My first thoughts direct me to feel more concerned over the idea of abundance. Rosenzweig points out that “the Google search engine … gets 300,000 hits [, which] should make us consider that future historians may face information overload.” Obviously, oversaturation of content overwhelms archivists and the cultural memory. For this reason, archiving digital landscapes is difficult. For example, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank illustrates this issue. The project contains a section dedicated to letting users post their own photographs of Hurricane Katrina or Rita. I am not entirely sure how it is moderated, but it seems that some photos are somewhat insignificant. (Is it historically relevant to see someone with their significant other flipping a peace sign underneath a Mardi Gras banner?… Probably not because there already exists an oversaturation of photos like that all over social media) The 13,927 items included in the project cannot all benefit memory of the hurricanes to the same degree.
The notion of scarcity unsettles me more; this stems from a very significant irony. As technology advances, historians and archivists alike are continuing to lose artifacts because of this advancement. What digital spaces lose can be lost forever, whereas physical materials can last for thousands of years. Into the Future: On the Preservation of Knowledge emphasizes this point. Advances in computer sciences and constant forward “trajectory” neglect practices in preservation for its own sake. By nature, abundance is messy, but order can be made from disorder. Order cannot be made from something that no longer exists.
This issue of advancement (paradoxical, I know) harms Digital Humanities projects, too. The Graceful Degradation Survey calls this idea to attention. The project asks, “How are projects to be designed so that they can be maintained, or maintain themselves, through periods of change?” The solution is complicated, and it relates to scarcity, where items can be lost forever.
A simple solution is to preserve the hardware that stores the digital archive. Yet, this proves inconvenient. Rosenzweig shares, “If you have files created on an Apple II, then why not keep one in case you need it? Well, sooner or later, a disk drive breaks or a chip fails, and unless you have a computer junkyard handy and a talent for computer repair, you are out of luck.” Other scholars put their faith in “data migration.” Even so, time-consuming and expensive roadblocks prevent “data migration” from being worthwhile.
Personally, I am not sure that a universal solution will ever come about for preserving digital spaces (either physical artifacts represented in the digital, or digital artifacts that have always been so). Despite emulation being theoretical, as Rosenzweig notes, I think it might be the most efficient solution. Moreover, perhaps an aspect of relativity needs to be introduced? Archives are unique, and maybe their methods of maintaining their artifacts in the face of advancement can be too? Maybe preserving hardware, emulating, and using data migration? Whatever the future, I am certain that scholars must be careful and flexible to better remedy this issue.