The Afterlife of Software

Death on the internet is not limited to human death. The business model of planned obsolescence, the technical work of preserving old websites, systems, and applications, as well as a cultural emphasis on the new and immediate all combine to make the internet a place where many software technologies have gone to die. Networked modes of living engender networked modes of loss, and a key question is how our connection to the past is reconfigured when software dies. In terms of digital preservation strategies, emulation may also be distinguished from migration, or periodically moving data and software to new environments, “rewriting” them as required. Software does not end with source code, nor with electronic pulses producing material changes in underlying hardware and storage media. If bottom-up, continuous preservation is the way forward, then software’s afterlife will depend not just on the work of a few heritage institutions

El historiador y la historia en la Edad Oscura Digital

El mundo se hace digital y con ello los documentos, fuentes de información para la historia. Nuevos soportes y medios cuya conservación permanente no está asegurada, lo que ha llevado a predecir la venida de una Edad Oscura Digital, en la que se disiparían la mayoría de las fuentes para la historia. En ese contexto se analiza la presencia del historiador en el debate, las nuevas formas de hacer historia —que podrían peligrar— y se pretende vislumbrar el futuro de los documentos digitales como materia prima para la historia.The world becomes digital and its documents become information sources for history. The permanent conservation of new media outlets and supporting platforms is by no means assured. The possibility of their disappearance has led many to predict the coming of a Digital Dark Age in which the majority of sources used for the historical study would disappear. Given this context, we analyse the historian’s presence in this debate and the new ways of practicing history that could be jeopardized. This article offers a glimpse into the future of digital documents as raw material for history