Unfortunately, with the barrage of information delivered by our perpetually shortening news cycle, participating in that process has never been more daunting for the average American. Fortunately, there are digital archivists who have been building tools to address this kind of issue around the world for decades and making sure that important information does not disappear may be easier than you think. This is the first in a series of articles meant to introduce these tools to those who have need for them in these trying times.
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So, what is the point of archiving? Well, lets say a mainstream news organization published an article titled “White Active Shooter in Denver” and then later changed that title, following the release of contradictory information, to “How Gun Control Can Stop Mass Shootings”, without appending an ‘edited’ marker, a few hours later. If I shared the link to the article on social media in the first hour after it was published, but those who received the shared link didn’t open it until the next day, there is going to be a lack of continuity between my commentary and the article they are visiting. Enter page archiving websites like archive.today and it’s many variations. There are a bunch of sites that provide page archiving services, but in my years of experience archive.today stands out as the least responsive to requests for takedown of lawful content while also providing the highest quality user experience.
Say you decided to use archive.today in the previous situation with the silently edited article. You visit the article within the first hour of it having been published and paste the link into archive.today. Archive.today then visits the site and creates a carbon copy of it that is timestamped and generates a link to access that copy. If you share that link the page that loads will always reflect its state at the time it was archived. Now here’s the coolest thing in my opinion. Say one of your friends read the archived article then visited the live page and pointed out to you that they differ. You can then archive the new edited page and compare the two. The differences can be commented on and this practice has a way of exposing the manipulative tactics that are used to shape a narrative. Archives made in this way are easily accessible and can be used to demonstrate the biases of individual authors, editors, and media organizations over time.
If archive.today and other similar websites are so great then why is there a need for any other kind of archiving? Well, I mentioned that these services tend to keep archives live and accessible which is true. However, they’re relatively untested when considering takedowns that originate from the government itself. In cases where data absolutely must be preserved there are ways to streamline the process of creating local archives on your computer and also places to backup to and share from that are explicitly designed to resist any form of censorship. I’ll be covering the creation of local archives of general information like webpages, videos, images, and documents next.
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The problem with trusting local archives of websites is that they can be easily tampered with. Those third-party websites are ones that are viewed as reliable and trustworthy, but that's lost when it's just some anonymous guy sharing an archive.
Do we need to go back to taking a photograph of the computer monitor to archive something? I'm serious, that would be a weird low-tech solution.