ד"ר שרון רינגל, אוניברסיטת חיפה

26.11.19, 12:15, מדרגה 4041

Abstract

This study uses three archiving efforts at the New York Times as a means by which to analyze the transformation of historical editions for newspapers from analog to digital objects: the traditional “morgue” of physical clippings and photos, the joint project with Google Cloud to digitize the photo collection and the TimesMachine interactive digital archive, which includes scanned editions of printed issues from 1851 to 2002. Based on interviews with staff and analysis of over 30 publication of the NYT describing its past and present newspaper archiving practices, this paper makes three interrelated arguments: 1) There are a significant number of documents stored in physical archives that have not been translated to digital, and whose loss would be detrimental to historians and media scholars alike; 2) Even the documents that have been scanned and made available as digital objects do not perfectly mirror their analog equivalents, meaning that information loss is currently part of the digitization process; and 3) The online archive serves as a cultural intermediary, actively shaping journalistic practice and reframing current events in the context of the past.