially where idiosyncratic changes are made, or a particularly creative interpretation is either cited or copied.  Caution is essential, and the context of the commentary that surrounds the quote tells one a lot about how reliably representative of the original this exceprt is likely to be.  Close reading is invaluable as a tool.

So when looking for some of the posts for Khaldun/Burke referred to in "Shell Games - Part 2", below, the originals had gone, as part of a deliberate move on the part of an involved actor: the host and target, SOE).  But other posts survived which quoted and commented upon Burke.  From those, I was able to recover enough to make useful citations.  And, on the upside, it didn't require the idle Porphyrogenitus to set teams of civil servants to the task.

And here's something that a careful archaeological historian can avoid with discovered texts.  Accessing cached google entries often actually destroys them if the site no longer exists.  It's as if reading a book burns each page once you turn to the next. Google goes back, checks this old page that is apparently interesting, finds the original is no more, and flushes the contents.

Of course, there are no real internet palimpsests available.  While actually getting hold of the server's disk array in a lab might theoretically make overwritten texts available, in reality this is not an option.  Once that forum - World of Warcraft -style - is written over with newer posts, then the original is gone.

Comments

# re: The Electronic Palimpsest

Friday, November 18, 2005 4:04 PM by Timothy Burke
I remember thinking about this some at the time: "Why am I writing these 7 Deadly Sins posts in a forum owned by SOE? Don't I want them to be disseminated?" But in a way, much of what I was driving at as a player within those forums was the fact that the community that SWG had created on the forums was potentially valuable for creating loyality to the game's future development if only they'd nurture it appropriately. So in a sense I was trying to exemplify by writing there in the forums the commitment I was advising the developers to make, that only Raph Koster seems to have sensed was important. (The consequence of which is that Raph became the synecdochal representative of SWG's failures, even or perhaps especially for me, which is rather unfair.)

Instead the SWG live management team went completely the opposite direction in community management: lies, puffery, incoherence, and blaming the forums. Just reading the forums as a player, I had useful heuristics for "reading out" the valuable information and content: why is that so hard for people whose jobs are supposed to concentrate on the same kind of cybrarianship? And, of course, scribbling over the past. That's a loss not just for us but for them: one of the major values left in SWG ought to be as an object lesson for SOE and other developers. If they can't figure out what went wrong with it, they're surely doomed to repeat the same mistakes. And the signal hidden amidst the noise in their forums, all the way back into Beta, provides many clues.

In any event, I more or less extracted the substance of the 7 Deadly Sins posts into the "Mystery of SWG" post and then repeated some of it in my recent piece for Game Studies, so not all the information is lost. I do kick myself for having not archived the forum posts, though.

Other forums I still wish were around in perpetuity include the old Lum the Mad forums, which contained a lot of really interesting material.

# re: The Electronic Palimpsest

Saturday, November 19, 2005 12:06 PM by rasputin
3 great posts about swg, endie.

Raph Koster is f unny one. People who play swg and who know about him have this really mixed attitude to him. He made this game that they all whined about at the time, but now they look back on it as if it was the best of times, "before the nerfs".

I think it's a Freudian thing. He made something hard and challenging and buggy as hell and gave life to all their characters and existences, but then he left almost at once. They hate him and shout at him for all the mistakes but they're sure that if he ever came back he could fix everything and make it right again.

# re: The Electronic Palimpsest

Tuesday, November 22, 2005 2:07 PM by Endie
Tim - You wrote seven posts of that length and with that much analysis and <i>didn't keep a copy</i>?! As a notorious hoarder - I have archives of just about every email I've received or sent since 94 or so - that makes me shiver.

Rasputin - You're right that there was a tendency on the boards for a long time to see Rap as the once and future king. I'm not sure it was Freudian, though: maybe more Jungian?