PhysicsWeb provides me with yet another blog post topic today, posting a lament about the death of letter writing, which makes life more difficult for historians:
Now that e-mail has replaced letter writing as the principal means of informal communication, one has to feel sorry for future science historians, who will be unable to use letters and telegrams to establish facts and gauge reactions to events. In addition to the Copenhagen episode, another example of the role of letters is Stillman Drake's startling conclusion, based on a careful reading of Galileo's correspondence, that the Leaning Tower event actually happened. And of all the reactions to the discovery of parity violation in 1957, the simplest and most direct expression of shock came from Robert Oppenheimer. After receiving a telegram from Chen Ning Yang with the news, Oppenheimer cabled back: "Walked through door."
Letters are also useful to historians because the character of scientists can often be revealed more clearly in informal communications than in official documents. Catherine Westfall, who has composed histories of both the Fermilab and Argonne national laboratories, likes to point out that letters often reveal leadership styles in striking ways. "[Former Fermilab director] Robert R Wilson knew he was making history and was ironically self-conscious," she once told me. "Leon Lederman [another Fermilab director] told jokes, [while former Argonne director] Hermann Grunder wrote letters that were really never-ending to-do lists."
There are really two problems her: the technical issue of being unable to read older electronic archives, and the social issue of people not writing the same sorts of things in email that the older generation did on paper. Of course, the solution to both problems is right there in their own magazine: more blogging by physicists.
Blogs are publicly available as HTML files (as consistent a format as you'll get from the computer industry), archived and cached by a bunch of Internet archivists, and provide an outlet for lengthier discussions of topics of interest to physicists and historians. It's the perfect solution.
A hundred years from now, if I become really famous, historians and biographers will have no end of useful material to go through, taken from this blog ("Chapter 7: He, um, really liked his dog..."). I'm doing this for posterity, you see.
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I wonder. Much of the communication to which you refer was more or less private. I really doubt that the writers would have been as open and revealing if they knew up front that their words could be read by anyone in the world.
It's one thing to be aware that your files may be examined and mined after your death; it's quite another to have everything go public as you write it.
I don't know that I think HTML is such a consistent format, especially with rather rapidly evolving stuff like CSS and Web 2.0 and so forth. There aren't many web pages left that make much sense if viewed with NCSA Mosaic. I suppose everything's still backward-compatible, but backwards-compatibility sometimes gets broken: it would be a real struggle for me if, for example, I wanted to transfer my 20-year old pfs:write documents from my old Apple //e to a modern computer. It might even be easiest to scan/OCR printouts.
The internet wayback machine is very useful, but right on its homepage it states "sites that are database driven, generate dynamic web pages or have robots.txt exclusions can not be archived." And it is the shift from static html webpages to database-driven dynamic content is exactly what has facilitated the rise of blogs and other interactive websites. The wayback machine does capture a lot of blog stuff, but archiving a database that you only have access to through dynamic web pages can't be trivial.
Perhaps those curmudgeonly old professors, the ones who have their secretaries print out their emails for them, have the right idea.
HTML is pretty standard and is likely to be around for a long time. Today's browsers can still read pages from the beginning of the web. In fact, modern XHTML may be easier to archive since it has a cleaner format and most of the styling gets pulled out into stylesheets.
Blogs are better than many dynamic web sites because they are meant to read and linked to. They have stable permalinks. For most of the them, it is hard to tell from the URL that they are dynamically generated. The archives stay around. There is lots of cross-linking and quoting. In fact, I suspect that quotes on blogs will end up being a good reference for news articles which aren't archived as well.