[2021-2] 주제심화프로젝트2 <History of the Future>

2022-01-21


How will future historians study the 2020s? The fragility of digital media and the advent of big data have reversed the historian’s relationship with primary sources. Unlike paper documents, which may hold information for hundreds of years, digital storage is unable to retain data for more than a few decades. Other than bit rot, future researchers risk losing access to digital artifacts deemed “historical” over time due to compatibility issues, encryption, and data sharding. The physical existence of big data in the form of data centers and global communications infrastructure poses an additional challenge. Decades from now, let alone centuries, one cannot simply excavate what remains of today’s digital devices, power them up, and extract information from them. Not to mention, the digital transformation of society is still in its infancy. Rapid advances in machine learning, virtual/mixed reality, electronic sensors, and blockchain technology will continue to reshape the world and demand that we rethink the historian’s craft.

This course invites students to wear the historian’s hat and face the decades ahead rather than the past. Topics include archives of the future, gamification, big data energetics, and blockchain. The lectures, including those of three guest speakers, introduce students to the various efforts to preserve digital artifacts, ways of authenticating born-digital and machine-generated contents, the materiality of digital technologies, and the rise of decentralized ledgers. Students are expected to form a team and develop one of the issues discussed during the semester into a research project.


Schedule

1. Looking Back from 2050

What is big data? What are 3Vs?

In what ways is the big data paradigm different from historical instances of information overload?

What is the fourth industrial revolution? What were/are the first, second, and third?


2. Archives of the Future

What happened to the Hollywood archive? What happened to Cyworld?

What are data centers? How many servers does a typical data center have?

What is Naver’s Kak? What are some unique features of this facility?

What is bit rot? What are the implications of bit rot in creating digital archives?

What major web archive projects are out there?

How do we define the Korean web? How would you build a reliable archive of it?

Why did Microsoft develop Project Silica? How is it used in GitHub’s Arctic Vault?


3. Authenticating Digital Artifacts

What is digital forensics? What is the relationship between history and law?

What are “evidence,” “proof,” and “truth” according to Carlo Ginzburg? How do we examine such things in the context of digital media and big data?

How do we authenticate digital artifacts?

What are the challenges of engaging in a forensic investigation of big data?


4. Guest Lecture 1

What are some examples of censored and manipulated digital archives?

What is deep fake? What is deep fake geography?

How does a deep fake detector work?

What new types of sources will future historians encounter because of deep learning?


5. Virtual/Reality

What happened to the boundaries between the virtual and the physical?

What is virtual? What is physical? What is real?

What is the third V of big data? What new types of data are being collected? How?

What are virtual/augmented/mixed/extended reality? What is metaverse?

How would future historians study today’s virtual or gaming worlds?


6. Cultural Analytics

What is cultural analytics? How is it different from digital humanities?

What does Manovich mean by cultural data?

What is Bechdel Test? How did Jang et al automate this process?

What are some sound vs. misleading applications of data science in the study of culture?


7. Guest Lecture 2

What is a network society?


8. Midterm Oral Exam


9. Timeless Time

How is “network society” different from the third/fourth industrial revolution?

What is timeless time?

What is real-time in engineering and social terms?

What is caching? What are content-delivery networks?


10. Big Data Energetics

What is Jevons Paradox?

How does the Jevons Paradox explain the persistence of old technologies?

What happened to manuscript cultures with the introduction of the printing press?

What happened to the publishing industry with the rise of digital technologies?

How much energy does a typical data center consume?

Why do Danes reuse digital heat whereas South Koreans shun it (or do they)?

Why did Google acquire a paper mill?


11. Final Team Project Proposals


12. Blockchain

What is blockchain? What are some applications of blockchain technology?

What is Bitcoin? Why is it dubbed digital gold?

What are some differences between fiat and cryptocurrencies?

What are Ethereum and VeChain? How are they different from Bitcoin?

What is the difference between proof of work and proof of stake?


13. Guest Lecture 3


14. Hackathon


15. Final Team Project Presentations