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268 points lermontov | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.273s | source
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intalentive ◴[] No.41906123[source]
"Honey, come look! I've found some information all the world's top historians missed."
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jonhohle ◴[] No.41906461[source]
I’ve found that it’s not uncommon for an interested individual to find details that have not been documented or “found” by others. I collect video games and have found variants of popular games that have been otherwise undocumented on any list or archive that I was aware of. I’ve found audio recordings from the 90s that seemingly have no recorded history on the internet.

These aren’t things historians have had hundreds of years to document, but several thousand or more people have been on this space long before I was looking at it more intently than I could ever and I still come across things from time to time that weren’t known to exist.

Likewise, in the past month I’ve spent an unfortunate amount of time reading laws and board bylaws and it doesn’t take long to find long forgotten rules that are being actively violated. Even outside of code, documentation is hard.

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1. cxr ◴[] No.41907473[source]
Tyler Cowen recently interviewed a historian (Alan Taylor), and they approached this subject near the end of the episode—how much the job of a historian still involves browsing undigitized material sitting on a shelf in a cold room somewhere. Around 3215 seconds* in:

> And then there's also a kind of notion that everything is there online when in point of fact lots of information about the past still only exists in archives

<https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alan-taylor/>

* of the audio version, that is; at that timestamp in the YouTube video, they're discussing the question "How will large language models change historical research"—interviewee's response: he doesn't know