::fibreculture:: internet archives

[Ned Rossiter]

just as Geert posts a query on an archive of recode, I was waking for 
the day with thoughts on that  quite remarkable site/engine, the 
Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/

And I was wondering if anyone out there is doing internet archaelogy 
work.  This site is particularly handy for that sort of research.  I 
remember typing in something like "S11" a year or 2 ago, and getting 
the progression of the event as it appeared, for instance, on CNN 
pages.  This sort of feature lends itself to tracking the 
relationship between what Ken Wark calls a "weird media event" and 
the time it takes for discourse to capture and contain that which has 
inititially exceeded any media-discursive logic.

The url search feature brings up hits for 2001, 2002 for fc site 
developments. Strangely, it registers nothing for 2003  -  a time 
that has seen the site undergo quite significant development. 
Perhaps it takes a while for updates to trickle into the database. 
Or maybe fc is no longer being tracked.  The FAQs link explains how 
it all works.

Geert - if you enter the recode url: http://systemx.autonomous.org/recode/

3 hits come up for 1999, and 2001.  1999 is dead, but 2001 gives some winners.

If any of you are doing work along these lines, it'd be great to see 
it posted to the list.  Or even submitted to one of the future issues 
of the fc journal (issue 1, btw, is not too far off launching).

Related to this type of research, I'm also wondering if anyone is 
doing not mailing list analysis, but announcement list analysis. 
This perhaps seems particularly dull, but one great thing about 
announcement archives - and a good reason why they should exist and 
be preserved - is that you're able to quickly establish a set of 
co-ordinates that assist in what Lefebrve and others call synchronic 
historical analysis [suited to any history of the present], as 
distinct from diachronic analysis.  [and on a friendly admin note: 
all announcements of events, cfps, exhibitions, projects etc should 
be posted to the separate fc announcements list - url in footer of 
all fc list postings - and not this list]

Ned