Forum Essay
Scarcity or Abundance?
Preserving the Past in a Digital Era
ROY ROSENZWEIG
ON OCTOBER 11, 2001, THE SATIRIC Bert Is Evil web site, which displayed photo-
graphs of the fu
y Muppet in Zehg-like proximity to villains such as Adolf Hitle
(see Figure 1), disappeared from the web—a bit of collateral damage from the
September 11th attacks. Following the strange career of Bert Is Evil shows us
possible futures of the past in a digital era—futures that historians need to
contemplate more carefully than they have done so far.
In 1996, Dino Ignacio, a twenty-two-year-old Filipino web designer, created Bert
Is Evil ("
ought to you by the letter H and the CIA"), which became a cult favorite
among early tourists on the World Wide Web. Two years later, Bert Is Evil won a
"We
y" as the "best weird site." Fan and "mi
or" sites appeared with some
embellishing on the "Bert Is Evil" theme. After the bombing of the U.S. embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, sites in the Netherlands and Canada paired Bert
with Osama bin Laden.'
This image made a further global leap after September 11. When Mostafa
Kamal, the production manager of a print shop in Dhaka, Bangladesh, needed some
images of bin Laden for anti-American posters, he apparently entered the phrase
"Osama bin Laden" in Google's image search engine. The Osama and Bert duo was
among the top hits. "Sesame Street" being less popular in Bangladesh than in the
Philippines, Kamal thought the picture a nice addition to an Osama collage. But
when this transnational circuit of imagery made its way back to more Sesame
Street-friendly parts of the world via a Reuters photo of anti-American demon-
strators (see Figure 2), a storm of indignation erupted. Children's Television
This article has benefited greatly from the generous and astute comments of a number of friends and
colleagues: Joshua Brown, Michael Grossberg, Deborah Kaplan, Gary Kornblith, Michael O'Malley,
Kelly Schrum, A
y Smith. James Spa
ow. Robert Townsend. and four anonymous readers for the
American Historical Review. My thanks also to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Pat Denault of the Charles
Wa
en Center at Harvard University for providing the congenial setting in which most of this was
written.
' Greg Miller, "Cyberculture: The Scene/The We
y Awards," Los Angeles Times (March 9, 1998):
D3. On Ignacio, set; the interview "Dino Ignacio: Evil Incarnate," in Philippine Web Designers
Network, Philweavers, www.philviieavers-nct/profiles/dinoginacio.html; Buck Wolf, "Osama bin Mup-
pct," ABC News, www.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WolfFiles/wolffileslQO.html: "Media Killed Bert Is
Evil," http:
pla2a.p0wersurfr.com
ert/, viewed online April 15, 2002, but unavailable as of July 4,
2002; Peter Hartlaub. "Bert and bin Laden Poster Tied to S.F. student," San Francisco Chronicle
(October 12, 2001): A12; Gina Davidson, "Bert and Bin: How the Joke Went Too Far," The Scotsman
(October 14, 2001): 3.
736 Roy Rosenzweig
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FIGURE 1; Bert the Muppet at Hitler's side, from the now defunct "Bert Is Evil!" web site.
Workshop, the show's producers, threatened legal action. On October 11, 2001, a
nervous Ignacio pushed the delete key, imploring "all fans [sic] and mi
or site hosts
of 'Bert is Evil' to stop the spread of this site too."-
Ignacio's sudden deletion of Bert should capture our interest as historians since
it dramatically illustrates the fragility of evidence in the digital era. If Ignacio had
published his satire in a book or magazine, it would sit on thousands of li
ary
shelves rather than having a more fugitive existence as magnetic impulses on a we
server. Although some historians might object that the Bert Is Evil web site is of
little historical significance, even traditional historians should wo
y about what the
digital era might mean for the historical record. U.S. government records, fo
example, are being lost on a daily basis. Although most government agencies started
using e-mail and word processing in the mid-1980s, the National Archives still does
not require that digital records be retained in that form, and governmental
employees profess confusion over whether they should be preserving electronic
- "Bert Is Evil!" in Snopes.com, www..snopes2.com
umorsAiert.htm; "Bert Is Evil—Proof in the
Most Unlikely Places," in HermAphroditeZine, wvrtv.pinktink3.25Ux.com/hmm
ert.htm; Josh Gross-
erg, "The Bert-Bin Laden Connection?" in E! Online News, October 10, 2Ü01, www.eonline.com
News/Items/0,1.8950,00.html; Joey G. Alarilla, "Infotech Pinoy Webmaster Closes Site after ^Bert-Bin
Laden' Link," Philippine Daily Inquirer (October 22, 2001): 17; Dino Ignacio, "Good-bye Bert," in
Fractal Cow, www.fractaleow.com
ert
ert.htm. See also Michael Y. Park, "Bin Laden's Felt-Skinned
Henchman?" Fox News (October 14, 2001), www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,36218,00.html; DecÃan
McCuliagh, "Osama Has a New Eriend," Wired News (October 10, 2001), www.wired.com/news/conflict
0,2100,47450,00.html; "Sesame Street Character Depicted with bin Laden on Protest Poster," AP
Worldstream (October 11, XXXXXXXXXXNikke Lindqvist, N.'kke, www.lindqvist.com/art.php?inel =
ert.php&iang=eng, provides an excellent chronicle of the unfolding story. Significantly, many of the
links on this site, which 1 first viewed in Fe
uary 2002, were no longer working in March 2003.
Scarcity or Abundance?
FIGURE 2: Supporters of Osama bin Laden demonstrate against the United States in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on
October II, 2001. The poster, which was created from Images downloaded from the Internet, includes bin
Laden juxtaposed with the Sesame Street character Bert. Copyright Reuters 2001. Reuters News Picture
Service Photo by Rafiqur Rahmiin.
files.3 Future historians may be unable to ascertain not only whether Bert is evil, but
also which undersecretaries of defense were evil, or at least favored the concepts of
the "evil empire" or the "axis of evil." Not only are ephemera like "Bert" and
government records made vulnerable by digitization, but so are traditional works—
ooks, journals, and film—that are increasingly being born digitally. As yet, no one
has figured out how to ensure that the digital present will be available to the future's
historians.
But, as we shall see, tentative efforts are afoot to preserve our digital cultural
heritage. If they succeed, historians will face a second, profound challenge—what
would it be like to write history when faced by an essentially complete historical
ecord? In fact, the Bert Is Evil story could be used to tell a very different tale about
the promiscuity and even persistence of digital materials. After all, despite Ignacio's
pleas and Children's Television Workshop's threats, a number of Bert "mi
or"
sites persist. Even more remarkably, the Internet Archive—a private organization
that began archiving the web in 19%—hascopiesof StTZ/A^W/goingback to March
30, 1997. To be sure, this extraordinary archive is considerably more fragile than
one would like. The continued existence of the Internet Archive rests largely on the
interest and energy of a single individual, and its collecting of copyrighted material
is on even shakier legal ground. It has put the future of the past—traditionally seen
as a public patrimony—in private hands.
3 Jeffrey Benner, "Is U.S. History Becoming History?" Wired News (April 9,2001), www.wired.com
news/print/0,1294,42.725,00.btml.
738 Roy Rosenzweig
Stiil, the astonishingly rapid accumulation of digital data—obvious to anyone
who uses the Google search engine and gets 300,000 hits—should make us conside
that future historians may face information overload. Digital information is
mounting at a particularly daunting rate in science and government. Digital sky
surveys, for example, access over 2 billion images. Even a dozen years ago, NASA
already had 1.2 million magnetic tapes (many of them poorly maintained and
documented) with space data. Similarly, the Clinton White House, by one estimate,
churned out 6 million e-mail messages per year. And NARA is contemplating
archiving military intelligence records that include more than "1 billion electronic
messages, reports, cables, and memorandums.""*
Thus historians need to be thinking simultaneously about how to research, write,
and teach in a world of unheard-of historical abundance and how to avoid a future
of record scarcity. Although these prospects have occasioned enormous commen-
tary among li
arians, archivists, and computer scientists, historians have almost
entirely ignored them. In part, our detachment stems from the assumption that
these are "technical" problems, which are outside the purview of scholars in the
humanities and social sciences. Yet the more important and difficult issues about
digital preservation are social, cultural, economic, political, and legal—issues that
humanists should excel at. The "system" for preserving the past that has evolved
over centuries is in crisis, and historians need to take hand in building a new system
for the coming century. Historians also tend to assume a professional division of
esponsibility, leaving these matters to archivists. But the split of archivists from
historians is a relatively recent one. In the early twentieth century, historians saw
themselves as having a responsibility for preserving as well as researching the past.
At that time, the vision and membership of the American Historical Association—
em
acing archivists, local historians, and "amateurs" as well as university schol-
ars—was considerably
oader than it later became.''
Ironically, the disruption to historical practice (to what Thomas Kuhn called
"normal science")
ought by digital technology may lead us "back to the future."
The struggle to incorporate the possibilities of new technology into the ancient
practice of history has led, most importantly, to questioning the basic goals and
* Areot Rajasekar, Richard Marciano, and Reagan Moore, "Collection-Based Persistent Archives,"
www.sdsc.edu/NARA/Publications/OTHER/Persistent/Persistent html; U.S. Congress, House Commit-
tee on Government Operations, Taking a Byte out of History: The Archival Presentation of Federal
Computer Records, HR XXXXXXXXXXWashington, D.C, 1990); National Academy of Public Administra-
tion, The Effects of Electronic Recordkeeping on the Historical Record of the U.S. Government
(Washington, D.C, 1989), 8, 29; Joel Achenbach, "The Too-Much-Information Age," Washington Post
(March 12, 1999): AOl; General Accounting Office (hereafter, GAO), Information Management:
Challenges in Managing and Preserving Electronic Records (Washington, D.C, 2002), 11, 66. See also
Alexander Stille, The Future of the Past (New York, 2002), 306; Richard Harvey Brown and Beth
Davis-Brown, "The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Li
aries, and Museums in the
Construction of National Consciousness." History of the Human Sciences 11, no XXXXXXXXXX): 17-32;
Deanna Mareum, "Washington Post Publishes Letter from Deanna Marcum," CLIR Issues, no. 2
(Mareh/April 1998), www.clir.org/pubs/issues/issucsO2.html#post.
5 John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (1965; rpt. edn., Baltimore, 1983),
16-20. See also American Historical Association Committee on Graduate Edueation, The Education of
Historians in the 21st Century (U
ana, III., forthcoming XXXXXXXXXXTo observe this
oader vision is not to
deny the very different historical circumstances (such as the disorganization of archives), the obvious
lindness of the early professional historians on many matters (such as race and gender), and the early
tensions between "amateurs" and professionals.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Scarcity or Abundance? 739
methods of our craft. For example, the Internet has dramatically expanded and,
henee, blu
ed our audiences. A scholarly journal like this one is suddenly much
more accessible to high school students and history enthusiasts. And the work of
history buffs is similarly more visible and accessible to scholars. We are forced, as
a result, to rethink who our audiences really are. Similarly, the capaciousness of
digital media means that the page limits of journals like this one are no longer fixed
y paper and ink costs. As a result, we are led to question the nature and purpose
of the scholarly journals—why do they publish articles with particular lengths and
structures? Why do they publish particular types of articles? The simultaneous
fragility and promiscuity of digital data requires yet more rethinking—about
whether we should be trying to save everything, who is "responsible" for preserving
the past, and how we find and define historical evidenee.
Historians, in fact, may be facing a fundamental paradigm shift from a culture
of scarcity to a culture of abundance. Not so long ago, we wo
ied about the small
numbers of people we could reach, pages of scholarship we could publish, primary
sources we could introduce to our students, and documents that had survived from
the past. At least potentially, digital technology has removed many of these limits:
over the Internet, it costs no more to deliver the AHR to 15 million people than
15,000 people; il: costs less for our students to have access to literally millions of
primary sources than a handful in a published anthology. And we may be able to
oth save and quickly search through all of the products of our culture. But will
abundance
ing better or more thoughtful history?^'
Historians are not unaware of these challenges to the ways that we work. Yet,
paradoxically, these fundamental questions are often relegated to more marginal
professional spaces—to casual lunchtime conversations or
ief articles in associ-
ation newsletters. But in this time of rapid and perplexing changes, we need to
engage with issues about access to scholarship, the nature of scholarship, the
audience for scholarship, the sources for scholarship, and the nature of scholarly
training in the central places where we practice our craft—scholarly journals,
scholarly meetings, and graduate classrooms. That scholarly engagement should
also lead us, I believe, to public action to advocate the preservation of