Jason Scott

a photo of Jason Scott

Jason Scott is an American archivist, historian of technology, and filmmaker. He is the creator, owner and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic bulletin board systems. He is the creator of a 2005 documentary film about BBSes, BBS: The Documentary, and a 2010 documentary film about interactive fiction, GET LAMP. Scott works for Internet Archive and has given numerous presentations at technology related conferences on the topics of digital history, software, and website preservation.

Appearances

Episode 97 Archiving The Internet

The Internet Archive is a treasure trove of digitized culture — films, software, audio, websites and more. How it it being collected, and how might the Internet Archive be our best hope for preserving the history of this era, as we invent the web? Jason Scott joins Jen Simmons to talk about the challenges of archiving in the digital age.

In This Episode

  • The strange collection of digital things that is the Internet Archive
  • What will it take to save website from disappearing long-term?
  • How do certain sites get saved?
  • How can companies or people better preserve our web heritage?
  • How digital files degrade faster and have a shorter shelf life than older forms of media.
  • How that affects archiving, and increases the need to preserve as much as possible, so that later, when humanity is able to determine what is important to still have, the files do exist and are accessible.