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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 784. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2020-04-19 10:24:57+00:00 From: Gabriel EganSubject: 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 _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
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