Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 784.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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        Date: 2020-04-19 10:24:57+00:00
        From: Gabriel Egan 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.780: on using academia.edu

Francois Lachance writes:

 > I recently fell victim to the disappearance of
 > browser support (plug-in) for Shockwave. (A
 > page BTW not captured by the Wayback Machine)

This is why we should only ever use Open Standards
and formats, not proprietary ones. It is possible to
preserve the means to make sense of obsolete proprietary
formats such as Shockwave by emulating the hardware
and/or software platforms needed to support them. There's
a wonderful project at the University of Freiburg on
'Emulation as a Service', as they call it, that addresses
this. They already can provide support for software and
data that rely upon environments such as Apple OS 7
and earlier or IBM's OS/2.

I consider such endeavours to be a kind of cleaning up
after we've made a mess of things rather that having
a place within our responsible planning for the longevity
of our digital cultural artefacts. The United Kingdom's
main state funder of Arts and Humanities research, the
Arts and Humanities Research Council, rightly insists
on Open everything (Open Standards, Open Data, Open
Access, Open Source) in all the projects it funds
unless a really strong case can be made for doing
otherwise.

Regards

Gabriel Egan






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