[ggm]

I have come to the conclusion this will best be left to professionals, and a significant amount of oral history has in fact already been collected and curated, by professionals.

I wanted it to be me. The more I thought about it, the less equipped I felt. In some ways, it's the technologists curse, to believe your meta sense informs "the best way" when in fact, you're disrespecting another disciplines praxis assuming your amateur spider sense is the way.

[j45]

The world would be more boring with only professional stories and films.

Telling your experience of a story always has merit.

Adding something to the world isn’t solely for professionals. It’s not about being the first, or the last.

[ggm]

Tell your story to the pros. Archivists know how to filter. I've done some.

[j45]

Llms can filter too.

[jcowienh]

Hey, original author here. I feel your comment. I should note that the goal here, as I drew it narrowly, was a technical one: to curate some very specific datasets (the "names and numbers and routes" that describe Internet infrastructure), generate some interpretative metrics that describe the network in various places at various times, and then to get the heck out of the way and let professional social scientists use this evidence to actually write papers and do history.

tl;dr: There's a lot of meaning locked up in historical Internet measurement datasets that is totally inaccessible to the real experts who study society. Technologists need to be respectful, preserve it, unlock it, and make it accessible outside the technical community.