… there is no way of precisely defining the designated community, and similarly no way of foretelling the properties that future users might deem significant. This leads to pressure for preservation that must be faithful to the original in all respects.

The simplest technologies to maintain and understand today are the simplest to carry forward and to recreate in the future.

When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. The “Rule of Least Power” suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

1. Social media presents an huge opportunity for documenting previously undocumented historical events.

2. Researchers of all disciplinary stripes routinely create collections of social media for use as data in their research. But they by and large are not providing access to these collections because platforms forbid it.

3. Content creators in social media have little control over how their data is being used in archives, and are largely commodities in surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2015).