The Current

Preserving digital history is imperative to save cultural history

Last month we spoke with Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet. His predictions of a coming "Digital Dark Age" were dire. We continue this discussion with a digital historian who says the "Dark Age" is already here and he's working towards keeping our history on our hard drives.
Ian Milligan Ian Milligan is an assistant professor of digital and Canadian history at the University of Waterloo, and one of the researchers behind WebArchives.ca, a portal that lets you search through millions of old and deleted political websites. (Ian Milligan)
"By deleting websites, blogs etc… we lose our own memories, and as a society we lose collective memories and history of us."- Digital Historian Ian Milligan

Vint Cerf, one of the people who made the internet a reality spoke with The Current last month as part of our project Ripple Effect. In that conversation, he told Anna Maria he feared for the future of history on the internet and warned us of a digital dark age that was coming.

Ian Milligan says, that Dark Age may already be here. 

Ian Milligan is an Assistant Professor of Canadian and Digital History at the University of Waterloo. 

Exploding ARC files: 224,977 URLs with 254,702 hyperlinks between them. (From the Web Archives for Historical Research Group at the University of Waterloo)

This segment was produced by The Current's Sarah Grant.