18 March 2021
The topic of our March roundtable is security as physical infrastructure and personal data protection. Future historians will have access to only what we choose to archive for them. We need to consider anonymizing and classifying selections of today’s social media data that may prove useful for researchers of the 2010s and 2020s. Is this possible? What do we earmark for long-term preservation? Writings? Pictures? Location? Biometric and medical data? If we do, how should such big data archives be designed? Anonymized? Encrypted? Classified for a time and then be made available for public use after 100 years? And where? In the arctic vault? Former nuclear bunkers? Is there anything we can do collectively today?
With data scientist Shannon Stewart and anthropologist A. R. E. Taylor, we will discuss data anonymization and data center security from the perspective of historical research.
