A how-I-did-it list to remind me of how I did it when I come to write my thesis.
I’ve been archiving a FirstClass conference for the last two days. I’m drawing on my experience of the last two conferences I worked with – which were both archived by someone else. I had several problems with that data which I wanted to avoid here.
- The files had gone through so many transformations that they were full of little rectangles and returns which no find-and-replace operation would pick up on. It took a lot of formatting and reformatting and shifting from Mac to PC and back again to get them into readable shape.
- One of the conferences didn’t show the dates when posts were made, only the date on which they were archived. This was no use whatsoever for a temporal analysis. Also, the participants in that forum reported a lot of technical problems with postings going missing or popping up out of order. It was impossible to work out in what order messages had been posted, or how threads hung together.
- The postings couldn’t be sorted according to eg poster, thread or date without an enormous amount of manual work.
- None of the attachments had been saved, which meant that the main body of the work was not available for study, and I couldn’t see how the study had been developed, amended or finalised.