Entertainment - by Kaela Jensen on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 14:25 - 4 Comments - 338 views
I have a hard time living in the 
present, and often spend hours thinking about how I will look back on everything happening now when I’m older and have grandchildren huddled about my hologram wheelchair in my robot house. I never said it was a realistic fantasy. Anyway, one of the things I think most about is dial-up internet and floppy disks and trying to make my own anime website when I was 10 on Geocities.
In a very timely fashion (Geocities is shutting down forever this month, and nerds everywhere are crying into their Domo-kun pillows), a new project has been born out of the Interwebs to immortalize these forgotten formats and fonts. Internet Archaeology, founded by a dude named Ryder Ripps, aims to preserve the spirit of the Internet we all grew up with by archiving old websites and such.
Their mission statement says it best: “Internet Archaeology seeks to explore, recover, archive and showcase the graphic artifacts found within earlier Internet Culture. Established in 2009, the chief purpose of Internet Archaeology is to preserve these artifacts and acknowledge their importance in understanding the beginnings and birth of an Internet Culture.”
Remember these gems? Me neither, but I remember sites like them. It’s like nails running down a chalkboard in my brain remembering trying to navigate this sludge. But like prohibition and jazzercise, we have to remember what came before so we can learn from it.
4 Comments
Julianna M.
Joey
Yes, but with archive.org you need to know the URL… making it difficult to sift through sites. Archive.org is merely a robot that archives stuff, they don’t show you anything. It would be as if the MET was just a storage facility.
Kaela Rae Jensen
Thanks for letting me know, Julianna, but I would agree with Joey that archive.org is hard to navigate. I guess I’m a sucker for presentation.
Julianna M.
I agree it is hard to navigate, but they do have their own separate music, audio, image and text archives, and that alone makes it more of an “archive” than the archaeology site.
The point of archive.org is exactly that, to be an archive, not a museum. Museums are for uber-selective display while the goal of archives is usually to collect a bulk of information, not for display, but for use by researchers.
Hopefully archive.org has begun, or will begin to try to create a workable search engine.
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I’m in the archive program at NYU and I thought I should let you know that If you’re looking for an internet archive, there is already a fully functional one: http://www.archive.org/index.php
I looked around Internet Archaeology and its kind of a terrible website. Plus since they seem to be new, there isn’t much they can do about preserving anything we may remember from the mid-90s if it has already disappeared. At least archive.org began in the late 90s so they already have a good deal to work with as an online internet archive.