Are we doing enough to preserve the stuff around the data?

We're not doing enough to preserve context information for digital trace data at the moment.

For example, we're not capturing data how specific online platforms look like, like the whole look and feel of the platform, which functionalities are available to the user community, which drives a lot about how you interact with the platform and what kind of content you can share.

We will very likely lose information on what does a like mean on a platform? What does different types of user interactions actually mean and why were users producing content in a specific form? because these context informations are not being kept.

So actually future history might seem like regular history that we're all used to.

To some degree, yes, future history will look similar to it has always looked like because the same type of events happen at the same time of events get captured.

We might get an additional layer of the really born digital creativity effects that we can capture as well.

So really viral trends, practices that just appear in online spaces and that we can capture as well in certain means that travel around the world.