Myspace and MTV: how will future historians study the 21st century?

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Myspace and MTV: How Will Future Historians Study the 21st Century?"

History Extra Podcast
Date: October 29, 2025
Host: Matt Elton
Guests: Jane Winters (Professor of Digital Humanities, University of London), John Wills (Professor in Film and Media, University of Kent)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Matt Elton speaks with historians Jane Winters and John Wills about the challenges and opportunities future historians will face when studying the 21st century. The discussion centers on the explosion of digital records—from social media to video games—and the implications for the historical record, preservation, technological obsolescence, inclusivity, and the reliability of rapidly proliferating sources. The episode provides deep insights into how future narratives may be shaped by today's data and how historians must adapt their methods to make sense of the overwhelming scale and variety of records.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. New Kinds of Records and Sources

[03:43 – 08:20]

• Digital vs. Analog Evolution:

  • Jane Winters observed that what we consider primary sources now are often familiar forms (like newspapers) that have transitioned to digital, alongside wholly new formats such as blogs, tweets, memes, and multimedia content.
    • “An issue of The Guardian newspaper that was published in print today will not have the same information in it as the online version… there'll be multimedia material. You'll have online comments appearing, which you would have only ever had letters to the editor previously."
      (Jane Winters – 03:43)
  • John Wills expanded on how film, video games, and digital fandom assemble a vast, unstructured archive of audience reactions and experiences.
    • "Doing that research is...vast because you’re having to deal with memes, gifs, digital content of both fandom, the everyday audience. You can access actor responses…”
      (John Wills – 05:04)

• Multiplicity of Formats:

  • Jane Winters highlighted the web as an unstructured collection of text, images, sounds, emojis, memes, and more—posing challenges for meaningful research.
    • “A web archive... will have all of this material in there in a very unstructured way.”
      (Jane Winters – 06:34)

2. Video Games as Historical Sources

[08:42 – 11:24]

• Interaction With the Past:
  • John Wills explained that video games, once considered ephemeral, now offer a window into cultural views and can provide both experiences and reflections of history.
    • “Video games can be almost this introduction to the past in a way that maybe older television programs or film would have done. They can also build history into the games…”
      (John Wills – 09:11)
• Scholarly Lag:
  • There has been a delay in academia fully integrating video games into the set of primary sources.

3. Social Media and Ordinary Voices

[11:24 – 13:33]

• Inclusion of Diverse Narratives:
  • Jane Winters pointed out the historical novelty of numerous ordinary people ending up in archives via social media.
    • “Most ordinary people end up in an archive when you encounter the state at some point...But now anybody with access to the Internet, it’s so easy to create content of all kinds...”“That ability to tell your own story, I think.”
      (Jane Winters – 11:31, 12:57)
  • John Wills raised the challenge for scholars to ensure true diversity by actively including marginalized voices and being aware of new forms of exclusion.

4. Digital Divide and Global Gaps

[13:33 – 14:49]

• Persistent Inequity:
  • Despite the global spread of digital platforms, significant regions (e.g., Africa, China during global events like COVID-19) are still underrepresented in major digital archives.
    • “It skews to the global north in terms of the story about that pandemic, which, as we all know, was a global pandemic.”
      (Jane Winters – 14:16)

5. Technological Obsolescence and Material Culture

[15:16 – 19:15]

• Short Lifespan of Media:
  • John Wills illustrated the issues with preserving video games (hardware malfunctions, reliance on emulation, and lack of physical records for digital-only releases).
    • “...A console that sells well might only be publicly available for, say, ten years. Those consoles will then degrade, or they might not be designed to even last that ten years...”
      (John Wills – 15:16)
• Archival Responses:
  • Jane Winters described how memory institutions now preserve not just files but the entire context—hardware, software, metadata—to enable future “replay” of digital content.
    • “We need to preserve the material culture of these born-digital records...”
      (Jane Winters – 17:23)
• Context Collapse:
  • Digital records are easily decontextualized; tracking origins after an account deletion or server loss is sometimes impossible.
    • “Context collapse is something that gets talked about in relation to social media... it’s quite hard to trace it back to where it started, particularly if that crucial piece of information has gone.”
      (Jane Winters – 19:29)

6. Entertainment Archives: Commercial Interests and Loss

[21:45 – 24:44]

• Deliberate Demolition and Paywalls:
  • John Wills addressed the problem of content disappearing due to conscious deletion (for paywall or control purposes) or lack of archival responsibility from private companies (e.g., MTV, Myspace).
    • “MTV is an incredible resource for people... so there’s a paywall issue and there’s a control issue.”
      (John Wills – 22:10)
    • “MySpace... lost 12 years worth of photos, video and music because of a faulty server migration. So that just went.”
      (Jane Winters – 23:56)

7. Data Deluge: Scope and Navigation

[25:04 – 28:52]

• Archival Overwhelm:
  • Jane Winters referenced the “tidal wave of digital material” already overwhelming archivists and historians.
    • "[The National Archives] have this wonderful description in there of a tidal wave of digital material…”
      (Jane Winters – 25:04)
  • Most digital collections aren’t catalogued; keyword search offers no guidance on importance or representativeness.
    • “You will find whatever you’re looking for, but you will have no sense of how important or representative it is because there’s just so much material there.”
      (Jane Winters – 25:04)
• Algorithmic Filtering:
  • John Wills warned that the first presentation of historical info may now be shaped by search engines or AI—with risks of bias, error, or distortion.
    • “Our platforms...are in a sense potentially misleading us as scholars, or they’re potentially pushing the most common citation...”
      (John Wills – 27:27)

8. The Problem of Trust and the Role of AI

[28:52 – 31:56]

• Proliferation of Disinformation:
  • The scale and algorithmic curation of digital content make assessing reliability an increasing challenge compared to the “fraudulent charters” of the past:
    • “It’s always been an issue that there’s misinformation in archives, but the scale of it is, I think, different now… particular narratives are being created algorithmically that we’re not aware of behind the scenes.”
      (Jane Winters – 29:09)
• Archiving Algorithms:
  • Jane Winters stressed that preserving the functioning of algorithms themselves (“algorithmic heritage”) will be vital to understanding digital history.
    • “If we don’t know how the algorithms worked, we won’t be able to see what their effect was on the material that we want to study.”
      (Jane Winters – 31:36)

9. Comparing Scarcity and Overabundance

[31:56 – 35:48]

• Different Challenges, Same Dilemma:
  • Whereas ancient and medieval history contends with scarcity and partiality, modern digital historians face too much unstructured information, with both extremes risking distortion.
    • “Both the volume and the scarcity distort the picture, I think.”
      (Jane Winters – 34:08)
• Ephemerality and Loss:
  • Even now, valuable digital sources may disappear unexpectedly—making ephemerality a modern analogue to the accidents of historic survival.
    • “One of my fears is about ephemerality and that things will go or deliberately be deleted.”
      (John Wills – 34:08)
    • “There’s a lack of fixity in some digital archives…”
      (Jane Winters – 35:19)

10. Opportunities of Digital Abundance

[35:48 – 38:18]

• Holistic and Rich Reconstructions:
  • John Wills likened digital traces created today to “time capsules” that might enable immersive future histories, with more detail than previously possible.
    • “We’re every day kind of creating these kinds of capsules that historians of the future could use… create your own picture of that time period with quite a lot of depth and realism to it.”
      (John Wills – 36:05)
  • Jane Winters agreed, emphasizing how emerging technologies—like topic modeling and automated cataloguing—will help historians access qualitative richness.
    • “Technology is developing to help us with that. Things like topic modeling software which allows you to draw out key themes in a huge collection…”
      (Jane Winters – 37:16)

11. Copyright and Access Barriers

[38:18 – 41:05]

• Restriction by Legislation and Ownership:
  • Legal deposit laws, copyright confusion, and control by digital platforms all limit what historians can access or publish—even with public materials.
    • “It’s not clear whether you can post a screenshot of an archived website in a book or on a website yourself. In theory you’re supposed to ask permission from everybody, but you can’t do that…”
      (Jane Winters – 38:28)
  • The "free" ethos of the internet is an illusion—platforms exercise increasing legal and technical control.

12. Looking to the Future: What Stories Will Historians Tell?

[41:05 – End]

• Enduring Partiality:
  • Jane Winters argued that all histories, past or future, will be partial—shaped by what survives, what’s preserved, and what’s accessible.
    • “We’ve only ever been able to tell partial stories, and that will be true for future historians, as it is for current historians.”
      (Jane Winters – 41:48)
• Hope for Preservation Through Community:
  • Despite daunting challenges, the guests expressed confidence that ongoing efforts in national libraries, archives, and academic communities will ensure valuable records are sustained for future research.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Context collapse is something that gets talked about in relation to social media... it’s not very long before something is completely decontextualized and reused and it’s quite hard to trace it back to where it started.”
  — Jane Winters [19:29]

• “On one level, there’s a repetitive thing there, an ongoing thing of how to save things, not to lose them, how to protect our history and our culture. But there’s definitely... an issue here over control and paywall. I think it’s coming to the fore.”
  — John Wills [22:10]

• “If you’re working on an event, you could look at the sound, the video, personal files. You could in a sense create your own picture of that time period with quite a lot of depth and realism to it. And that is a huge opportunity for the future...”
  — John Wills [36:05]

• “We’ve only ever been able to tell partial stories, and that will be true for future historians, as it is for current historians. How partial those stories will be, I think, is the challenge for us now...”
  — Jane Winters [41:48]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:43: How digital formats differ from analog records
• 05:04: The scope of digital content: Barbenheimer and fandom research
• 09:11: Video games as historical sources and their role in public history
• 11:31: Social media and the inclusion of new voices in historical records
• 14:16: Missing geographies in digital archiving (COVID-19 example)
• 15:16: Technological obsolescence and the struggle to preserve media
• 19:29: The fragility of digital context and “context collapse”
• 22:10: Corporate control and digital demolition in entertainment archives (MTV, Myspace)
• 25:04: The tidal wave of digital data and the challenge of meaningful analysis
• 27:27: Dangers of platform- and algorithm-shaped histories
• 29:09: Misinformation and the need for contextual clues in the digital era
• 31:36: Importance of archiving algorithms themselves
• 34:08: Digital ephemerality and loss compared to earlier eras’ scarcity
• 36:05: New potentials for immersive, data-rich histories
• 38:28: The access and copyright conundrum for future historians
• 41:48: Why partial stories will always dominate—past, present, or future

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Conclusion

This episode vividly explores how the 21st century’s explosion of digital content—unprecedented in both scale and type—presents opportunities for richer, more inclusive history, yet simultaneously brings immense challenges of preservation, access, context, and trust. Jane Winters and John Wills’ dialogue encourages both critical rigor and optimism, envisioning a future where, with the right tools and collaboration, historians will construct ever more nuanced narratives from our era’s data deluge.

Transcript

[Jane Winters]

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Learn [e-mail] your teen adjective used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained, one who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly. They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice an individual confident in their contradictions. They know the rules, but behave as if they do not exist. New Teen the new fragrance by Miu Miu defined by you. Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. If you've ever written a social media post in the heat of the moment and you've potentially been unwittingly contributing to the historical record for future generations to explore. But will the fact that it'll be joined by millions and millions of other records present a problem for researchers? How will future historians begin to make sense of our current data saturated moment? Matt Elton caught up with the historians Jane Winters and John Wills to find out.

[Matt Elton]

So we are today talking about how future generations might tell the histories of the present moment and the recent past, and how thinking about that can help us make sense of how the 20th century, the 21st century, might differ from other previous centuries in its records and in its histories. And I'm delighted to say that we're joined by two experts to talk us through some of those aspects and some of those thoughts.

[Jane Winters]

Hello, my name's Jane Winters. I'm a historian and professor of digital humanities at the School of Advanced Study in the University of London.

[John Wills]

Hi. And I'm John Wills. I'm a professor in film and media at the University of Kent.

[Matt Elton]

Thank you both so much for being with us today. It is great to get your thoughts on some of these issues. To start with, I suppose I wanted to think a little bit about the kinds of records that we have from the present moment and the recent past and how those might differ from those of previous centuries. Jane, did you want to kick us off with this?

[Jane Winters]

Yes, of course. I think we're dealing with a number of different formats when we're talking about records and primary sources now. And in some instances, it's a very familiar analog format that has become digital, and in other instances, it's a completely new format. And newspapers, I think, is a great example of how this has changed that. We had physical newspapers. The physical newspapers were digitized, relatively, keeping the same structure, but now we have physical newspapers and digital newspapers, and they differ in both form and content. So an issue of the Guardian newspaper that was published in print today will not have the same information in it as the online version of that paper. And there'll be multimedia material. You'll have online comments appearing, which you would have only ever had letters to the editor previously. Now you've got all of these other conversations going on. And we also have things like a diary is not exactly analog to a blog post, but people's reflective writing has moved over into blogs and, of course, social media as well. I'll leave John to talk about moving image and so on, because that's much more his area than mine. But that's just one example of the different kinds of forms of records that we have now.

[John Wills]

Thanks, Jane. Yeah, I tend to work in the history of video games and film, and, yeah, in those areas, as Jane said, it's kind of like there's a huge wealth of material. It could feel quite overwhelming at times, but it's a real opportunity. For example, I was looking at Barbenheimer, the phenomenon of that, whereby Barbie and Oppenheimer showed at the same time, and the great movies, and a really interesting event to research a little bit. Doing that research is not a little bit, though. It's vast because you're having to deal with memes, gifs, digital content of both fandom, the everyday audience. You can access actor responses, you can access all kinds of public responses to those two movies in a way that you'd never be able to do before. And the researcher might be looking at, say, a specific aspect like gender in the movies to do with those two films. But that question is opened up and becomes a vast thing to deal with in terms of your own research on it and where you draw the lines of material, how much you do.

[Matt Elton]

We'll get into some of this idea of the vastness of the amount of content in a minute. Before we do, I just want to unpick something here. It sounds like what you're both saying is it is a mixture of new forms of existing records and existing sources, and then also genuinely new types of sources. Is that fair to say?

[Jane Winters]

Yes, I think so. And one of the things that characterises digital archives and born digital archives that don't have an analogue print equivalent, for example, is the mixture of formats that you have. It's not just text, it's not just image or moving image, it's all of that, that going on with, as you were saying, John, the memes and gifs and everything in between. And, you know, people are researching emojis as well, you know, all these different forms of communication that we're seeing in these sources too. So a web archive, for example, the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, might be the one that most people are familiar with, will have all of this material in there in a very unstructured way. And the strategies for working with these different formats. It's going to be a really an interesting challenge, I think, for researchers now and in the future.

[John Wills]

Yeah, agreed. It's definitely. It's really hard, isn't it, because you're dealing with kind of random systems and random cataloguing, and if you're working, you might be working on something that's very, very specific, but actually where to find the information that fits that example is incredibly hard. And yeah, in terms of looking at new kind of sources and new things. Yeah. I mean, video are incredible for kind of raising that issue, because sometimes you can, for example, go in. If you're working on the history of a certain video game, you can go into that online world and meet people within the game to talk about their memories or experiences of that game world. So that's in a sense quite mind blowing compared to how we traditionally did worked on, say, the history of memory or history in previous decades.

[Jane Winters]

And I think oral history is something that comes up a lot in relation to this material because we lose the specific context so quickly of how people are using platforms, languages, formats at a point in time. So speaking to the people who were involved in it is really important. And keeping that as part of the metadata for this material.

[Matt Elton]

Can we go into perhaps a little bit more depth with some examples of some of these new types of records and I suppose some of the things they tell us about society that we might not have had in previous centuries or previous generations? John, you mentioned their video games. Can you talk a little bit about what video games offer us as a historical source? Because although video games are a relatively, historically speaking, new medium, they actually go back decades. What can they tell us about. About the 20th and the 21st century?

[John Wills]

Yeah, as you know, Matt, we're talking about a history. We tend to see video games as fairly recent in terms of media and also in terms of a history, but their history is dating back to at least 50, not more so. And in a sense, looking at video game history, looking at the game worlds, that present history, so the kind of senses of history that are being portrayed in those games can be really exciting. I think video games can, in a sense, both reflect cultural views of the time, but they're also shapeless. And there are also access points for the public. So, for example, you know, the video game Red Dead Redemption, the series video game intervention, Red Dead Redemption by Rockstar, that game series has often proved an entry point to ideas about the American west, or the history of the Wild west, as we call it, for many gamers, for many people. And so video games can be almost this introduction to the past in a way that maybe older television programs or film would have done. They can also build history into the games. Games such as Assassin's Creed offer, to some extent, at least aesthetically, a kind of realistic, kind of historical time capsule or a museum that you can go into. So I think, you know, in terms of video games, they do, as a media, offer us kind of unique opportunities to both see but also interact with ideas about the past.

[Matt Elton]

And they are a historical source that future historians will look to in the same way as we would books or other sources from previous centuries.

[John Wills]

Yeah, I think we're slowly kind of adjusting and adapting to that reality that video games are part of the media range that we work with as scholars. I think there's been a lag. I think game studies or people working on games took a while to kind of evolve or be present. But now we're starting to really build in video games into part of that sense of understanding history and understanding historical views, at least in, you know, the last few Decades.

[Matt Elton]

And, Jane, are there other sources that you'd like to highlight that reveal new things about society that wasn't the case in previous centuries?

[Jane Winters]

I think probably social media platforms is an obvious area to go. And one of the really exciting things about that for historians is that people's voices and stories are ending up in archives that would never previously have done so. Most ordinary people end up in an archive. When you encounter the state at some point, unless you've done something particularly extraordinary. But now anybody with access to the Internet, it's so easy to create content of all kinds. There are chances that at least some of that will end up in a national archive somewhere that brings its own problems, I think, because not everybody is thinking about that when they're posting an angry response on Instagram to something. But that really rich conversation that we haven't had before, I don't think is what we have now the potential to work with. There are really quite substantial social media archives already, and they are going to grow. That brings its own challenges again, about preservation and storage. And how much of this do we want to keep, particularly I think, given the environmental impact of digital archiving too. So, yeah, it's different kinds of people will routinely end up in archives. And I think that's one of the very exciting things about this, is the.

[Matt Elton]

Depth and the extent of that inclusion. Historically new, is that the first time that this extent of people have been included in the historical record?

[Jane Winters]

I think so. And certainly where it's them creating the material themselves rather than being mentioned by somebody else or described by a state body. So it is that ability to tell your own story, I think.

[John Wills]

Yeah. And I think the one thing I would add is that in a sense, it's also the historian or scholar's task to include those people and that diversity. And so it's what's being included or excluded is really important. And there's still kind of choices there, aren't there, over how to process that historical record.

[Jane Winters]

And I do think it also means that it's not a global. That record. There is inequity in terms of who has access to the Internet, who is able to have their voices recorded in this way. So that's something I think we will need to be really conscious of. It's already an issue, but it will become even more of an issue.

[Matt Elton]

I think that's so interesting because I certainly do think about the Internet, about digital media, as a chance for this very, very wide inclusion. But what it sounds like you're saying there is we still need to think about who is doing the recording and who is being excluded from it in much the same way as we might do from ancient Rome or the medieval era. It's just a slightly different step on that path.

[Jane Winters]

Yeah, I think a really kind of concrete example of that is there was a wonderful exercise around collecting Covid, so collecting all of the websites and so on that were produced in response to the COVID pandemic, and the International Internet Preservation Consortium led on that. And it's a pretty diverse collection, but there's almost nothing from Africa, for example, and very little from China. So it skews to the global north in terms of the story about that pandemic, which, as we all know, was a global pandemic.

[Matt Elton]

So you've already alluded a little bit to this, but we should talk in some depth about some of the problems with using and keeping these kinds of records. I wanted to run through some of the issues because I think they're interesting. I think one of the first ones I'd like to talk about is technological obsolescence. What issues do having these records being based so much in technology and in new forms of technology, cause us and might cause historians of the present moment. John, did you want to kick off with this?

[John Wills]

Yeah, it's a huge issue in the arena that I typically work in. And so, for example, with video games, a video game console or an arcade machine has a very short, at least in terms of history, lifespan. And even a console that sells well might only be publicly available for, say, 10 years. Those consoles will then degrade, or they might not be designed to Even last that 10 years, as has been the case with some of those machines and the variety of games, quickly, numbers can decrease. Can you get an emulator which kind of shows you what the game is like? You can rely on things like YouTube to watch people having played that game, but that will only give you one view of that game world, that will only give you what the player did rather than a sense of what the game's really about. And we have a range of institutions being set up to help preserve video games and that whole history. The National Video Game Museum in Sheffield is doing that really well. And there's more localized ones near where I live. There's one called the Micro Museum. But I think there's bigger questions there over responsibility. Who has a responsibility to preserve this technology, Whether it can be actually physically done because you're having to reopen machines, try to fix that technology, and also kind of the vastness of it all. When an individual Console might have a few thousand games, and some of them now are increasingly on a digital platform, which means there's no physical kind of archival record of them. That can be incredibly hard work. So I think technological obsolescence really is an issue. If you're working in that. I should also say that it's kind of always been a problem anyway. I mean, this goes with different media. And has that media been transferred to the next level of media? Has it been preserved for kind of the next generation?

[Jane Winters]

In a sense, yeah, I completely agree with that, John, because digital records are embedded in systems and structures, and we need those to replay them, as it were. And it's very striking that the word replay is used a lot in relation to web archives, that it's less about accessing material, it's about replaying content. And I think as move more into multimedia environments, that's just going to increase. So we do need to collect all of the information that allows us to understand what those structures and systems were. I think one really useful way of framing this that will be very familiar to historians is the material culture of these records, that we think of digital as something that exists in the cloud, even though the cloud is physical infrastructure as well. It's a very unhelpful term for it, I think. But we need to preserve the material culture of these bourne digital records so that we understand how to work with them and how to reuse them. And a lot of memory institutions, places like the British Library and the National Archives, are making sure that they have rooms with equipment and versions of particular computers to replay floppy disks, for example. You need to make sure that you have all of that and things like digital forensics come into play to make sure that you're not not, as John indicated, kind of altering a file when you open it. So all of this work. There's a really growing field of practice around digital preservation, which is very aware of these questions. And there is also a case. And again, this happens a lot with video games, I think, is emulation. So not keeping the same hardware, but presenting it through a web browser, for example. So you lose what the actual experience was, but you've still got the game, but you play it in the same way or understand what it would have been like to play it with a console.

[Matt Elton]

It sounds like one of the ideas that you're both returning to in terms of seeing these sources as historically useful is context that we need to preserve or be able to make understandable the context in which these records were made and used.

[Jane Winters]

Yeah, and I think there's also a concern that context disappears very easily from digital records. Context collapse is something that gets talked about in relation to social media, that it's not very long before something something is completely decontextualized and reused and it's quite hard to trace it back to where it started, particularly if that particular crucial piece of information has gone. So like an originating account was closed down or something, you can find something that sits in a very different context from the one it was created in. And because so much of this is happening in commercial platforms as well, you don't have the attention to public documentation of things like that that you would get in a library or an archive. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies. So you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.

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[Matt Elton]

One of the trends I've noticed, I think particularly in the States in recent years, is of TV and film companies choosing to delete films from their archives or in some cases making a film but then it never being released. Are there issues here specifically about the worlds of entertainment, of TV and film that we should talk about? And is that in any way different from previous records in previous centuries?

[John Wills]

Well, I think that it is a real issue because I mean you could call it almost like digital demolition because sometimes it is very Conscious, and it's very deliberate. Other times it's created around the idea of if we hold this back, we can create a paywall later, or we can control access and get people to give money to see this item. And I think MTV and Comedy Central recently the archives with those was taken away. And MTV is an incredible resource for people trying to understand kind of entertainment television, music television in the 1980s and 1990s. So I think that there's a paywall issue and there's a control issue. There's also a sense that maybe we could say that this isn't completely new in that records of these kinds in television and film have always been lost. We've got very little of the silent movies of the 20th century. Chaplin himself destroyed one of his own movies deliberately. And so nobody could ever see A Woman of the Sea. That was in the 1920s, too. And, you know, there was issues of these things were seen as not valuable. And that's one of the dangers, isn't it, that basically we don't see these television productions or foreign productions as a useful, valuable. How do we store them, things like that? And we have one of the classic examples, if anybody's into sci fi, are the Doctor who episodes that went missing in the late 60s and early 70s. So I think on one level, there's a repetitive thing there, an ongoing thing of how to save things, not to lose them, how to protect our history and our culture. But there's definitely, as you say, Matt, a kind of issue here over control and paywall. I think it's coming to the fore.

[Jane Winters]

I think there's also a problem that arises from our tendency to think of platforms and content creating companies as archives, archives when they're not, and they don't have an archival remit. That's not what they're designed to do. And they think of that data in very different ways from us. And this is not a television or film example. But in 2019, MySpace, which is one of the earliest social media sites, lost 12 years worth of photos, video and music because of a faulty server migration. So that just went. And. And they don't have an archival responsibility, so there's not really anything you can do about that. And we have a sense that we own this material as purchasers, but we don't.

[Matt Elton]

The rights issue is very interesting, and perhaps we'll pick up on that in a minute. I wanted to get into something else that we have briefly touched on, which is the sheer volume and the sheer extent of this data of these records. How do you Think historians will deal with or make sense of the vast scope of the information that's out there. Jane, do you want to kick us off with this one?

[Jane Winters]

I think this is a sort of wave of data that we've been talking about is going to be coming our way and we sort of missed that it's already here. There's a huge volume of data. I was looking at the National Archives research vision for 2024-27, and they have this wonderful description in there of a tidal wave of digital material which in its scale, diversity of format and complexity of structure will overwhelm many existing record keeping institutions and practices. So the kind of overwhelm starts in the archives and then next is the historians and researchers who are trying to deal with this material. And the scale really is mind boggling. I think I tend towards qualitative research myself. So where do you start doing qualitative research if, as the Wayback Machine has, it's got 946 billion web pages and your main way to access that is through keyword searching. So you will find whatever you're looking for, but you will have no sense of how important or representative it is because there's just so much material there. I think we're going to have to develop strategies to just find out what's in some of these huge digital archives, because they're not catalogued, they're unlikely to be catalogued in anything like the way that traditional archival material would be catalogued. We talk about web archives, but they're not archives in the sense that we would normally talk about an archive. So we're really going to have to find strategies to access the material, get a sense of what's in them, the shape of these collections, before we can really start to dig into them and do the kind of historical research that we want to.

[Matt Elton]

Can we identify there as being a point in time at which this avalanche of records started to really pick up, up?

[Jane Winters]

Oh, I'm not sure about a point in time. And I. But I also don't think it's been equal in different sectors. So web archiving, for example, they were collecting millions of websites as early as 2013 at the British Library. So that's already a huge collection. I think the anticipated digital deluge of government records hasn't really happened yet. So that will be coming. So I think it's unevenly distributed. I don't know what, what your experience of that is, John.

[John Wills]

Yeah, I agree. I think that it is uneven. It depends what area you're working in. If you're working on, say, certain events Even in the 1980s or 1990s, the advent of 24 hour news coverage, lots of television, visual culture around that, that can sometimes seem overwhelming. I think there's also a challenge around where to go for the information and actually that the information is being supplied in an unreliable. I think one of the big challenges around this is our platforms and algorithms. And so actually those platforms, such as Google and algorithms involved, are in a sense potentially misleading us as scholars, or they're potentially pushing the most common citation or something, or the view that's been pushed hardest. And so instead we're not necessarily getting kind of an open picture of the past, we're getting an AI shaped version of the past. And sometimes that's often the first point that you're going to, isn't it? If you're looking up something, you're using Google or you're using AI and you're trying to find out about that event or that person and the information has already gone through an adaptation, really. And that's a real issue for us too.

[Matt Elton]

You mentioned AI there. And one of the concerns in more recent years certainly has been about whether or not, not even in the present moment, we can trust what we read and what we see. Do you foresee that as being a real problem for historians of, of the early 21st century?

[Jane Winters]

I think it's going to be a huge problem. We're already struggling with it in real time when we've got some of the context that we were talking about not being present earlier. And it's a real challenge for archiving institutions, I think, as to how they contextualise information. This is not to say that there isn't misinformation in archives, you know, the fraudul, medieval charters, that kind of thing. So it's always been an issue that there's misinformation in archives, but the scale of it is, I think, different now. And the entanglement between trustworthy information and misinformation, and as John was saying, the fact that particular narratives are being created algorithmically that we're not aware of behind the scenes. So all of those factors come into play and it's really tough because it's not the role of archives to say whether necessarily you can trust this material or not, but historians are going to need to have enough information to make those decisions and judgments for themselves. And those are skills we have. Right, that's what we spend time assessing information. But we will need to have enough of that contextual material to judge whether that is the case or not.

[John Wills]

Yeah. I love the phrase that you use, entanglement, because it does feel like an entanglement when you're working on these topics. And there's a real complexity there. The image of future historians working on their sources. There's a brilliant episode of Star Trek whereby they have an eternal archive, which is this beautiful kind of repository of all items and books around the universes. Everything is gathered there and you can go into it and look up anything, and it's kind of presented uncritically and it's solid information. I think they actually filmed the sequence in a rare book library in Toronto, so maybe it's not that futuristic, but there's a sense that, you know, in a kind of utopic way, you know, that we will have access to everything, it will all be preserved. And the historian is like this person just coming in and getting everything they want. Instant, you know, in an instant. Whereas at the moment, the reality looks like a situation whereby things are, as Jane said, very entangled, more complicated. And negotiating where to get your material from is increasingly problematic.

[Jane Winters]

And I think we're also going to have to address the problem of archiving algorithms as well as algorithmic heritage. If we don't know how the algorithms worked, we won't be able to see what their effect was on the material that we want to study. That's a really emerging area of research, I think.

[Matt Elton]

I'm interested to see whether the next thing I'm going to say is right or accurate. I'm interested to gauge your responses to it. Is it fair to say that when we look back at, say, ancient Rome, we may not have very many records, we may not have very many records about very many people, but we can sort of trust what they tell us. Whereas now we've got millions and millions and millions of records, and we have no idea necessarily of their context or of their trustworthiness. Can you unpick a bit for me, maybe the incorrect things I've said in that statement, or whether you think it rings true?

[Jane Winters]

I think there's sort of maybe two ends of the same problem, really, in terms of dealing with sources and using them to reconstruct what might have happened. There's the scarcity of earlier sources. Ancient medieval history makes them much more amenable to study. You can look at all the material that survives, that relates to a particular. Particular incident in some cases, but you're also very aware that it's an accident of survival. Often it will be very partial. Some of it won't actually be True, it will have been created for propaganda purposes or for legal financial purposes. So. But you. You know that you. It's difficult to get at what really was happening because you've got things missing and you've got skewed and partial viewpoints at the other end. You've got so much information that you can't possibly engage with at all. We don't yet have the tools to really interrogate it effectively, although we're developing those all the time. And we really struggle, I think, still to find out what we don't need to keep, which has always been part of archiving. But it's really hard to do. When you get, I don't know, a government document server handed over to an archive, where do you even start in deciding what should and shouldn't be kept there? I mean, we all know how people name files. They're often not very helpful information. So even at that level, how can you do that? And I think that'll start to happen semi automatically, but it's a really big challenge. So both the volume and the scarcity distort the picture, I think.

[John Wills]

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think that there's similarities, as you touched on Jane, aren't there over, you know, the choices of preservation, which items are preserved? They obviously happened in Roman times, although I should say I probably go back to the 1950s with my work, so I know very little about that period. But there's choices to be made over what's preserved that are still today happening, and we've discussed those a little bit over control. And also there's a danger of things always being lost that's still actively happening. I was looking at a nuclear veterans group online whereby people talked about their experiences of atomic testing, and the website basically just disappeared one day and there's no way of recovering it. It's not saved anywhere. And so valuable materials can just randomly disappear. And that's probably always been the case throughout history. But I think we imagine this idea that future historians will be able to access so much content. But actually, one of my fears is about ephemerality and that things will go or deliberately be deleted.

[Jane Winters]

I think there's a lack of fixity in some digital archives as well. You see it in web archives where there'll be takedown requests or. So it disappears from the indexing. So something that was there yesterday is no longer accessible the following day. That's all very opaque in terms of what's going on behind the scenes. So there's a real lack of Fixity that we've come to expect in physical archives. And alongside that huge ephemerality that John was mentioning.

[Matt Elton]

We've talked a bit there about some of the negative aspects of this story to try to put a more positive spin, I suppose, on some of this. Are there ways in which new technology and new records might help historians either working now or working in the future about now? John, did you want to kick off with this?

[John Wills]

Yeah, I have been a bit doom laden, haven't I, pointing out all the negatives. I think there is a huge opportunity and excitement around what can be done. I was thinking of how in the 20th century a number of companies created time capsules whereby they gather together all kinds of everyday items and put them in a capsule and bury them in the earth. And the point would be in hundreds of years people could dig those capsules up and find out what life was like. Well, today in a sense, we're every day kind of creating these kinds of, of capsules that historians of the future could use. If you're working on an event, you could look at the sound, the video, personal files. You could in a sense create your own picture of that time period with quite a lot of depth and realism to it. And that is a huge opportunity for the future that we can maybe bring history back to life. So obviously problems with it. But I do think that we will be able to immerse ourselves in the past in ways that we'd never managed before.

[Jane Winters]

I think that's a really great point. It's so easy to focus on the problems because you're confronted with loss so often in digital archiving. And your example John, the website's there one day and then it's gone. And we've all experienced data loss of one kind or another, I think. But as you said John, that sort of holistic view of something that is possible when you bring together this whole range of sources. And I think, I think we'll be dealing with analog sources for a very long time as well. So it's bringing all of them together into conversation. This really rich picture that you were talking about. I think John is absolutely right. And technology is developing to help us with that. Things like topic modeling software which allows you to draw out key themes in a huge collection that you can't read in a close reading way, but you'll get a sense of what's in it. Things there are really interesting semi automated cataloguing to help get access and to really draw out those rich stories that John was talking about.

[Matt Elton]

We did mention briefly earlier the idea of copyright being a problem. Jane, could you talk us through some of the issues about access and about copyright?

[Jane Winters]

Yes, I think this is a real issue for people working with recent historical material in terms of access. The thing that I know most about web archives, many of those are collected under legal deposit legislation, which is great, but it also restricts access to an on site visit to a library for browsing only. So you've already got a big barrier to people accessing that material and studying it in any scale. There's a lack of clarity around copyright. For example, it's not clear whether you can post a screenshot of an archived website in a book or on a website yourself. In theory you're supposed to ask permission from everybody, but you can't do that when they're hiding hundreds of sites, thousands of people in the material that you're working with. So I think, as is quite often the way the technology has outstripped the legal frameworks that support researching with it. And I suspect it might be even more complicated in John's area. But it's really something that I think as historians, we need to work together to get clarity on some of these questions about what we can and can't do with more recent primary sources.

[John Wills]

Yeah, totally agree. I think there's a sense of real difficulties around this issue. We used to think of cyberspace, the World Wide Web as being free spaces, and we still think of them as places of free expression. In a sense, we're often too free with what we're saying on those formats. But at the same time, there's all these legal issues, there's issues of control, there's also the platforms controlling what people, how you use their information. And so actually it's more layered and complicated than before, I feel, whereby in an archive you can simply, in an old physical archive, you can simply get permission often to use the source of material that you're looking at. And the archive has already negotiated that access for you. Who grants you permission on something that you find online? And often you can't find even the person who said it. So it's very challenging. But again, I point to out that we've often, as scholars, been tackling some of these issues in the past. So for example, Disney Corporation has always had lots of control over access to its materials, will pull things back, will put them out in different formats. So there's always these negotiations going on, but it seems to have increased considerably. And the lag, as Jane says, is a really important one to try to.

[Matt Elton]

Draw some of these things to a conclusion. Then we talked earlier about this beautiful utopian Star Trek library. What sense do you think historians living in the future will be able to make of the late 20th and early 21st century? And what do you think the histories they tell might look like? John, do you want to kick us off with this?

[John Wills]

Yeah, I should say that I think at the end of that Star Trek episode, somebody may attempt to blow up the eternal archive. And so that does put a little bit of a dystopic lens on the. The proceedings. And I think there is that threat or danger for anybody kind of working on the past. You know, will the past become more fragmented? Will we be able to gather up what we need?

[Jane Winters]

I think in that example of the eternal library, sort of where's the challenge for the researcher if it's all handed to you as easily as that? And I think historians thrive in spaces of challenge where you have to put that evidence together and build on what somebody else has said and perhaps take it in a different direction because you found a new piece of information. And I think we've only ever been able to tell partial stories, and that will be true for future historians, as it is for current historians. How partial those stories will be, I think, is the challenge for us now to make sure that it's why discussions like this are really important to think about what we can do to make sure that as much of this material as possible is sustained and where the conversations around that need to happen, which are the bodies that should be involved and really work together. And so many communities of practice are developing around this that I have confidence that the work that they're doing and that's happening in our national libraries and archives and other places will really ensure that historians of the future will have enough material to work with. That was Jane Winters, historian and professor of Digital Human Humanities at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, and John Wills, professor in Film and Media at the University of Kent. They were speaking to Matt Elton, and you can hear professor of Computer Science Michael Wooldridge discuss the longer history of artificial intelligence on a previous episode of this podcast. Just search for A.I. an ancient nightmare. To bring that episode up.

[John Wills]

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[Jane Winters]

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