Big Data and the Historian’s Craft

21 January 2021 The advent of big data challenges long-held assumptions in historical research. The 59 zettabytes of data generated until 2020 reside in fragile storage devices with an average…

18 February 2021 Historians and archivists have expressed concerns about the Digital Dark Age for decades. The short life span of storage hardware (about 7 years for SSDs under stress,…

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…

15 April 2021 In “Energetics of Big Data,” we will discuss big data as energy. Data centers are energy gobblers that consume anywhere between 1% to 5% of the world’s…

20 May 2021 The May session of Big Data and the Historian’s Craft shifts our attention to data science and methodological reflections. Text analysis, GIS, network analysis, and machine learning…

17 June 2021 History of… the Future? As we saw in Archives of the Future, the fragility of digital storage media and the rise of big data have reverse the…