Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. And, this week, we're finding out what the internet can't remember.
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There's a really fun subreddit called Tip of My Tongue. It's where people go to crowdsource answers to all the little things that we forget. I've written about it and its sister subreddits before, although I can't remember where...as I said, they're fun. However, they also illustrate a problem with the internet as our collective memory: you have to know what you're looking for. Which is where these crowdsourced sites come in. There, you can just describe a thing and hope someone will recognize it well enough to tell you what it is you've been looking for.
One of my triumphs, years ago, was to find an image of the Yorx Stereo I had as a kid. Means nothing to anyone, but it made me really happy for a while, which is kind of the point.
But, what I've been fascinated by recently, and what I've been trying to learn about, are the holes in the internet's memory. In theory, once you know what you're looking for, the internet should have a record of it somewhere. And, for the most part, it seems to. Or, more realistically, it has access to a database that has a record of your grail and can retrieve that information for you.
The past few years have seen an explosion in these kinds of databases as the entities who have these databases have begun to realize the value of the data they have squirreled away in dusty archives. So, you see both the massive archival and preservation efforts of museums and libraries, as well as the collection and curation efforts by groups of dedicated individuals. The first looks like the British Museum, the second looks like The Internet Archive (and, of course, there's lots of overlap between the two.)
The reason all this has been on my mind is because of a few grail-quests I've gone on recently. One lead me to some archival / curation efforts I hadn't known about, and the other lead me to some of the holes in the internet's memory. It's these latter ones I want to talk about.
The original database. Photo by Twitter: @jankolario on Unsplash
(I've written about the other archives recently, but just in case - the archival and curative efforts I found and wish to support are the Cover Art Archive for record covers and the Database List, which is an amazing research tool by itself, if for no other reason that it shows us what we don't know.)
So. To the point at last - I've been trying to chase down a few posters I had on my bedroom walls as a kid. The posters I had were mainly from comic books or movies with a lot of weird stuff in between. Here's where the internet's memory gap comes in: there is an archive of movie posters. In fact, there are a few of them and most of them want to sell you a reproduction.
But there doesn't seem to be an archive of comic art. In fact, not only is it hard to find a poster you might have had, it is very, very hard to find who actually created the original art that the poster was printed from. Part of this seems to be because the work, often photographic or graphic design, was commissioned as work-for-hire, meaning that the artist knew they were never going to get credit for it. And part of it seems to be that a lot of poster companies have gone bankrupt and no longer exist, which makes tracking down their records all the more difficult.
No idea who made these. Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash
This same could be said for book covers. In recent years, book collectors and fans have begun taking note of who's done the covers for beloved books. This has been helped by authors talking on social media about their covers and generally praising the artists who made them. But when it comes to tracking down a cover for a book that has gone out of print...well, crowdsourcing to the rescue. But even then, you could experience what I did this past week - everyone knew exactly which cover I was talking about; no one knew who had painted it or even how to find out.
I have hope that this situation will change. There are more new specialist archives opening up everyday and all it takes is the right data set to change the game for collectors everywhere. And, in the meantime, it's not like we're going to run out of things that we can't quite remember even as we search for them ever more ardently.
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Stay strong, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel