The intolerable transience of hypertexts

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The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

We too know the problem of "expiring links", which Cassandra talks about today. For this reason we try, when we remember 😶, to always insert the original link alongside the link above archive.org or archive.today. Obviously in the hope that the latter never die (for this reason, if you can, donate both to one That to the other).

This article was written on December 10, 2022 from Cassandra

Cassandra Crossing 525/ The intolerable transience of hypertexts

Links are delicate entities, subject to “breaking”; Is this a serious phenomenon, and if so, how much? Cassandra experienced this first hand today.

You know. knowing a topic theoretically is culture, and if it is bad news, it can worry us.

But just as reading a crime in the judicial news or being an innocent person involved in it are two very different things, so is knowing in theory that links die on the Internet, and experiencing it firsthand on one's own article.

It happened that Cassandra, now aged and nostalgic, began republishing her articles for some time evergreen and in fact he was doing it, now in an almost distracted manner, as it was a repetitive and almost completely "mechanical" job.

Choose what to republish, check in the index that you haven't already done so, retrieve the HTML already laid out from the Cassandra Crossing site (you knew it's there, of all the articles, and that you can find it here?).

Just to fix ideas, the article we are talking about is "Generations” written on April 7, 2006 and very recently republished.

Then edit the title, format the subtitle, find an image to illustrate it, paying the rights if necessary, or inserting the “standard” one of Cassandra Crossing (thanks, Ska!).

Fix the accents, often "shattered" by conversions, reformat the paragraphs with a few well-placed carriage returns and a few bold lines here and there for the most important sentences. A nice reread to finally correct some typos, which Cassandra and the editorial team also noticed.

And then the most boring thing, checking if the links work and searching for the sources of those that have now "broken" or disappeared.

And yesterday they were 4 out of 4. Everyone!

It's true that 16 years is a long time, but damn!

“Random and overrated event – one of the 24 imperturbable readers will say – nothing to worry about, especially someone as tough as Cassandra”.

Well no, my beloved reader.

First of all, one of the links was to a site lovingly looked after by Cassandra herself, and the other three were to resources that had not been "moved elsewhere" (like, guiltily, Cassandra's) but had actually disappeared from the Internet, beyond any Search engine.

Secondly, Cassandra is terrified by how much books and university publications now use links as bibliographical references, without making any attempt to make them reliable. Our culture becomes corrupted the moment it is printed or archived. What will happen in 10, 100 or 1000 years? Better to write on clay tablets, the most durable culture in history, 4000 years.

Of course, undying praise to Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive; If you don't know it, you have to read this memorable appearance of his at CCC2015.

Thanks to him, all the missing links were available, and the recoverable pages, duly archived in a lasting resource that, Cassandra is certain, History will one day compare to the library of Alexandria.

Here, even these shreds of history, re-emerged from the Internet Archive like the apocryphal gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls, are in place. The article is still alive, and the links are stronger than before.

Selection of a free license, insertion of some tags, click on "Publish", and finally sending some messages in two or three places on the Internet frequented by historians or potential readers of this strange column.

And another piece of Cassandra's self-imposed duties has fallen into place.

That's all.

Can't you think of something similar that you should do too?

Marco Calamari

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