[gumby]

> We live in the only point in human history where we can actually save all of humanity's knowledge and culture,

Because the the welter of proprietary, undocumented formats, media bitrot and the like we are actually moving away from such a point.

Turns out historians may not be so upset. You can be a historian of early medieval France have a chance of reading 100% of the surviving documentation. Too much data can obscure the story.

Of course historically you could get a PhD for compiling a concordance to Shakespeare, something that can now be done mechanically in seconds. Future historians could (and will) apply the same tools to today's surviving documentation. But I don't believe there'll be as much of it as you seem to think.

[ghaff]

>Because the the welter of proprietary, undocumented formats, media bitrot and the like we are actually moving away from such a point.

The best we can probably say is that it's different. We're capable of saving far more but, in practice, a lot of digital media is locked up in walled gardens and accounts that have to be paid for and require logins.

It's presumably easier to save a bunch of photographs or videos in a way that they'll be accessible so long as key Internet sites or their successors are. A fire or flood probably won't destroy them. OTOH, unless you've taken affirmative steps to upload that media to the right place, it won't be serendipitously discovered in a shoebox some day in the future.

[TeMPOraL]

> Turns out historians may not be so upset. You can be a historian of early medieval France have a chance of reading 100% of the surviving documentation. Too much data can obscure the story.

I don't understand this reasoning. Yes, more data = more work, but less data = more likely you're wrong.

[gumby]

Less data: less likelihood someone will challenge you before you get tenure.

The incentives in academia are messed up.

[erikpukinskis]

Is your entire original comment meant to be read as sarcasm then?

Or are you advocating for the idea that history is arbitrary and it’s better to just have a simple story than to have to worry about what really happened?

I’m having a hard time understanding what idea you’re trying to position in this debate.

[gumby]

I was making three points in the three paragraphs:

1 - it's more likely we will be an information-sparse region in the historical record rather than an information-dense region.

2 - professional historians have their own set of incentives which can be counterintuitive to the layperson.

3 - but indeed if there turns out to be a huge amount of stuff (there will likely be mountains of some forms of ephemera) to go through some people may be able to find value using new tools not available in the past to historians.

As someone trained as (but never worked as) a historian I do indeed have a bit of cynicism on point 2. I suspect most if not all actually working in that domain have the same cynicism.

[dmitriid]

Somehow "all available documentation about medieval France" somehow ended up being "oh, we don't know exactly, a lot is guesswork".

And that's France. What about Medieval Africa? The Americas?

Oh, we mostly burned that documentation because "it wasn't important". Right?

[gumby]

My understanding is that the jesuits burned the mesoamerican literature because they thought it was dangerous to their reign, not harmless. An appalling crime.