Guiding Questions

How can I bring silence and stillness into my hectic life as a law student? What drives me to seek this silence? How do I stay faithful to a contemplative practice when my daily life activities and obligations seem so all-consuming? What do I see in the Church? In God? Why go to Mass? These questions will change with time, as my journey progresses. This blog documents my struggle with practicing what I preach, so to speak -- my struggle to keep God in the center of my life. At times, I may fail; indeed, I often will. My hope is that both my successes and failures will lead me toward greater authenticity, understanding, and love.

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Internet Archive

The creators of the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) created it to preserve the history of digital culture and of the internet. They are working to staunch the flow of lost information, such as the record of rapidly-changing news coverage (what happens to the information on CNN's main page when it ceases to be relevant/breaking news?).


In addition to the Wayback Machine, the Archive captures myriad types of information, grouped in four main categories: "Moving Images," "Live Music Archive," "Audio," and "Texts." "Moving Images" encompasses everything from user-generated videos to classic films and news broadcasts; in the "Audio" section can be found MP3s, poetry readings, and news programming, to name a few -- most of which are free to download; the "Live Music Archive" is, as the name implies, an archive of live music; "Texts" include every imaginable types of texts.

As described on the "About Us" page of the website, there are multiple potential uses of the Internet Archive. The following are three examples of such possible uses: we can trace the way our language changes by enabling linguists to automatically search for the first occurrences of words and the subsequent migration of their meanings; we can establish internet centers internationally, to preserve the aspects of a country's heritage that exist on the Internet; we can track the Web's evoloution by researching when different ethnic groups or certain businesses first gained a presence on the Internet.

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