[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.