BLOG FOREVER

An interview with Dr Mike Joy, Department of Computer Science

Self-publishing online has increased in popularity over recent years but blogs and other digital technologies are often hard to archive and preserve. We risk losing many posts and ideas. Dr Mike Joy, Department of Computer Science, is part of a new EU-funded project, Blog Forever, that is researching different ways to preserve the content found in blogs. Here, Dr Joy explains more about the project.

The preservation of knowledge has always been a complex business; when the great Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fire around 48 BC, the stoic philosopher Seneca claimed that 40,000 books had gone up in smoke. ‘What is the use of having countless books and libraries, whose titles their owners can scarcely read through in a whole lifetime? The learner is not instructed, but burdened by the mass of them, and it is much better to surrender yourself to a few authors than to wander through many,’ he said.

Although written several millennia ago, Seneca’s remarks could just as well have been applied to 21st-century life. We now live in an information age where we consider ourselves inundated with data. Although we no longer fear the loss of original works in a physical sense, we do face the problem of changing technologies, and how to preserve digital works in the future. The more technology forces information upon us, the harder it gets to digest that information and to turn it into knowledge. The task of making information properly searchable is more important than ever.

Take blogging, for example. Self-publishing has become an important part of our cultural and intellectual heritage – especially in an academic context – but digital works are not straightforward to preserve. How do we capture the continuously evolving nature of blogs, the exchange of ideas that they foster and the social networks that surround them?

Step forward BlogForever: an EU-funded project that draws together 12 partners – led by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and including the universities of Warwick, London and Glasgow in the UK - to work collaboratively towards the preservation of content published via blogs and to make the archiving techniques available to any user, user group, institution or organisation. Here at Warwick, the project is led by principle investigator Dr Alexandra I Cristea and co-principle investigator Dr Mike Joy, with support from Research Assistant Dr Karen Stepanyan. Another member of staff, Dr Di Wang, is due to join the team at Warwick next month.

‘Our partners come from across Europe and include companies which specialise in hosting blogs, from which we will be able to gather a lot of real and timely data about people who use them and how the blogs themselves are used,’ explains Dr Joy. ‘The University of London [Computer Centre] has got a lot of expertise in, for example, gathering information from blog users, and Glasgow has got expertise on legal frameworks and copyright and how these apply to digital media. So we’ve got a wide spread of partners who offer complementary expertise on handling blogs.’

Yet, the process is not merely about the creation of robust archiving technology. ‘One big challenge is addressing the issue of what a blog actually is,’ says Dr Joy. ‘There’s a naive view of a blog being simply a sequence of posts by a person on a particular topic, but what do you actually mean by a post? How much in the way of multimedia may or may not be included in the blog? What is the structure of a blog allowed to be? What will a blog be like in 2015? So understanding what blogs are will allow us to start putting together the software for preserving blogs, for archiving blogs, and for searching through them in a meaningful way.’

In a fast-moving Web 2.0 world, understanding the evolution of the blog is a complicated business.

In a fast-moving Web 2.0 world, understanding the evolution of the blog is a complicated business. Some see micro-blogging sites such as Twitter and Facebook as a rival to blogs, some see them as a complementary activity. It wasn’t too long ago that we were using forums and newsgroups as a way of disseminating information; already these look like old-fashioned technologies.

‘If you take forums and bulletin boards, then capturing the data in them is potentially quite easy, because most of them are basically text files and you just copy them to some backup device,’ says Dr Joy. ‘Because blogs are much more complex in terms of what they contain, it’s much more difficult. And if one goes on the assumption that there’s important content in blogs at the moment, which I think is correct, then it’s important to be able to archive them and to be able to find what’s in the archive, and this is where the EU is coming from in terms of digital preservation.’

But what happens if people don’t want their blogs preserving?

‘One of the issues that we will be addressing before any software goes live is to make sure that there is a mechanism in place so that privacy is respected, as we must do by law,’ says Dr Joy, ‘but if a blog is already in the public domain and the author of the blog has not explicitly said “You must not copy this”, then it’s perfectly proper to do so because these things – if they’re visible through your web browser – can be copied anyway. But users will be able to opt-out.’

We have become used to the intense speed of modern technology, but ironically, digital media is considered more time-consuming to preserve than any other media. Whereas documents from several centuries ago are still easily read, information created just a decade ago is in danger of being lost unless efforts are made to contextualise it and to make it accessible to search engines. Yet despite claims that we’re headed for a ‘digital dark-age’, projects like BlogForever hope to address the issue by gaining a better understanding of online content and its purpose, along with users’ views on preservation, management and analysis.

For more information on the project please visit the website blogforever.eu.

The Knowledge Centre have produced some online resources for individuals interested in blogging. Find them in our Learning Resources section.

Dr Mike Joy teaches in the Department of Computer Science at Warwick. He is an Information Systems Engineer, with particular interests in educational technology object-oriented programming and Internet software.

By Dr Annette Rubery