> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.
What we have already lost is the process of reading the newspapers that birthed the obituary.
Newspaper's used to have strong local coverage and a collection of vignettes into the outside world. The way the author uses the obituaries is the way I used to use the newspapers. Getting multiple newspapers (and magazines) from all over the world was a fixture for New York City creative offices pre-internet.
I think the idea from the original article is great! But although I'm a fan of printed newspapers and even subscribe to a renowned one, I unfortunately can't take part in it, simply because in my cultural circle (Germany) there are no detailed obituaries of ordinary people in the newspaper, only death notices. But that's always been the case here - at least that's how I know it.
The Internet Archive is massive force for good and a huge not-for profit effort.
However in certain aspects of preservation of History (for example if deemed high value at a national level) we should also expect national archives to duplicate the effort to preserve this and other information with historic value.
I wonder how much would such national digital archives resist rewriting of history.
It is much harder to doctor hard copies of newspapers or books. You can burn them, but altering them is a complicated challenge, and someone may own another copy of the originals.
With digital records, the temptation is stronger because the editing is easier, and other "unofficial" copies that diverge from the officially archived version may be declared to be fake/misinformation etc.
Well, I have some experience with the Danish National Archives, but may be out of date.
First, the rule used to be that they could crawl all Danish sites or having interest to Danish government (so I guess also news reports of Denmark or discussion in other nations) ignoring robots.txt, which yes I found that to be a very wrong headed rule but that's what it was. So obviously they need to put in a good deal of effort to get content into the archives that would be getting blocked otherwise.
At the same time governmental records, including the records and cases in communities around the country get added to archives (but of course are only available to scholars at some future date)
So theoretically this is a lot of data. I suppose other national archives probably have similar rules and situations.
It would seem unlikely that one could rewrite history easily with so much data, without alerting people to what you were doing. But I guess that is actually the lesson of Fascism, they don't care if you see what they're doing.
They will do it and then hope you forget how it got to be like it is.
The Internet Archive is constantly under attack for daring to preserve pressure waves. One of these days the destruction will be successful. Probably right now, under a Republican landslide government.
Democrats are conservative in the traditional sense, which is identical to Liberal with a capital L. Are you confused about the way labels shift and parties change their ideologies over time?
I asked what that word salad meant. Not how you defined the single word.
If you need 3rd grade simplified reductions like you just posted, we cannot continue here. Divorce from reality and truth is why your party lost trust with intelligent voters and must appeal to emotion and crisis to rally support, ultimately losing elections. Congratulations
It wasn't a landslide by any definition except the Trump campaign's; Trump won by an extremely narrow margin. It's important to be accurate about this to try to preempt despair.
Trump won by an extremely narrow margin in the popular vote, but by a high margin in the electoral college, which was the real prize fought over by the two candidates. He took all seven swing states.
IDK if this counts as landslide in the American sense. I mostly heard that expression used for results of European elections.
Edit: instant downvote, didn't even take a minute from the original posting! Wow.
Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics. The fact that Trump got 312 electoral votes to Harris' 226 is just that, a fact. It does not reflect any subjective attitudes or preferences of anyone taking part in this discussion, wisdom or idiocy of current White House policies etc.
A lot of Republicans are calling it a landslide, but I think they've forgotten what a landslide looks like; along with forgetting a lot of other things.
Out of 538 votes, in 2024, Trump had 312; in 2020, Biden had 306, just a few less, and Trump had 304 in 2016, only 8 less than his "landslide". In 2012, Obama had 332 and in 2008, he had 365. Clinton had 370 and 379. I wouldn't call any of those landslides though.
GHW Bush had 426 which is quite a lot, but Reagan before him had 489 and then 525. Those are landslides.
Nixon got 301 the first time, which is just a win; but he got 520 in his second term. That was a landslide.
I would draw a line in the sand at 90% of the electoral vote is a landslide, and anything less is puffery. Ranked by percentage of electors, Trump's "landslide" is only 44 out of 60. That's the saddest landslide ever. 58% of electors is a clear and undebatable win, but it's not a landslide and it's not a mandate, or even a large margin. It might be an indictment of the Democratic Party or some other lesser hyperbole though.
I agree with you the true landslides were Nixon, Reagan, FDR, etc.
The absence of electoral landslides in recent years implies both parties are better tuned and optimized now. Their data collection to enable a "winning campaign platform" is probably much better now, resulting in close elections.
My theory is that it's a result of institutionalized corruption: neither party wants to win by a landslide anymore. They want to win, in Dick Cheney's words (quoted in Obama's biography), "fifty percent plus one".
They want to share the spoils of victory with as few as possible. Winning with a big margin, to the party apparatus, is evidence that you wasted valuable political capital on pleasing voters that could instead have been spent on pleasing donors.
Did I do that? Not knowingly; my main intent was to reflect on what "landslide" may mean in various perspectives.
Personally, I am more to the right than to the left, but I don't enjoy the clusterfuck of the current administration at all, doubly so because our local security (a small NATO member which used to be subjugated to Moscow) has been thrown into total uncertainty.
Landslide is about popular vote not electoral. Because a small shift in popular vote can result in a massive swing in electoral vote. Claiming somin has a landslide is silly
This is partially true but not the whole picture. A small shift in popular vote across the seven swing states can result in a massive swing in electoral vote. Shifts in safe states don't register in the electoral college but do register in the national popular vote.
It was 312 vs 226 votes, including seven swing states, and got the popular vote. I guess to make ourselves feel better we’ll just say an extremely thin margin. But as long as it’s with a nod and wink; kind of like saying that alligators also fly, just extremely, extremely low.
> There is a real danger that obituaries of people in the early 21st century will become inaccessible to future generations due to obituary rot:
When my father died we got a 'complementary' online posting from the funeral home for ~1 year (for funeral/service details), but I also made the effort to pay to put one in the newspaper for posterity.
When my mother-in-law died, I immediately registered a domain for her name and created a website and added the obituary, eulogy, and a photo gallery and shared that with friends and family for exactly this reason.
In 1000 years, you're unlikely to find any given book, hard drive, or newspaper that is still legible, but accessing any of those is far more likely than finding an Internet Archive datacenter, spinning it back up, and accessing the contents.
Companies that aggregate and sell data suck up all of the obituaries as they are public record and unburdened by regulations on sharing and selling it. Although it may not be in its original form (as far as I know), info from obituaries may actually be positioned to survive a very long time.
There's a danger, but also a natural way of things. Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
Mind I can get behind the genealogy argument, yet feel that our post-life records being accessible by default is not an assumption we can make unilaterally.
> Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
The historical record is important and we don't know what will be useful to future generations.
Take Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms as an example. It briefly recounts the multiple legal proceedings that the Roman Catholic Church brought against a humble Italian Renaissance-era miller who spread strange, heretical ideas about the cosmos (involving the cheese that was apparently the moon's substance and the worms that ate it). Ginzburg draws on Church records, including the man's own written defense, and builds a fascinating picture of his mental world, intellect, and disposition.
If I remember correctly, these small, cloudy windows into the Early Modern past even let Ginzburg identify likely traces of pre-Christian, or folk, traditions largely hidden from the written record.
This is a funny example, I suppose, because in all likelihood the miller would have been tickled to know that his ideas survived and found an audience not just despite but because of Church persecution.
Still, his case nicely illustrates the importance and unpredictable value of the historical record.
It's really hard to find stuff from the "old internet" on google. I know it's there. But instead it feeds me garbage marketing articles that just touch the surface and then try to sell me something.
I suggest trying Yandex, no joke. It feels like 2005 Google - no industry forced filtering or rerouting, no BS recipe sites boosted by SEO and "time on page" manipulation...
wiby.me, marginalia.nu, and kagi.com seem to do a better job at this. Wiby is specific to old web, and even has a delightful "Surprise me" button that can take you to some fun little websites that provide an insight into someone's life.
"There are people who have done great evil, who perhaps want to be forgotten if they were dead. But it would not be morally right to forget their deeds and the lessons we can draw from them. Because of that, the right to be forgotten upon death is a conditional one."
The above is the moral reasoning expressed in the comment you are responding to, and of course whether or not one agrees with this line of reasoning can vary from person to person and belief to belief.
Here's what currently happens: obit links get passed around among friends, family, loved ones. Anyone who catches wind of a death and is remotely interested in family history/geneaology is going to archive it and plug it in somewhere. Such as Find-a-Grave, ancestry.com, etc. Ancestry themselves should be actively indexing all these obits and such.
Digital obits will last so long that you will hate them forever, and curse the day they wrote yours.
Because here's what's going to happen next: every "data point" in those obits will be plugged into databases. Family Trees, Find-a-Grave Memorials, personal ancestral files. Those will be indexed, searchable, and every single factoid will be repeated and reduplicated and copy-pasted in perpetuity.
Unfortunately, anyone who reads obits and knows some family history also knows that obits are riddled with errors. Sometimes they're deliberate! Sometimes they misdirect or protect the innocent, minors, whatever. Sometimes they're spiteful and sometimes they're simply papering over scandal with something anodyne.
So you've got a 95% true obituary that's being traded and scraped and plugged into databases, and those 5% falsehoods are going to multiply like a pernicious cancer.
Once I delved into my family tree, I found that most of my effort and resources were in disproving connections, removing sources, and reconciling conflicts due to inept researchers who didn't check anything. I hacked off entire "trunks" due to false bloodlines (usually to Revolutionary heroes, nobility, notables, etc.)
Let's get real here: obituaries were published in newspapers! Newspapers are periodicals designed to last only as long as you read them, and then you wrap fish in them and toss them on the fireplace! Don't get so precious about these fleeting words. Because many people will care far too much, preserve them with undue care, and we'll be worse off than before.
You only live as long as the last person to remember you. Now the internet is going to make us all immortal as our descendants research the family tree.
https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/obituary-rot.html
> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.